Resisting Occupation in Kashmir is a significant intervention in the literature on the insurgency in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, which has been raging for three decades now and shows no signs of abating. Scholarship on the subject has rarely addressed its meaning and monumental consequences for the people of Kashmir, which has led to a dim understanding of why and how ordinary Kashmiris have resisted and continue to resist the Indian state. This edited volume probes the military, legal, cultural, territorial, cartographic, discursive, and other forms of occupation practiced by the Indian government in the state, and the equally myriad forms of protest and resistance to this oppression carried out by Kashmiris.

These forms of state occupation, the introduction by Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, and Ather Zia argues, are carried out “as much through electoral democracy as … through intensive militarization and institutionalized impunity” (p. 8), which makes the Kashmiri population both a victim of and dependent on the state at the same time, “torn between its subordination to the state and its aspirations for national liberation” (pp. 14–15). It is this liminal position that Kashmiris have been thrust into as a result of the lack of resolution of the Kashmir issue—as both participants in and challengers of the system that subjugates them—that the volume captures so well.

Its individual chapters approach the twin themes of occupation and resistance, and their linkages, from a range of perspectives, including an analysis of community organizations that seek justice for rapes carried out by security forces; an account of the split personality of a Kashmiri police officer, who moves between representing the police, the people of Kashmir, and his own self; a discussion of mourning at martyrs’ graveyards, which has recently become a significant form of protest that counters the narrative of occupation in Kashmir; and an examination of everyday forms of opposition in popular novels and films, which preserve the historical memory of the Kashmiri movement for rights and justice. Other chapters take on the themes of the corporeality of India's presence in Kashmir, through the ways in which Kashmiri bodies are treated and (re)presented by the Indian state and media, such as in the case of Afzal Guru's life and execution; the specifically sexual nature of state violence, especially against women's bodies; and the use of the language of trauma and related therapies to address the widespread impact of these violent practices on people's mental and physical health, rather than addressing the root causes that require a political solution.

Resisting Occupation in Kashmir remains centered on the Indian side of Kashmir, focusing especially on the Kashmir Valley as the center of the insurgency, and thus has little to contribute to an understanding of the deeply negative impact of Indian policies on other parts of the state, where resistance has taken on different forms and is often framed in response to the insurgency in the valley. The sole chapter on the suffering experienced by the people of Pakistani Azad Kashmir, who live near the Line of Control that divides the Indian side of Kashmir from the Pakistani side, feels like an afterthought and does not quite fit with the volume as a whole. Thus the book conflates Kashmir with the Kashmir Valley, thereby eliding the fact that any political resolution to the Kashmir issue, which it calls for, involves several other regions on both sides of the Line of Control.

Perhaps more significantly, the volume misses the opportunity to provide an analysis of Kashmiri political organizations, such as the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, the Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, and the Jamaat-i-Islami, among others, that have shaped and continue to shape the nature and form of Kashmiri Muslim resistance to the Indian state, in some cases long before the beginning of the formal insurgency in 1989. What are the ideologies driving these organizations and their leaders and how have they shifted over the course of the past thirty years? Have they been able to accommodate the new generation of Kashmiris who feel increasingly alienated not just from India, but also from their own leadership? Moreover, it would have been edifying to read a chapter on how electoral politics has functioned as a form of resistance as well as the cause of divisions within the resistance.

These issues notwithstanding, this is a rich collection of essays that would make a useful addition to undergraduate courses on political conflict, state repression, and forms of protest. And by unraveling the complexities of the impact of the intractable Kashmir dispute on the inhabitants of the region—which forces them to participate in their own repression and that of their neighbors and friends—Resisting Occupation in Kashmir is a sobering reminder that the time for a resolution to this conflict might well-nigh be past.