In this short intervention, I ask, What is at stake, politically and conceptually, in understanding militarism not as stable and unfolding similarly across geographies, but as deeply contingent on historical and contextual specificities? How might we then unpack the question of home becoming a catalyst of militarism? What constitutes home under saturated state control and occupation where militarism is neither subtle nor benign but enforced through violence? Emplacing the vignette of a window that came up during my ethnographic fieldwork in Srinagar, Kashmir, I reflect on the conditions of gendered vulnerability, fear, violence, and everyday negotiations of survival that become urgent concerns for people surviving a colonial occupation.

This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife's Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.

If home is found on both sides of the globe,
home is of course here—and always a missed land.
— Agha Shahid Ali (2001, 33)

“This is MY home”,
I must be careful with these words,
announce them only in soundproof rooms...
for if they escape,
and reach New Delhi
they will have verdicts freshly juiced for me—
Seditious, unholy, a foreign conspiracy.
— Samia Mehraj (2020)

These verses by Kashmiri poets terrifyingly situate the conditions under which home—in its affective and material tenors—remains a fragile imaginary that for Shahid Ali is always “a missed land.” Under conditions of military occupation that long persist in Kashmir, claims to home, constituting home, and being at home are caught in volatility, especially when the Indian state's insistence on “Kashmir as integral” to its imaginaries of the nation constricts any semblance of home and self-determination for Kashmiris surviving occupation.

How then is home, broadly understood by feminists as a “relation between material and imaginative processes” (Blunt and Dowling 2006, 22) constituted under militarization and occupation?

This issue's Special Section, Domestication of War, opens with a pertinent question: How does home become a catalyst for militarism? This question brings to attention how latent and pervasive processes of militarism (Lutz 2002),¹ and its enforced form as occupation of Kashmir, are not just exerted in the minutiae of daily life. In other words, spaces of everyday life are not simply shaped by dominant power in a top-down manner, but (differential) social relations in these spaces co-constitute the form and effects of occupation. It is also worth remaining with other openings in this question: What type of militarism? What is at stake, politically and conceptually, in understanding militarism not as stable and unfolding similarly across geographies, but as deeply contingent on contextual specificities? What then becomes of home?

This short piece offers some reflections on these openings in the context of Kashmir. I want to begin by conceptualizing India's military occupation as an ongoing project of state-enforced militarization in Kashmir, which operates through several paradoxes: it is imposed by violent means at the same time as the Indian state maintains a “façade of democracy” through elections (Zia 2019); occupation is instituted by emergency laws that give armed forces the power to act with impunity alongside Indian state's claims of “normalcy” in the region; occupation as both spectacular for it perpetuates abject conditions of control most recently seen in the August 5, 2019 de-operationalization of Kashmir's nominal autonomy and advancing of India's settler colonial governance, and an everyday process permeating daily life, lifeworlds, and practices of people surviving occupation (Zia 2019). In this context, I foreground an ethnographic imprint emplaced in the geography of home and ask, In conditions where militarization is a mode of settler/colonial control, what do everyday practices reveal about the socio-spatial precarity induced by occupation? Or when militarism becomes a constitutive logic of coloniality?

Anam is a twenty-six-year-old social worker shuttling between Delhi and Kashmir's Srinagar. In our hours' long conversations, she often circled back to a window in her ancestral home in Downtown, Srinagar, a locale that has historically been among the centers of the region's self-determination movement, thus also a military target. When recalling her experiences of growing up in the home located on a restive street, Anam spoke about a window that was perpetually damaged in protests and from the state's use of force against protestors. For young Anam, who stayed alone with her mother as her father would travel for business outside of Kashmir, this window became a window into witnessing how military occupation thrives on magnifying socio-spatial precarity. I draw on Judith Butler who conceptualizes precarity as “politically induced conditions in which certain populations...become differentially exposed to injury, violence and death” (2004, 25). To convey her sense of heightened precarity under occupation, Anam recalled a few brushes at/with this space by figuratively drawing me to the window.

During spells of protests and curfews, there was little for Anam to do; she would often peep through the window to get a glimpse of the street and say an occasional greeting to her neighbours. As an integral part of the house and the only access to the outside world during recurring lockdowns when Anam and her mother were confined to their home, the window was strictly out of bounds in the evenings when protests took place. For her escapades near the window after 5 p.m., Anam was scolded by concerned elders who feared that a stray pellet or a stone may hit her to devastating results. While both an important and fearful spot, the window was also a site of possible injury and sharp anxiety at nights.

Anam described to me some evenings when she and her mother would be confined to a narrow corridor of their house. With the corridor at considerable distance from the window, it became a temporary safety spot. The absence of a male family member further heightened Anam's and her mother's concerns, largely because of the real possibility of harassment in case soldiers knocked on their door as part of search operations. Or if either Anam or her mother were injured, they had no close kin to rely on for an emergency drive to the hospital. Anam recalled sleepless times of being restricted to the corridor when their home, while one of the few spaces that offered temporary refuge under volatility, was also no longer safe. Being confined to the corridor brought with it heightened anxiety where Anam's embodied and spatial sense of home became limited to a particular spot, and being at home raked up feelings of deep insecurity.

