Resisting Disappearance unravels a politics of mourning of women whose kin were forcefully disappeared in the wake of the Indian counterinsurgency that was initiated to tackle a popular armed struggle in Kashmir in 1989. The politics of mourning begun and sustained by women, often referenced as apolitical in the milieu of heightened politics, challenged the Indian state's imperial dispensation sustained through a military-state administrative complex.

The gradual and almost sudden invisibilization of the Kashmiri polity after the Indian state's recent annexation of Jammu and Kashmir state has further intensified the militarization of social-political life since August 5, 2019.Footnote ¹ However, the militarization of Kashmir now is charged with an overt Hindutva cultural imperialism that is adamant about dislocating this culture of mourning/protest with a culture of disciplined obedience or extinction. Therefore, this book offers a certain precision in detailing how such invisibilization is carried out on the ground, and it is a handy tool to understand South Asian political sovereignty more broadly.

Ather Zia meticulously details the rubrics of the affective mourning, its cultural symbolisms, and the archival practices of members of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP). In doing so, the biggest success of the book is the way it transports the reader into a social-political world of people inhabiting a military occupation and the lives of those who are entangled in the web of imperial domination. The ethnographer grapples with what becomes of helplessness, the chaos and strife that dominate the lives of her research subjects, and observes how affective recourse, such as poetry, becomes a lamentation to register excess ethics. Using the term “ethical surfeit,” Zia situates poems as a possible excessive experience meant to convey subjectivity. As a result, each chapter begins with a poem. The book is divided into seven chapters, each dedicated to aspects of life that exist and are constituted under military occupation.

Chapter 1 is a construction of mourning and what necessitates it when the systemic failure of the rule of law, justice, and remedy leaves a vacuum in which enforced disappearances are normalized. Much like Antigone (in the Greek legend, who chose to mourn her brother despite a direct edict from the king dictating against it, invoking an alternate mode of justice), in defiance of this vacuum, women choose to grieve by invoking a spiritual alternative sovereignty. In the second chapter, Zia centralizes the heartbreaking narrative of Shabir, a survivor of torture, and the hanging of Afzal GuruFootnote ² to show how, under the modern Indian polity, Kashmiri bodies become earmarked for physical violence/criminalization and extermination, sanctioned through a judicial process in which majoritarian Hindu consciousness finds legal sanction.

Zia investigates the monthly sit-in protests organized by APDP activists in the third chapter, tracking an intricate gendered minefield that women tread to make such a protest possible. She offers Parveena's life narrative as a testimony for political ordeal in which the gendered ideal of an asal zanan (good woman) becomes central for identity construction through women's actions. Both Parveena's and Sadaf Khan's narratives familiarize the reader with women's undertakings to rescript the cultural ideals of an asal zanan to craft more political roles.

In chapter 4, Zia further explores the inversion of a tradition by investigating the emasculation of Kashmiri men and the sheer inequality between traditional patriarchy and military patriarchy. In such an inversion of tradition, women have emerged as protesters and protectors. The death and disappearance of men make the living vulnerable, an essential backdrop that the politics of affect permeates. In chapter 5, the ethnographic account based on life inside a gated village, administered by the Indian army under Operation Goodwill, allows for Shabir's story of torture, Ruhi's son's case of dental infection, and the coercion of Basit to join the State Task Forces to show vulnerability, culpability, manipulation, violence, and contest deployed to control and create a life of dependency for the villagers. It helps us fathom a gray zone that comes into place under a military occupation in which life permeates as an open prison and attempts to craft Indians out of Kashmiris such as Raheem.

In chapter 6, Zia traces the practices of APDP activists in generating and preserving archives, in which a file containing written notes to be transacted between different officials, photographs, and details of next court dates takes a central position. Zia traces different instances and methodologies of archiving and shows how archival practice is sustained and, in turn, sustains the politics of mourning. Finally, in chapter 7, Zia shows how grief and joy converge at intimate moments such as a wedding, where memory is invoked to reminiscence loss and unburden individual and collective memories of injustice meted to the men subjected to enforced disappearance.

In conclusion, Zia locates an everyday gendered human agency, which is a telling predicament to understand the social-political life in Kashmir and responds to the discourses within the feminist political theory on questions of identity construction, agency, and a global contextual feminist praxis. In the context of a military occupation, inverting the gendered norms and traditions, cultural patriarchy is often a footnote to the patriarchal violence inflicted by the military-state. Thus, women mourners of the “disappeared men” also generate an affective politics through invoking symbolism, rescripting cultural notions, and invoking specters of spiritual relevance to reclaim power to proclaim visibility for invisibilized Kashmiris. In establishing this, the book is an important and successful addition to both ethnographic works and works of feminist political theory on South and Central Asia. It will speak to scholars and students of women studies and political theory.