The burden of tradition on Pashtun women in Kashmir

For more than 150 years Pashtuns have been living in Kashmir Valley. These people were displaced from their ancestral homelands in North Western Frontier Provinces of Pakistan due to various reasons like conflict, intermittent tribal feuds, and poverty. This paper throws light on the life of Pashtun women and tries to highlight how different tenets of Pashtunwali (Pashtun code of living) like Nang (Honor), Jirga (Council of elderly males), Purdah (separation of men and women), Mahram (unmarriageable kin), Ghariat (courage) and Saritob (manhood) override the principles of religion and govern life of their womenfolk making them subordinate. This paper uses Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic violence to explore the role of tradition, religion, and gender in Pashtun society. The study is ethnographic in nature and employs participant observation, oral history, and extensive in-depth interviews conducted with a sample of 80 Pashtun women and 40 Pashtun men from GutliBagh area of district Ganderbal conducted over a period of 7 years from 2015 to 2022.