Weathering the Occupation

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how weather became an important element of India’s imperial project particularly after 2019, while its everyday forecast and management, as well as its seeming predictability, offered the Indian state an illusion of control in Kashmir’s uncertain political terrain. Against this backdrop, the article foregrounds how weathering the occupation offers a critical analytic to track the eco-logics of the Indian occupation in Kashmir and to consider how Kashmiris rely on the potency of differently constituted “earth beings” to envision alternative political, ecological, and geographic futures. As Kashmir’s climate vulnerabilities intensify because of India’s occupational and settler-colonial regimes, how can weather intrusions unravel geopolitics and contest the fiction of national cartographies? In other words, how might centering weather, rather than nation or borders, help us reenvision Kashmir’s futures beyond the confines of Indian statehood?