Resisting the Clockwork of Occupation

Abstract Despite its centrality as a locus of both occupation and resistance in Kashmir, the inquiry into time has received scant academic attention. This essay undertakes two lines of inquiry. First, it attempts to foreground the temporal extraction integral to the Indian state’s matrix of control, arguing that its military occupation and settler-colonial project in Kashmir operates not only through the logics of spatial control but also through a control over time. The state has not only tried to erase people out of their own futures but also weaponized the idea of future itself—as a site of a permanent and multimodal extraction. Second, Kashmir’s liberation praxis is anchored on a rejection of an occupational and settler-colonial temporal order and, through two ethnographic fragments, this essay explores enactments of alternate temporal imaginaries and consciousness and foregrounds multiple registers of “in-betweenness” within this imaginary. The essay redirects attention from future as an event or a discrete unit of time, and from its not-yetness, toward the intimate and everyday articulations and enactments of future—a complex ongoing process of becoming and unbecoming unfolding in the everyday. Thus the essay calls for reimagining “ruptures”—instead of “futures”—as a locus of liberation.