Anam recalled how, when her father returned from business, he would try to allay their fears and mend the broken window. This repair routine was cyclical: violence, protests, breakage, repair, often only to find the window shattered the very next day. In sharing these memories, Anam laughed at what she called the “absurdity” of life under occupation: when small desires of peeping through the window to allay boredom can cause injury; and how spaces like the home traditionally conceived as “familiar” are all but safe. After undertaking this cyclical repair, one day Anam's father woke up to see the window broken again. Exasperated, he banged his fist into the glass shards.

I spoke to Anam on an encrypted calling platform in July 2020, in the middle of many COVID-19 lockdowns and the aftermath of increased surveillance post 2019, as part of my doctoral research. She attributed these early experiences of witnessing occupation as among those that have heightened her indignation. While she no longer lives at the house, her experiences by the window have stayed with her. In a follow up call in late July 2020, I told Anam of my travel to Srinagar in some days and that I would like to meet her in person, to which she responded in the affirmative and that she would like to take me to her Downtown home and the window that she talked about at length. When I met her some weeks later, it was no longer possible. The house was damaged by fire and was being reconstructed.

What this imprint shows is how enforced militarization and occupation are far from benign or latent as is usually theorized in non-conflict environments, but seep through everyday spaces, affective lives and experiences. When deployed as a modality of statist control, militarization functions as a cog in the wheel of contemporary coloniality and to assert state sovereignty in a region where it is constantly challenged by people's long-standing resistance (Kaul 2021). In contrast to liberal understandings of militarism and militarization (see Howell 2018), occupation takes hold both through spectacular violence, including mass pellet blinding, disappearances, sexual violence (Junaid 2013), and by reconstituting socio-spatial relations of everyday life where “familiar” spaces are sites of insecurity.

This imprint does multivalent work. Anam's witnessing of/through the window shows how occupation frames home as a space susceptible to militarized control. While the physical space of home often becomes the only accessible site amid amplified uncertainty, militarized processes undo its binary separation from the battlefront or the public, as feminists have long argued. Yet home does not emerge as a presumed space of safety but is inflected by occupation—by continually constituting socio-spatial relations of everyday life. These relations are deeply gendered: it was the “lack” of a male figure that made Anam and her mother more fearful of violence, especially if soldiers came to their doorstep. Such gendered vulnerability also heightened awareness about their surroundings and shaped their coping practices (by being confined to the corridor) to avoid injury. These complex experiences of precarity contingently shape home as both a site of temporary refuge and militarized control.

I began this piece also with an emphasis on contextualizing militarism in specific social, political, and historical formations, which can begin to reveal how militaristic processes, ideas, and logics may be deployed as modalities of settler/coloniality in contemporary times. On this note, Nitasha Kaul (2021) has offered an incisive analysis on the need to account for the politics of formerly colonized regions (India) that have now become a colonizing force (in Kashmir), and these particularities of militaristic domination and control remain indicative of India's ongoing coloniality in Kashmir. In other words, it remains imperative to examine how statist discourses, logics, and processes of militarism (for instance, Kashmir as a “national security or law and order issue,” or enforcement of emergency laws such as the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) are used as political alibis for justifying military occupation as a way of “controlling” Kashmir and restoring “Indian national security.” Whilst strict military control and surveillance have long criminalized public spaces for discussion and assembly, for Anam, it is the space and affective imaginary of home that engenders a critical recall of her experiences of insecurity and its enduring effects under occupation. Beyond simply “catalyzing” militarism in a linear sense, home becomes a site where the socio-spatial ways in which occupation takes hold, and its enduring effects are made visible. While Anam's father attempts to smoothen these effects by undertaking a repair process, this process too is marred by impending rupture, relaying the cyclical and persisting effects of occupation in daily life. These effects are not one-off but unstable and ongoing, effects that have the potential to upend routine life in a matter of minutes. To sum up, what becomes of home under occupation, which seeps through the “ordinariness” of everyday life, and yet where the quotidian may be a site of ongoing struggle and coping?

¹ While there is often slippage between militarization and militarism, I broadly conceive militarization as a process towards war-preparedness and militarism as not just statist war ideology but one that materializes through the social processes of militarization and activates focus on “people’s...preparation for war” (Åhäll 2016, 160).

Åhäll, Linda. 2016. “The Dance of Militarisation: A Feminist Security Studies Take on 'the Political.'” Critical Studies on Security 4 (2): 154-68. https://doi.erg/10.1080/21624887.2016.1153933.

Ali, Agha Shahid. 2001. Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.

Howell, Alison. 2018. “Forget 'Militarization': Race, Disability and the 'Martial Politics' of the Police and of the University.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 20 (2): 117-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2018.1447310.

Junaid, Mohamad. 2013. “Death and Life under Military Occupation: Space, Violence, and Memory in Kashmir.” In Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East, edited by Kamala Visweswaran, 158-90. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Kaul, Nitasha. 2021. “Coloniality and/as Development in Kashmir: Econonationalism.” Feminist Review 128 (1): 114-31. https://doi.org/10.1177/01417789211016490.

Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States: Militarization and the Current Crisis.” American Anthropologist 104 (3): 723-35. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3567250.

Zia, Ather. 2019. Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women's Activism in Kashmir. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Niharika Pandit is an educator and writer who works across anti/decolonial thinking, critical military studies, transnational queer, and feminist epistemologies through ethnographic and archival sensibilities. She is currently Fellow in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK).