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“Boot Power, Butt Power, Bullet Power! – Gendering Violence (against Men) in the ‘Disturbed Areas’ of India”

« Le pouvoir des bottes, des crosses et des balles ! » la violence genrée (contre les hommes) dans les « zones troublées » en Inde
Leisangthem Gitarani Devi

Résumés

Les écrits qui proviennent des zones de conflit de l'Inde – les zones dites « troublées » – sont des écrits qui révèlent la violence informulée commise par les forces armées à l'encontre de la population. Face à la censure et aux dénégations des forces étatiques comme non étatiques, les écrivains de ces régions traduisent dans leurs écrits la terreur exercée sur la population. Cet article s’appuie sur une critique genrée pour analyser comment dans ces écrits la violence (des forces de sécurité étatiques) envers les hommes (civils) vise à les diminuer et à les émasculer. Il démontre ainsi que les corps des civils (vivants ou morts) sont souvent appropriés par les forces étatiques pour en faire d’une part des « sites de lutte contre le terrorisme », et d’autre part des « spectacles de représailles », pour discipliner les masculinités divergentes et dissidentes. Enfin, il examine comment, face aux formes extrêmes et violentes de masculinité des groupes militaires et militants, les hommes civils reconfigurent une nouvelle forme de masculinité, jugée « inférieure » ​​mais plus humaniste.

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1Military boots, butts of guns, and bullets – these are symbols of power and oppression that loom large over the people in Kashmir and Manipur, two regions in India. These regions have witnessed untold violence, particularly against men, over the last several decades since India’s independence. Yet, articulations of the oppressed and circumscribed lives of men in these conflict zones are slow and even difficult to come by. Furthermore, a gendered discourse on the violence in Kashmir and Manipur is often understood to be women-centric, which has resulted in scant critique of violence against men.

  • 1 Urvashi Butalia, Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir, New Delhi: Kali for Women, (...)
  • 2 Preeti Gill (ed.), The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s Northeast, New Delhi: Zubaan, (...)

2Some of the earlier writings on gendered experience of women in these regions highlight how women engage with oppressive realities of their lands. Urvashi Butalia1 and Preeti Gill2 in their respective books inform that victimhood (of rape) is not the only reality of women. Negotiating with and navigating invisible forms of systemic violence within the domestic space and beyond is another reality. While Butalia’s work engages with the impact of the conflict on women in Kashmir, Gill’s work focusses on the conflict areas of the Northeast India, primarily on Manipur. Separately albeit similarly, both writers establish the complicit and subversive ways in which women navigate and resist violence at individual and collective level. Additionally, Gill’s work highlights the centrality of civil societies in articulating the violence, particularly those by state forces, but limiting in their negotiations with non-state elements and actions.

  • 3 Seema Shekhawat, Gender, Conflict and Peace in Kashmir: Invisible Stakeholders, New York: Cam (...)
  • 4 Sanghamitra Choudhury, Women and Conflict in India, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016.

3Seema Shekhawat’s3 and Sanghamitra Choudhury’s books4 examine conflict and gender from the perspective of how women transform the conflict. Shekhawat informs how women sustained the conflict in Kashmir for decades either by extending ancillary services or even by taking up arms. Choudhury also observes similar position regarding women in Northeast India, particularly in Assam. Their support and services are used (by militants) to assist the separatist movements even as their bodies are used as sites of power assertion by state forces. On the one hand, patriarchal sanction for women’s support towards the armed resistance was forthcoming; on the other hand, this sanction was revoked when it comes to involving women in peace-building efforts. Both writers take cognisance of the marginalisation of women in peace processes and decision-making roles. In fact, all the writers emphasise the significance and instrumentality of women in conflict transformation and peace-building efforts.

  • 5 Amya Agarwal, Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir, Lanham, Maryland: (...)

4Clearly, women’s agency becomes a crucial issue here: what motivates women to exercise their agency? Are women entitled to independent agency, or are they determined by masculinist norms. Amya Agarwal addresses these questions in her work.5 She informs the contestations against women’s location at either ends of victimhood and agency in conflict situation. Additionally, Agarwal complicates women’s agency in relation to multiple militarised masculinities in Kashmir. In this nuanced analysis of agency mediated by different masculinities in Kashmir, Agarwal pushes the framework of agency – often discussed in the context of women in conflict areas – and problematises the essentialist conflation of male victimhood of violence to emasculation. She illustrates how men who survive armed torture do not necessarily see themselves as any less man and rather consider themselves as heroic.

5Adopting a conceptual framework based on existing discourse on gender and conflict, this article argues that the rhetoric and actions of militarised violence (against men) are often intended to subordinate (and even emasculate) civilian masculinities. This position is based on a critique of the representation of violence against (civilian) men (by state forces) through literary narratives by writers from Kashmir and Manipur. More specifically, it examines Basharat Peer’s life-narrative entitled Curfewed Night (2008) and Mirza Waheed’s novel The Collaborator (2012), for Kashmiri (men’s) experiences of armed conflict. Manipuri men’s experiences will be illustrated from Subadani Kshetrimayum’s short stories “Kangshillaklaba Ichel” (“Fading Dreams”) and “Laakkhini Hairammi” (“The Promised Homecoming”) from Meisha Amasung Meichak [Heat and Agony] (2012), and Maya Devi Nepram’s short story “Cheinakhol (“Trauma”)” from Wakat [Grievance] (2004). The next part examines how state security forces engage with civilian men and appropriate the battered bodies as “sites for counterterrorism” on the one hand and “sight of retribution” on the other hand. Finally, it argues how, amid extreme and violent forms of masculinities embodied by both military and militant groups, civilian men reconfigure a new form of masculinity – “lesser” but more humanistic.

A gendered perspective on conflict

  • 6 Asian Human Rights Commission, “Indian Human Rights Report”, May 2009, New Delhi. <http://w (...)
  • 7 Ibid., 135.
  • 8 Élise Féron, Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones (...)

6Scholarship on gendered dimension of the conflict situations in Kashmir and Manipur violence primarily foregrounds women’s experiences, as mentioned above. Even in reports by human rights organisations, violence against women is reported categorically as “violations of the rights of women.”6 Violence against men in the form of extrajudicial killings, illegal arrest, enforced disappearances, detention, (sexualised) torture, and so on, on the other hand, is reported as human rights violations without a hint of gender nuances.7 In the ever-growing discourse on gendered dimensions of conflict and war, scholarship on men’s experience, particularly on male-directed violence, is relatively recent.8 This article therefore examines violence against civilian men (by state security forces) from a gendered perspective. Notably, and more often than not, the state security forces engage with local civilian men in violent ways that underpin a display of hypermasculinity, effectively undermining non-combatant civilian masculinity.

The question of violence against men

  • 9 A comprehensive report on the phenomenon of torture used by the state forces in Jammu and K (...)
  • 10 However, in the context of Kashmir, survivors coding their experience as torture “p (...)

7At the outset, this article does not primarily focus on sexual violence, as this is not a critique based on empirical study. Any reference to sexual violence is supported by reports from civil society organisations and sparingly from the narratives discussed in this article. The common tendency to essentialise women as victims and men as perpetrators of (sexual) violence is largely instrumental in the failure to take cognisance of men’s subjection to such violence. Therefore, conflict related sexual violence against men are often unacknowledged, unreported, underreported, and even self-silenced due to fear and stigma. Such forms of violence are often summarily registered as ‘torture’ in testimonies and reports.9 Amya Agarwal informs the global discourse on conflict related sexual violence against men and highlights the pitfalls of summing up sexual violence as “torture” and “extreme torture.” The term “torture,” she informs, does not capture the true character of violence done to the bodies of men (and women) in detention. Moreover, it reduces sexual violence to “an exception” and it “not only essentializes the experiences, but it also prohibit[s] men from accessing harm responsive and sex health services.”10

  • 11 Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, (...)

8A comprehensive report on ‘torture’ prepared by the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society exposes the unimaginable and innumerable forms of cruelty and torture by Indian state forces. Verbal abuse is the most harmless form of torture amid a slew of tortures such as electrocuting the genitals, stretching of legs, rubbing of chilli/salt/petrol on wounds or on genitals, forced insertion of objects into rectum, etc.11 These forms of torture serve as an (un)sanctioned retribution, a sort of vendetta, a show of strength and might of the Indian state against the forces that allegedly threaten the state.

  • 12 Frank van Lierde, We, Widows of the Gun, The Hague: Colophon, 2011, 59.
  • 13 One of the testimonies mentions how Assam Rifles personnel dared “that the army and its off (...)
  • 14 Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, (...)
  • 15 Similar rules shape the nature of engagement between non-state forces and civilians. Both f (...)

9Engagement between state security forces and civilians – particularly occasioned by fatal consequences to state forces due to militant attacks – is therefore driven by a will to persecute the perpetrators. In such condition, every local civilian man in these regions becomes a suspect. While the actual perpetrators manage their safety by various mechanisms, civilians bear the brunt of armed violence or even get killed in staged encounters.12 These episodes of violence directed at men disempower civilians, incapacitates, and even emasculate them.13 In the mildest form of aggression, men are made to assume rooster position, or squat, or lie prostrate, particularly in public space. More brutal forms involve those that result in curling up one’s body in self-defence, whimpering, crying for mercy, and other modes of protecting oneself.14 Engagement between state security forces and civilian men – in public space and in custody – mimics the power imbalance of a gendered relationship, wherein one gender is left defenceless against the other.15

  • 16 Elise Féron, Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones (...)
  • 17 V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered Identities Ideologies, and Practices in the Context of (...)
  • 18 Ibid.,19.

10Power and agency are integral to the discourse on the intersection of gender and conflict. While it is simplistic and reductive to assume that men are powerful and women are vulnerable – despite the shifting nature of these positions both within and between genders – (sexual) violence meted out in militarised space is strengthened by this simplistic assumption. Locating (sexual) violence against men within the grid of power dynamics (of masculinities) therefore explains the varied tools of torture deployed most notoriously. Élise Féron informs the “tactics/opportunism” debate which explains sexual violence either as an opportunity to satiate sexual desires or as a weapon of war, each accompanied with its contestations. Féron notes that rape, genital harms and mutilations, particularly in the case of ethnic conflicts, are often used “to turn male victims into ‘lesser men’, into ‘womanized men’, and to annihilate their reproductive capacities.”16 V. Spike Peterson explains how in military organisations “heteronormative hypermasculinity is presumed” and how there is a “privileging of masculinity” and corresponding devaluation of femininity.17 By subordinating other masculinities the armed military engages in power dynamics that “devalorizes … [the] sexually, racially, culturally, and economically marginalized men.”18

  • 19 Phillip Schulz, Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence: Perspectives from Northern Ugand (...)
  • 20 Ibid., 11.
  • 21 Idem.
  • 22 Idem.

11However, Phillip Schulz, rejects the conceptualising of conflict related sexual violence against men as “emasculation”, “feminization” and “homosexualization” as it not only reinforces the misogyny which underpins the undervaluation and denigration of femininity, but also normalises “the essentialist assumptions about women and homosexuals as subordinate to (heterosexual) men.”19 Schulz therefore refrains from using any gender-hierarchy reinforcing terminologies and chooses to use “displacement from gendered personhood” to capture violence against men in conflict situation.20 By so doing, he primarily takes into account the “potentially temporary” condition of the male survivor contrary to the finality or irreversible condition the terms emasculation or feminisation might suggest.21 He foregrounds the resilience and agency of the survivors, despite the “gendered harms” that impacts their everyday realities.”22

  • 23 Several feminist writers have engaged with the question of “rape” being used as an instrume (...)

12Schulz’s concept of “displacement from gendered personhood” indeed highlights the temporariness of being victimised as a particular gendered person, and discards female-devaluing and denigrating rhetoric. Yet, it acts as a palliative for an experience that is brutal, targeted, and decimating. When women and children are raped during conflict or war, it has been well-established that they are targeted not only because they are sexed body, but because they are representatives of their communities.23 The act of bodily violence against women are fuelled more by power politics than by lust. Similarly, (sexual) violence and other forms of torture against men are bare, symbolic acts of “competing masculinities” and power dynamics. Such actions incapacitate men at the other end of the spectrum.

  • 24 Swati Parashar, “Competing Masculinities, Militarization and the Conflict on Kashmi (...)
  • 25 Ibid., 663.
  • 26 Ibid.., 663-664.
  • 27 V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered Identities Ideologies, and Practices in the Context of War and (...)

13The prolonged conflict in Kashmir is, Swati Parashar explains, one of “competing masculinities” between “indigenous Kashmiri masculinity” and the Indian state driven by “Hindutva masculinity.”24 Parashar maintains that the militarised masculinity in Kashmir is supported and legitimated by Hindutva masculinity, which has been on rise since the 2014 election of Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government in India.25 Hindutva masculinity perceives itself in crises and is “manifested in the rejection of a feminized/androgynous/soft Indian state.” It rather draws on the image of Hindu men who “shaped their culture and destiny alongside exercising patriarchal control over ‘their’ women.”26 Hindutva masculinity’s stance on the Kashmir issue aligns with patriarchy’s ‘protectionist’ outlook (towards women). This perspective, Parashar observes, coincides with military masculinities that consider demands for self-determinism and separatism as a threat to India’s sovereignty. V. Spike Peterson finds such “gender coding” common in warring contexts. The armed forces, in their state-appointed capacity, assume the role of protectors, and the civilians become the feminised lot “who must be protected” at best and “controlled, detained, or eliminated by masculinized agents of ruling states” at worst.27

  • 28 Amya Agarwal, “Fixing Ruptured Masculinities: Reflections from Kashmir”, E Internat (...)
  • 29 Amya Agarwal, Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir, Lanham, Maryland: Row (...)
  • 30 Frank van Lierde, We, Widows of the Gun, op. cit., 61.

14Agarwal too identifies the political condition in Kashmir as a manifestation of “violent forms of masculinity (represented both by the state and non-state actors).”28 Agarwal recalls a slogan “get them by their balls…” inscribed on a state camp in Kashmir. Such ideology not only “fully conforms to the idea of an idealized masculinity where being a man signifies an innate characteristic of showing aggression, use of force and violence,” but also establishes the intent of controlling “the enemy” by emasculating Kashmiri masculinity, particularly those of the militants.29 Frank van Lierde reports a widow (of a man who was executed extrajudicially) who was taunted by Assam Rifles personnel saying “that the army and its officers will not [be] deterred by hiding behind state parliament members or ministers or other ‘little men.’”30

15It therefore opens a different perspective in examining state forces’ outlook towards civilians as feminising and emasculating, particularly during the moments of “torture”. What needs further exploration is whether civilians perceive their masculinity and agency as disrupted and dis-engaged – an experience that overlaps with the vulnerabilities that women face during episodes of violence? In such climate of repression, how do civilian men navigate the hostile conditions?

Defining masculinity in the Indian context

  • 31 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd Ed., Ne (...)
  • 32 James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity: Formulation, Reformulation, and Ampl (...)

16Masculinity is a gendered practice which is “performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence.”31 As a performative practice of (often consensual and internalised) socially prescribed sex-specific roles, which are contingent upon time, space, and culture, masculinity is neither singular nor absolute. Its relative position of superiority or inferiority depends on “gender relations in a particular social setting.”32

  • 33 While discussing masculinity as a gendered discourse, I take cognisance of the risk of rein (...)
  • 34 Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Californi (...)
  • 35 R.W. Connell, Masculinities, op. cit., 83.

17The relational order of the genders33 is complicated by subject positionalities based on class, caste, race, ethnicity, and other such categories. Raewyn W. Connell instantiates the shifting masculinities among heterosexual men and homosexual men; white men and black men; middle class men and working-class men occupying dominating or subordinating positions relationally. These masculinities alternate between “hegemonic masculinity” and “marginalized masculinities” depending on the “configurations of practices generated in particular situations in a changing structure of relationships.”34 Regardless of the relativeness and contingent factors of exercising masculine practices, certain traits of ‘being a man’ or ‘doing as a man’ are sanctioned in a patriarchal society. Such hegemonic masculinity, which is idealised and to which all other forms of masculinity are subordinated, as Connell describes it, predicates an unequal gender structure. She finds such a systemic structure of inequality “hard to imagine without violence.”35

  • 36 Idem.

18Inarguably, such a structure of inequality is sustained by both internalisation of heteronormative, patriarchy-sanctioned values and by violence in its overt and covert forms. Connell professes that it is “the dominant gender who hold and use the means of violence” as a tool of domination.36 While physical violence, among other tactics, is a masculine practice for domination of women (stereotypically considered the ‘subordinated’ gender), the same practice undergirds gender relations among men, particularly in conflict situations.

  • 37 James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity, op. cit., 39-40.
  • 38 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report on the Situation of (...)

19Messerschmidt, however, rejects the popular association of toxic practices and violence with hegemonic masculinity, and posits that hegemonic masculinity may also be associated with positive practices such as “bringing home a wage, sustaining a … relationship, and being a father.37” Even as it is important to acknowledge that essentialising ‘violence’ as a hegemonic trait of masculinity is not only faulty but also limiting in contemporary context, it is, nonetheless, equally crucial to acknowledge aggression and brutal force as common practices in militarised spaces like Kashmir and Manipur. Several reports on human rights violations in Kashmir and Manipur attest to this argument.38

  • 39 Two clarifications are in order at this point. Firstly, the critique in this paper is prima (...)
  • 40 Phillip Schulz, Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence, op. cit., 8.

20The narratives39 examined in this article – both life and literary – represent the conflict between aggressive military masculinities and equally agitated militant masculinities. Both forms of narratives are informed by what seem like “mundane and everyday gendered harms and vulnerabilities experienced by men [and women] in conflict-affected contexts, during displacement, or under militant occupation.”40 At the same time, these narratives also inform how masculinity is continually re-imagined or reconfigured as a response to or as a means to navigate violence. Basharat Peer’s narrative particularly draws a nuanced account of how the two masculinities in Kashmir valley posture themselves. While a predominant gun-toting Kashmiri (Muslim) masculinity is shaped by the threatening presence of the Indian armed forces, representation of military masculinity acknowledges a lurking fear underlying the apparently impenetrable trappings of the Indian (para)military force. Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator too depicts Kashmiri masculinities shift between self-preservation and self-sacrifice. The young protagonist’s helpless ‘collaboration’ with Captain Kadian colours his outlook of the entire state force. While Kadian is not representative of all the military force, he is one of a kind and depicted less charitably. Owing to generic constraint, representations of military masculinities in the short stories analysed in this article are limited to the bare display of violent engagement between the state security forces and civilians. Unlike Peer’s and Waheed’s accounts, representation of anger against the state forces is profound and informed by grievous sorrows of mothers. Anger against military masculinity is as much intense as the resentment against gun-toting militant masculinity.

Narrativising State(s) of Terror

  • 41 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, Noida, Random House, 2008, 11.
  • 42 Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersu (...)

21Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night navigates between the personal and the historical, between the domestic and the private, and between the present and the past, in recounting the Kashmiri Muslims’ experience under “Indian rule.”41 It is a probing account of the historical fault-lines and the political force(s) that catapulted Kashmir into one of the most militarised zones in the world. While Peer’s memoir is informed by subjective experiences, the literary narratives re-imagine lives in the times of conflict and hence become an expression of a collective oppression and trauma. They register what the state denies and cast light on the in-between dark-spot between (official) reports and personal experiences, between custody and release, and between life and death. They offer what the state consistently seeks to deny – agency. These narratives may be rationalised as “a vital human strategy for sustaining a sense of agency in the face of disempowering circumstances.”42 The narratives examined in this paper not only resonate with each other – collaborating and confirming the structures of violence operating in Kashmir and Manipur – they also offer ways to register, relate to, and respond to the circumstances of Kashmiri people.

  • 43 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 14-15.
  • 44 Ibid., 19.

22The 1990s witnessed the beginning of tumultuous times in Kashmir. The night of January 20, 1990, witnessed a “long and sad night” of harassment by paramilitary forces, which drove thousands of Kashmiris (the next morning) shouting “slogans of freedom from India” at Gawkadal Bridge. This protest resulted in more than 50 “massacre[s] in the Kashmir Valley” for the first time, and eventually pushing Kashmiri youths towards insurgency.43 After the Gawkadal Massacre of 1990, young men in Kashmir, Peer informs, crossed over to Pakistan administered Kashmir, received military training, and returned home “as militants carrying Kalashnikovs” became the new ways to “be man.”44

  • 45 Noor Ahmad Baba, “Democracy and Governance in Kashmir”, in Nyla Ali Khan (ed.), The (...)
  • 46 Shubh Mathur, The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict: Grief and Courage in a South Asian Bo (...)
  • 47 Shubh Mathur, The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict, op. cit., 48.
  • 48 Ibid., 58.
  • 49 Christopher Snedden, The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir, op. cit.,15-16
  • 50 Meenakshi Ganguly, “Everyone Lives in Fear”: Patterns of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir, Hum (...)

23Noor Ahmad Baba attributes the turmoil in Kashmir to question of “the legitimacy of the accession process”, as the Maharaja’s “own legitimacy to rule the state was being questioned by the predominant [Muslim] majority of his subjects.”45 Since the accession, Kashmir has been a contested site between India and Pakistan. The delay in fulfilling the promised plebiscite,46 mandated by the United Nations, fanned the growing grievances of the Muslim population, which evolved into the Kashmir conflict. Shubh Mathur, however, traces the “immediate trigger for the insurgency” in Kashmir to the rigged election of 1987 when the National Conference party was declared the winner.47 Kashmir thus became a conflict zone with “fratricidal conflicts among militant groups with different political agendas – religious versus secular, pro-Pakistan versus pro-independence”, even driving some to “collaborate with the army against the others.”48 While a majority of Kashmiri Muslims were intent on joining Pakistan, some Kashmiri Muslims and a sizeable non-Muslim communities were aligned toward accession to India.49 Amid this conflict, at least 20,000 civilians have been killed, 8000 people have been “disappeared,” and many hundred thousands have been internally displaced since the conflict began in the 1980s.50

24Curfewed Night presents the delicate balance upon which the fate of Kashmiri Muslims hinge: any assault on the state by anti-state activities can tip the fragile balance of life and death situations for many Kashmiris. It serves as a record-keeping of the timeless war of Kashmir.

  • 51 Basharat Peer, Curffewed Night, op.cit., 98

People from almost every conflict zone had told their stories…. I felt the absence of our own telling, the unwritten books about the Kashmir experience, from the bookshelves…. The memories and stories of Kashmir that I had carried with me … could fade away. I had to find the words to save memory from the callous varnish of time. I knew I had to write.51

25Another landmark in documenting the tribulations of the people is Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator. Waheed reveals:

  • 52 Department of South Asia, University of Pennsylvania, “A Conversation with Mirza (...)

If you grow up in that place, if you grow up in Kashmir, you are essentially inhabiting what is a colonised space in every sense of the word, not just the physical space , your mental space, your spiritual space, your idea of who you are or you could be is colonised … I toyed with the idea of wiritng a non-fiction account of my Kashmir and what happens in Kashmir and I couldn’t do it…. The novelistic form …appeals to me as a writer…. This one [the Collaborator] had to be written…. I had a vague sense of that I could not not write anymore.52

26Left alone with his family in the frontier village of Kashmir, the nineteen-year-old narrator is tasked (by Captain Kadian of the Indian Army) with collecting identity cards and weapons from the corpses lying unburied in the valley between Indian administered Kashmir and Pakistan administered Kashmir. This role thus makes the narrator a collaborator. The vantage of being a collaborator reveals an insider/outsider’s glimpse of the counter-insurgency operations in Kashmir: how militants are tackled, how encounters are staged, how the list of dead terrorists is brought out, and so on. At the same time, the narrator’s account also informs how young boys, who are oblivious to either the cause or the consequences of India-Kashmir politics, join insurgency and eventually got killed sooner or later.

27The Collaborator provides an insight into the torment endured by the young narrator as much as it offers a picture of the ravages of the conflict on the bodies, homes, and lands of Kashmiri people. The battle that rages in the narrator’s mind often takes him back to his childhood years when Kashmiri youths began crossing over, thereby presenting an account of how the seeds of insurgency in Kashmir were sown. While militarisation of Kashmir has brought the region to a state of turmoil, radicalisation of Islam has equally entrapped Kashmir in a vicious cycle of violence. The Collaborator is therefore an angry indictment against the powers-that-be (against both insurgents and the Indian Army) that have unleashed forces resulting in the brutalisation and dehumanisation of people in Kashmir.

28Subadani Kshetrimayum’s and Maya Devi Nepram’s short stories register the interlacing ways in which insurgency impair lives in Manipur. Narrated in plain speaking manner, their short stories represent the double victimisation of lives entrapped amidst the hostilities between state and secessionist factions. Poverty, insurgency, alcoholic abuse, and so on, seem to be interconnected with the latitude and longitude in which insurgency has taken hold in Manipur. The select short stories therefore express the anger and frustration of the people towards both the armed opposition groups and the state security forces. Kshetrimayum and Nepram make space in the form of literary narratives to vent, criticise, and or even give closure to several irreconcilable issues that oppress people.

  • 53 John Parratt, The Wounded Land: Politics and Identity in Modern Manipur, New Delhi: Mittal (...)
  • 54 John Parratt, The Wounded Land, op. cit., 119.
  • 55 Saroj Nalini Arambam Parratt, The Court Chronicle of the Kings of Manipur: The Chei (...)
  • 56 Maharaja Bodhachandra was kept in isolation from his advisors and ministers, practically ho (...)

29Like Jammu and Kashmir, the rise of insurgency in Manipur53 is traced to the “events surrounding the merger of Manipur with India”54 and to the disregard and apathy55 with which the Government of India allegedly treated the political concerns of Manipur. Agreement for the merger of Manipur with India was signed on September 21, 1949, between Maharaja Bodhachandra of Manipur and the Government of India under ‘questionable’ circumstances.56

  • 57 Ibid., 104. After the merger, the Indian government dissolved the democratically el (...)
  • 58 Ibid., 125.
  • 59 Meitei insurgent groups have been demanding secession from India. Naga-based insurgent grou (...)

30The post-merger condition of Manipur did little to allay the fears and suspicions of the people of Manipur.57 Domination of economic spaces and government offices by non-Manipuris during the colonial times had already sown seeds of resentment among the Manipuris. Post-merger administration in Manipur was charged with “unaccountability, financial corruption, and nepotism.”58 These contentions, among others, sharpened the nationalist feelings and struggle for autonomy from Indian rule. Manipur witnessed incessant turmoil from the 1970s until the 2000s, marked by violent engagement between state and non-state forces on the one hand and factional rivalry among the insurgent groups with conflicting political interests on the other hand.59 As competing claims of diverse armed opposition groups remained unresolved, Manipur continues a theatre of violence.

Boot power, Butt power, Bullet power!

  • 60 Kshetrimayum Subadani, “Kangshillaklaba Ichel” (“Fading Dreams”), in Meisha Amasung (...)

31Kshetrimayum’s “Kangshillaklaba Ichel (Fading Dreams)” represents – not in many words but in effect – the devastating socio-economic consequences of the conflict situation in Manipur. The fading prospects of Araba, a carpenter, in conflict-ridden Manipur is symptomatic of the contemporary condition. On the one hand, insurgents pose a threat to the law-and-order situation; on the other hand, strikes, protests, and agitations by civil societies disrupt the daily life. The state, in the meanwhile, cracks down heavily upon suspected insurgents or supporters. Civilians caught between the crossfire have little to expect from the government other than symptomatic redressal in the form of monetary compensations for any loss of life.60 In such circumstances, finding a sustainable source of income for Araba, and many like him, remains perpetually slim.

32Insurgency not only created a fragile economic ecosystem in Manipur; it also cast local men in the light of suspicion. When state security forces came looking for Athoi, a fellow worker, Araba froze in terror:

  • 61 Ibid., 144.

Upon seeing the men in camouflage uniform, Araba was too terrified to even blink his eyes. Was it the police, or the CRPF, or the BSF! He couldn’t tell the difference. It was a terrifyingly hair-raising moment. Their big, black hands landed innumerable blows on Athoi’s face, left and right. Gathering all the force they could, the soldiers kicked Athoi with their heavy boots. Blood started oozing out of his ruptured lips. They then dragged him in the rain and hurled him inside their vehicle like they would an animal (emphasis and translation mine).61

33When Araba pleaded for Athoi’s innocence, he too was assaulted. This is a moment of bare truth: the display of a mightier force disciplining and subordinating errant civilian men. The passage depicts the impunity and excess with which armed personnels engage with civilians who are ‘suspects.’ By drawing attention to the “big, black hands”, the narrator foregrounds the monolithic form of the faceless, dehumanising force that was unleashed on Athoi. In this spectacle of retribution upon Athoi’s body, and by extension upon other men, Athoi becomes the (immediate) site for counterterrorism which denies judico-legal procedure of proving one’s innocence. The “big, black hands” indicate the intersection of race/ethnicity that underpins the “competing masculinities”. The soldiers are visibly outsiders, not from Manipur, and therefore ruthless in using force.

  • 62 “Disappeared” persons in the context of the “disturbed area” refer to those civilians who w (...)
  • 63 Kathleen Barry, Unmaking War, Remaking Men. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2012, 105.

34Here, outsider-insider politics deepens the nature of engagement between the (para)military personnels and the civilian. The narrator seems to indicate xenophobic aggression by highlighting the colour and size of the soldiers’ hands. Additionally, language barrier results in Athoi’s incapability of asserting his innocence, thus rendering him a mute recipient of all the allegations. The “big black hands” and heavy boots serve as symbols of brute force and domination which effectively creates a potent spectacle of decimating contending masculinities. Athoi’s fate remains uncertain: he must have been either “disappeared”62 or he might have really joined the insurgency, after being treated like one. Athoi, like many others, became a victim of “blinding macho.”63

  • 64 Idem.
  • 65 Ibid., 12.
  • 66 Ibid., 13.
  • 67 Ibid., 106.

35Kathleen Barry asserts that soldiers are characterised by a “blinding macho” which they carry forward from home, an entitlement which, they feel, are their patriarchal right. Barry reasons that “blinding macho” results from “core masculinity” which is deep-rooted in patriarchal society.64 “Core masculinity”, Barry posits, is built upon male aggression and an entrenched “contempt for all that is female.”65 At the same time, it is also founded upon the role of men as protector – protector of women and children.66 This role of aggressor and protector that the society sanctions – at home and outside – allows for a sense of male superiority. Consequently, the blinding power with which many, if not all, armed personnel engage with civilians resonates with the position of superiority men claim over women, or stronger men assert over weaker men. Barry argues (para)military forces’ engagement with local civilian men is characterised by an aggression intended to “make their male victims weak, vulnerable, and unable to defend themselves” and “inferior” compared to the “blinding macho” of the soldiers.67

36The “blinding macho” with which state forces assert their hypermasculinity over lesser masculinity of civilian men is evident in “Laak-khini Hairammi” (“The Promised Homecoming”) in Meisha Amasung Meichak [Heat and Agony] by Subadani Kshetrimayum. When Leihao’s house was raided, despite pleading innocence

  • 68 Kshetrimayum Subadani, “Laak-khini Hairammi” (“The Promised Homecoming”) in Meisha Amasun (...)

the father and the son were mercilessly punched all over the face. Not satisfied with just kicking and stomping with their big, heavy boots, they started bashing the father and the son with the butts of their guns.68

37Leihao’s family fell into misfortune for giving refuge to two insurgents for a night. The two men pleading for mercy from the overwhelming force transforms this moment into a stage where any act of resistance was incapacitated. The men in uniform, with an air of authority and trappings of military prowess, suppress any possible form of resistance or retaliation from the two men. Leihao loses her husband eventually owing to the violent beatings, and her son too to the insurgency. For many nights, Leihao waits for her son to return. However, like many other mothers’ fates, the wait for her son holds no hope of the promised homecoming.

38Nepram’s “Cheinakhol (Trauma)” in the collection Wakat registers the despair of a mother whose son lies half-dead in a hospital bed after being tortured by state forces. Tombimacha’s son was arrested during a house-raid after some insurgents had forced her family to provide shelter for the night. The insurgents landed her and her only son in this grievous situation. She resented the arrogance and entitlement with which those insurgents had demanded food and shelter from her. When she expressed her inability to provide food, she was self-righteously reminded of the sacrifices the insurgents had to make. While several writings engage in a critique of state-sanctioned aggression, “Cheinakhol (Trauma)” is unsparing in its critique of both state and anti-state aggressions. It is an exposé of fake rebels in Manipur who carry out extortion and terrorise people in the name of struggle for self-determinism. This short story takes the tone of a grievance against the powers-that-be for harassing innocent civilians.

39Nepram gives a glimpse of equally power-incensed non-state forces demanding obeisance for their ‘sacrifice.’ On the night when some insurgents barged into Tombimacha’s crumbling hut and demanded that they be fed “tin-fish” (canned fish), she could not help but comply with their demands despite her impoverished condition. Tombimacha was rebuked for refusing to support the demands of the insurgents:

  • 69 Nepram Maya Devi, “Cheinakhol (Trauma)”, in Wakat [Grievance], Imphal: Manipuri Literary (...)

What do you mean you have no money! If you are told to cook that [tin fish], just do it. Such a fuss for one portion of meal! If you don’t want to feed us, we will snatch from you and eat. Brother [addressing Tombimacha’s son], why don’t you go and buy one or two tin-fish? No money and all! After all, are we not doing this for you as well? … Is this something personal? We also want to live like you.69

  • 70 Kathleen Barry, Unmaking War, Remaking Men, op. cit., 107.

40Ironically, the state forces too rebuked and chastised Tombimacha for sheltering the insurgents. Tombimacha’s son was kicked with full force of the army boots, accompanied with abusive words. The hypermasculine soldiers (usually ‘outsiders’) “destroy their [the local men] ability to be the protectors they were led to believe they are suppose[d] to be” according to the patriarchal society.70 While ‘emasculation’ is a problematic term that degrades femininity and female, it is yet an insightful framework in explaining the excesses of male-directed violence by members of an institution that is founded on the spirit of valour, violence, and virility. To the gun wielding soldiers, pleading, crying, and whimpering effectively must appear as mockery of manliness.

41In several cases, emasculation of men in the literal sense had become another mode of terrorising people. In Curfewed Night, referring to Papa-2, the most dreaded place of torture in Kashmir, Ansar (a former militant) recounts the horror of emasculation to Peer:

  • 71 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 147-148.

That place destroyed most people who were there. You do not live a normal life after that torture. It scars you forever… They took you out to the lawn outside the building. You were asked to remove all your clothes, even your underwear… They tied copper wire around your arms and gave high voltage shocks… But the worst was when they inserted the copper wire into my penis and gave electric shocks. They did it with most boys. It destroyed many lives. Many could not marry after that.71

  • 72 Ibid., 148.
  • 73 Idem.
  • 74 The perverse, debilitating, and systematic violence done to the bodies of Kashmiri youths a (...)

42Peer shares how “the attacks on their masculinity had left them vulnerable even after the prison sentence was over.”72 One of Peer’s teachers from school was subjected to the same torture, like Ansar. He informs he “had three unsuccessful operations” on his testicles and that he had no chance of marriage ever.73 Torture by electrocuting the genitals reeks of a perverse sense of domination.74 Intersections of gender, religion, regional background, class, and so on in the grid of power dynamics between state armed forces and armed opposition groups are crucial in explaining such severe forms of torture. Militant Kashmiri (Muslim) men are a threat not only to the state but also to the idea of a ‘homogenous’ nation. The sexualised torture reeks of a concerted xenophobic attempt at incapacitating those men whom the armed forces perceive as not one of their own in terms of ideology, sensibilities, ethnicity, and so on. The imprints of torture on the body of such men are meant to be witnessed by others as the sight of retribution for their apparent terroristic tendencies and affiliations. Bereft of potency and virility, these men are left with the legacy of humiliation and emasculation – never to reproduce again. Outward traces of custodial violence conceal deeper scars; end of custody does not end their suffering, as Peer’s memoir establishes. As the sight of retribution, these beaten men become a potent warning among the local populace against any act of transgression.

  • 75 Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator, England, Penguin Books, 2012, 4.
  • 76 Ibid., 294.

43Therefore, the narrator of The Collaborator, when asked to be the retriever of identity cards and personal items from dead bodies, did not have the courage to refuse the order. After all, he knew “they’d do it anyway.”75 The narrator confesses when Captain Kadian “proposed the ‘job’ for the first time,” “we felt we had to do whatever he asked us to do. Baba was scared, transformed overnight into a weak-kneed old man. I was scared. Ma was scared.”76 While Captain Kadian may not be representative of military masculinities, as positioned above, he does represent those masculinities that abuse men and women symptomatic of the “blinding macho” which Barry elucidates. He lambasts and mocks the militants:

  • 77 Ibid., 90.

Maderchod heroes with their cheap Chinese pistols…. And the same bastards, when they are caught, the same fucking Rambos go down on their knees and cry, “Sir, sir, I’m innocent, I haven’t done anything…. Sir, I’m sorry …. Please forgive me … wee, wee, wee … saala, buzdil bhosdi ke … I’m filled with nothing but disgust when I see such whining sissies.77

44The Kashmiri Muslims “with cheap Chinese pistols” begging for his forgiveness and crying like “whining sissies” positions Kadian as an all-powerful man who could either destroy or forgive them. While state sanction places Kadian in that position and on the right side of the law, the militants are subjected to state retribution. The sight of retribution that Kashmiri men (and women) had become – with shroud covered bodies, decapacitated bodies, or half-limbed bodies – is a spectacle enough for instilling terror and eliciting subjugation among the subjects of the “disturbed” areas.

45Terror is a looming presence in militarised zones. The presence of military force that dominates the landscape of these regions is more terrifying than securing, as the narratives from these regions register. The barbed wires, sandbags, army checkpoints, patrolling vehicles, and so on, are all unnerving part of militarised spaces. Peer remembers how the civilians’ protest after the first military crackdown on January 19, 1990, heightened the military presence in Kashmir. The crackdowns, patrolling, highway checking and body-frisking on roads had uncannily become normal and terrorising at the same time. As Peer conveys:

  • 78 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 48.

Military vehicles, armed soldiers, machine guns poking out of sandbag bunkers were everywhere; death and fear became routine like going to school, playing cricket and football. At times we forgot about the war around us; at times we could not.78

  • 79 Ibid., 63.

46Having witnessed and even endured armed brutalities on the slightest suspicion, the mere sight of soldiers itself could be unnerving and intimidating. The cordoning off of multiple spaces in Kashmir with intimidating military apparatus demanded self-regulation on how one engages a gendered relationship with spaces. Peer recounts how he and his grandfather were unnerved when a soldier entered their compartment on train. He was however “stunned” how “unlike people in Kashmir, … north Indian fellow[s] … had no reason to be scared of soldiers.”79 These accounts of engagement with Indian soldiers show how the symbol of security for larger population of the country unsettles the people in conflict zones. With a dominating presence of military masculinities, civilians constantly self-regulate and reconfigure their masculine practices in ways that minimise their vulnerabilities. People in larger part of the country, however, remain oblivious to such vulnerabilities and intimidations.

47One’s own home too can never be private or safe in the true sense of the word. Army personnel (and armed opposition groups) can knock on and break down anyone’s door any time of the day or night and conduct search operations without warrant. Such invasive measure pushes the people to the edge of vulnerability, let alone bring any sense of security. Their lives are subjected to physical and psychological fencing by the (para)military. Waheed captures the moments when Nowgam was placed in curfew, curtailing the freedom of the people:

Black turbaned, menacing looking men in fearsome outfits with big shining rifles arrived … someone made an announcement through a megaphone perched on top of a windowless, fortress-like vehicle.

The area is declared under curfew, day and night.

Anyone violating this order will be dealt with severely.

  • 80 Ibid., 177.

This is a government order. Do not panic.80

48As the curfew was announced, the law-enforcers of the Indian state threatened the villagers with fitting punishment if they violated the government’s order; in the same breath, they disinterestedly cautioned the villagers not to panic. If anything, these “black turbaned” soldiers with their big rifles were an imposing presence and a symbol of threat in themselves. These measures to secure the local populace and curb insurgency, ironically, not only imprisoned the villagers in their own homes but also terrorised the people.

49This is however not to conclude that people in conflict zones have totally consigned themselves to a state of resignation. Notwithstanding the suppressed masculinity in Kashmir and Manipur, new ways of doing masculinity, and new ways of navigating everyday demands inform civilian lives in heavily cordoned spaces.

Reconfiguring Masculinities

50If political conditions in post-independent India pushed men to join armed opposition groups, thereby constructing an armed form of masculinity, civilians found ways to reconfigure their masculinities amid the everyday hostilities. Not looking into soldiers’ eyes, promptly obeying their command, always carrying identity card, giving into road frisking and luggage checking willingly, switching on the light inside vehicles, avoiding night ventures, and so on, became practices for self-preservation. Peer complains:

  • 81 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 165.

It felt like a video game. The soldier moves his finger; buses stop, people form queues, walk, stop, board and leave. Another vehicle reaches the checkpoint and the game repeats itself at every checkpoint across Kashmir.81

  • 82 Ibid., 57.

51These rituals redefined the perception of dignity, agency, and even gendered sense of the self. Young or old, submitting to military masculinity assured self-preservation. On a lighter note, Peer informs how younger men shaved their beard and older men stopped dyeing their hair black. Grey hair was “a certificate of ageing” and made the person “less of a suspect for the soldiers”82 On a more serious note, name calling and silently abusing Indian army soldiers, graffiti writing and sloganeering became a way of passive resistance and reclaiming (masculine) agency.

52In the early years of violent engagement between non-state forces and the Indian state forces, as depicted in these narratives, men took up arms in the name of freedom and constructed a new (and even glamourised) masculinity. Peer recounts the wave of protest against the Indian state:

  • 83 Ibid., 17.

Amid the collision of bodies, holding of hands, interlocking of eyes in affirmation and confirmation, the merging of a thousand voices, I had ceased to be a shy bookish boy hunched by the expectations of my family. I wasn’t scared of being scolded anymore, I felt a part of something much bigger, unknowingly making a journey from I to We. I let myself go, fly, with the crowd. Aazadi! Throughout the winter, almost every Kashmiri man was a Farhaad, ready to dig a stream of milk from the mountains for a rendezvous with his Shireen: freedom.83

53In 1991, Peer remembers visiting a nearby village looking for guerrillas:

  • 84 Ibid. 24.

We saw a group of young men dressed in fatigues, assault rifles slung on their shoulders coming from the other side of the road. They were tall, and seemed the most glamourous of men; we were awestruck.84

  • 85 Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator, op. cit., 17.

54Waheed’s narrator too informs how “everyone wanted to go sarhad paar, to cross over and become a famous freedom fighter…. Everyone wanted to return and be a commander, a masked legends in their own right, a liberator of the Kashmiri people.”85

55Both the narrators however remained distant from the aspirations for martyrdom that attracted, and eventually but inevitably killed, many boys around them. In both accounts, education gave the narrators a new framework of defining purpose and masculinities that was not founded upon violence. Shahid, Peer’s doctor friend, reminds him:

  • 86 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 153.

Remember that people like you and me are a privileged minority in Kashmir. Our backgrounds have shielded us from a lot. We have been able to get an education and build a career. We can get out of here whenever we want to.86

  • 87 Ibid., 83-84

56For Peer, therefore, writing about Kashmir, reporting the cruelty and injustice became his way to fight back as a man.87 He chose education and writing to gun and violence to define himself and his purpose.

  • 88 Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator, op. cit., 17.
  • 89 Idem.
  • 90 Ibid., 27.
  • 91 Mirza Waheed, op. cit., 108.

57Similarly, Waheed’s protagonist was considered “compromised” by his friends as he “had read too many books,” which had dulled his “ability to rebel, to take up arms.”88 Kashmir and Manipur in the 1990s witnessed several young men joining separatist factions. Their names and activities were spoken about in whispers. Joining the ‘underground’ groups appealed to the sensibilities of these young men and gave them a higher purpose in the face of rampant violence by the state forces. Inevitably, those who remained on the path of education were considered cowardly. Waheed’s protagonist is conscious of his “compromised” masculinity: “I didn’t have balls, they must’ve thought, therefore I wasn’t fit – and they were right perhaps – therefore I didn’t cross the line, and ended up staying behind [but alive].”89 Death was imminent everyday fighting against the state; it was like “picking small scabs off an elephant’s skin. Mosquito bites on a giant’s ass” in the protagonist’s father’s words.90 The protagonist became the ‘one who stayed behind’ – and yet still the ‘suspect’ like any other in the eyes of the law – and settled for a lesser, non-violent and more humanistic masculinity. At least he knew, “Ma won’t become this woman in front of me,” the woman whose tears were streaming down, or the mother’s face by a window waiting for their sons to return.91 As many civilian men in conflict zones negotiate between taking up guns or being victimised by militarised violence, many deliberately accepted the “compromised” masculinity, thereby rejecting, if not challenging, ideologies of violent masculinity that both militant and military masculinities uphold.

58Between the two perspectives that hold each other as ‘the enemy,’ and two masculinities that reject any traces of humanity in each other, a third perspective that is more complex and more considerate needs to be embraced as an important aspect of masculinity. Peer confesses that he knows nothing about the soldiers and their lives beyond their uniforms, their stiff expressions, their commands, and their guns and:

  • 92 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op.cit. 239-240.

young men like them, on different sides of the military divide, had killed and died after they chose to become militants and soldiers. Hundreds like them died every year…. I hoped that some day they could cease being part of processes that reduced individuals to suspects or military targets, shorn of all human complexity; processes that left them with bare nomenclatures like militants, soldiers, paramilitaries.92

Final remarks

59Narratives of violence (and reports by human rights organisations and other civil societies) attest to the human rights violations in the “disturbed areas” of Kashmir and Manipur. They are disruptions to the narratives produced, regulated, and circulated through administrative records, proceedings, and state-regulated media. At the same time, they serve as self-reflexive critiques of the trajectories and modus operandi of the self-deterministic factions operating in these regions. While state forces are condemned for outright acts of violence, armed opposition groups are scrutinised and reprimanded for self-serving, damaging demands placed upon civilians.

  • 93 Ibid., 42.

60In addition to initiatives by human rights organisations in exerting pressure and influencing state actions, life and literary narratives provide a crucial platform for articulating repressed voices and fostering solidarity through shared experiences. Basharat Peer, as a journalist based outside Kashmir, exercises his agency to report the violence that rages in Kashmir without fear. Yet, even with their professional impunity, journalists (or any critics of violence) are not safe either in Kashmir or in Manipur. Peer shares how Yusuf Jameel was almost killed and went “off the air” after a bomb exploded in his office, during which another journalist died.93 Manipuri journalists are no stranger to similar perils. Despite the threat and dread looming large, life narrative becomes a potent form of writing back to the gun forces. The subjective experiences omitted in his professional writings are transformed into a vital force intertwining with his own in this memoir. Similarly, Mirja Waheed, Subadani Kshetrimayum, and Maya Devi Nepram took to imaginary writings that vent their anger against the powers that be. Questions that are often silenced through acts of vengeance find inroads in these narratives. The flexibility of fictional genre allows them to explore the emotional interiority of human suffering in hostile environments – as children, adolescents, adult males and females, across intersecting subject positions. While reports provide statistics and highlight visible and invisible forms of violence; these fictions re-enact not just acts of violence but also depict pervasive ways in which violence disrupts everyday lives. They are therefore not just expressions of solidarity in suffering but also embodiment of resistance in subversive forms.

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Notes

1 Urvashi Butalia, Speaking Peace: Women’s Voices from Kashmir, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 2002.

2 Preeti Gill (ed.), The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s Northeast, New Delhi: Zubaan, 2010.

3 Seema Shekhawat, Gender, Conflict and Peace in Kashmir: Invisible Stakeholders, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

4 Sanghamitra Choudhury, Women and Conflict in India, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2016.

5 Amya Agarwal, Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022.

6 Asian Human Rights Commission, “Indian Human Rights Report”, May 2009, New Delhi. <http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/Indiahumanrights2009.pdf>, accessed on March 10, 2025, 135.

7 Ibid., 135.

8 Élise Féron, Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones, London: Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd, 2017; Phillip Schulz, Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence: Perspectives from Northern Uganda, Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2021; Amya Agarwal, Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022

9 A comprehensive report on the phenomenon of torture used by the state forces in Jammu and Kashmir from 1990s onward presents the debilitating ways in which the Indian state engages with the civilians. “Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir.” A Report by Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, Kashmir Law and Justice Project, February 2019, <https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Countries/IN/DevelopmentsInKashmirJune2016ToApril2018.pdf>, accessed on April 20, 2023. Other reports that mention ‘torture’ are: Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Kashmir: Developments in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir from June 2016 to April 2018, and General Human Rights Concerns in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, 14 June 2018, < https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Countries/IN/DevelopmentsInKashmirJune2016ToApril2018.pdf >; Laifungbam Debabrata Roy, Report of Torture in Manipur 2014-2015, Centre for Organisation Research and Education, 26 June 2015, < https://e-paolive.net/download/education/2015/06/CORE-H2H_Torture_Report_201506.pdf>; Suhas Chakma, India Human Rights Report 2009, Asian Centre for Human Rights, May 2009, <http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/Indiahumanrights2009.pdf>; Independent Citizens’ Fact Finding Report. Democracy ‘Encountered’: Rights’ Violations in Manipur. November 2009, < https://archive.crin.org/en/docs/AR2008.pdf> accessed on March 15, 2025.

10 However, in the context of Kashmir, survivors coding their experience as torture “provides them with the courage to voice out their difficult past experiences,” Amya Agarwal, Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022, 37.

11 Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, “Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir.” A Report by Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, Kashmir Law and Justice Project, February 2019, 12, 73-74 <https://www.kljp.org/articles/torture-indian-states-instrument-of-control-in-indian-administered-jammu-and-kashmir#:~:text=Torture%3A%20Indian%20State%27s%20Instrument%20of%20Control%20in%20Indian%20administered%20Jammu,began%20in%20the%20late%201980s>, accessed on April 20, 2023.

12 Frank van Lierde, We, Widows of the Gun, The Hague: Colophon, 2011, 59.

13 One of the testimonies mentions how Assam Rifles personnel dared “that the army and its officers will not [be] deterred by hiding behind state parliament members or ministers or other ‘little men’”, Ibid., 61.

14 Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, “Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian Administered Jammu and Kashmir,” op. cit., 56.

15 Similar rules shape the nature of engagement between non-state forces and civilians. Both forces posture themselves as the legitimate protectors of the land (and the people) and exact allegiance towards their respective causes.

16 Elise Féron, Wartime Sexual Violence Against Men: Masculinities and Power in Conflict Zones, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

17 V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered Identities Ideologies, and Practices in the Context of War and Militarism”, in Laura Sjoberg and Sandra Via (eds), Gender, War, and Militarism: Feminist Perspective, Santa Barbara, California: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010, 17-18.

18 Ibid.,19.

19 Phillip Schulz, Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence: Perspectives from Northern Uganda, Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2021, 10-11.

20 Ibid., 11.

21 Idem.

22 Idem.

23 Several feminist writers have engaged with the question of “rape” being used as an instrument of assault and shame by men of one community against another. Butalia, Urvashi; Menon, Ritu and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition, Kali for Women, 1998, New Delhi. Uma Chakravarti, Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens, 2009, STREE, Kolkata

24 Swati Parashar, “Competing Masculinities, Militarization and the Conflict on Kashmir.”

International Feminist Journal of Politic, vol. 20, issue 4, 2018, 663-665, <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14616742.2018.1532179>, accessed on April 23, 2023, 663.

25 Ibid., 663.

26 Ibid.., 663-664.

27 V. Spike Peterson, “Gendered Identities Ideologies, and Practices in the Context of War and Militarism,” op. cit., 28.

28 Amya Agarwal, “Fixing Ruptured Masculinities: Reflections from Kashmir”, E International Relations, 26 February 2019, 1, <https://www.e-ir.info/2019/02/26/fixing-ruptured-masculinities-reflections-from-kashmir/>, accessed on August 19, 2022.

29 Amya Agarwal, Contesting Masculinities and Women’s Agency in Kashmir, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2022, 62

30 Frank van Lierde, We, Widows of the Gun, op. cit., 61.

31 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd Ed., New York: Routledge, 1990, 34.

32 James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity: Formulation, Reformulation, and Amplification, London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, 35.

33 While discussing masculinity as a gendered discourse, I take cognisance of the risk of reinforcing “heteronormative concept of gender.” However, to engage with the discourse on multiplicities of gender identities will take this paper tangentially. Therefore, I present the overview of masculinity as defined by various critics to construct a theoretical framework that supports the main argument of this paper. James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity, op. cit., 34.

34 Raewyn W. Connell, Masculinities, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2nd Ed., 2005, 80-81. At this juncture, it will be helpful to bear in mind the caution by Messerschmidt that hierarchy among masculinities is not corollary to subordination of women by patriarchy and that “it is a mistake to deduce relations among masculinities from the direct exercise of personal power by men over women,” James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity, op. cit., 38.

35 R.W. Connell, Masculinities, op. cit., 83.

36 Idem.

37 James W. Messerschmidt, Hegemonic Masculinity, op. cit., 39-40.

38 Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Report on the Situation of Human Rights in Kashmir: Developments in the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir from June 2016 to April 2018, and General Human Rights Concerns in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan, 14 June 2018, < https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Countries/IN/DevelopmentsInKashmirJune2016ToApril2018.pdf >; Laifungbam Debabrata Roy, Report of Torture in Manipur 2014-2015, Centre for Organisation Research and Education, 26 June 2015, < https://e-paolive.net/download/education/2015/06/CORE-H2H_Torture_Report_201506.pdf>; Suhas Chakma, India Human Rights Report 2009, Asian Centre for Human Rights, May 2009, <http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/files/Indiahumanrights2009.pdf>; Independent Citizens’ Fact Finding Report. Democracy ‘Encountered’: Rights’ Violations in Manipur. November 2009, < https://archive.crin.org/en/docs/AR2008.pdf> accessed on March 15, 2025.

39 Two clarifications are in order at this point. Firstly, the critique in this paper is primarily based on literary and life narratives and not on empirical studies. Secondly, it deals more with violence by state security forces than with those by non-state armed opposition groups. Analyses of various oppressive practices by non-state forces in Kashmir and Manipur warrant a separate paper to itself.

40 Phillip Schulz, Male Survivors of Wartime Sexual Violence, op. cit., 8.

41 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, Noida, Random House, 2008, 11.

42 Michael Jackson, The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity, Denmark: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2006, 15.

43 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 14-15.

44 Ibid., 19.

45 Noor Ahmad Baba, “Democracy and Governance in Kashmir”, in Nyla Ali Khan (ed.), The Parchment of Kashmir: History, Society, and Polity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 104.

46 Shubh Mathur, The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict: Grief and Courage in a South Asian Borderland, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, 24-26. Mathur informs that the United Nations (UN) halted the fight between India and Pakistan, after the invasion by tribesmen from north-west province of Pakistan in 1947, with the resolution that a plebiscite will be conducted under its supervision. The poll would have facilitated Jammu and Kashmir to determine their political trajectory.

47 Shubh Mathur, The Human Toll of the Kashmir Conflict, op. cit., 48.

48 Ibid., 58.

49 Christopher Snedden, The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir, op. cit.,15-16.

50 Meenakshi Ganguly, “Everyone Lives in Fear”: Patterns of Impunity in Jammu and Kashmir, Human Rights Watch, vol. 18, no. 11 (C) September 2006. <https://www.hrw.org/reports/2006/india0906/india0906web.pdf>, accessed on January 07, 2024, 1-2.

51 Basharat Peer, Curffewed Night, op.cit., 98

52 Department of South Asia, University of Pennsylvania, “A Conversation with Mirza Waheed and Suvir Kaul,” Writers Without Borders, April 19, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32YQs5_RuFk, accessed on March 10, 2025.

53 John Parratt, The Wounded Land: Politics and Identity in Modern Manipur, New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 2005 103-105. J. Parratt contends that the first seeds of insurgency, however, had been sown when revolutionary leader and activist Hijam Irabot was outlawed after a protest on September 21, 1948, against India’s plan to constitute Purbanchal Pradesh, a conglomerate of Cachar, Tripura, and Manipur. This led to the formation of an underground communist party with a military wing called the Red Guard in 1950. Naorem Sanajaoba traces the history of insurgency in Manipur even further back to 1948 when Irabot inspired a “Maoist line of armed struggle” “semi-feudalism and colonialism.”” Naorem Sanajaoba, “The Genesis of Insurgency”, in Naorem Sanajaoba (ed.), Manipur Past and Present: The Heritage and Ordeals of a Civilization, vol. 1, New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988, 245.

54 John Parratt, The Wounded Land, op. cit., 119.

55 Saroj Nalini Arambam Parratt, The Court Chronicle of the Kings of Manipur: The Cheitharon Kumpapa. 1764-1843 CE, vol. 2, New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 108, SNA Parratt notes the aspersion cast upon the Government of India for handing over the Kabaw Valley, a highly fertile plain in present day Myanmar, to the Burmese without consulting the Manipuris during Nehru’s visit to Manipur in March 1953.

56 Maharaja Bodhachandra was kept in isolation from his advisors and ministers, practically holding them “as virtual prisoners” before the agreement was signed in Shillong, John Parratt, The Wounded Land, op. cit., 116-118.

57 Ibid., 104. After the merger, the Indian government dissolved the democratically elected government of Manipur on 15 October 1949.

58 Ibid., 125.

59 Meitei insurgent groups have been demanding secession from India. Naga-based insurgent groups have been demanding not only the formation of the sovereign state of Nagaland (separate from the Indian union) but also the unification of all Naga-inhabited regions in Northeast India and in Myanmar. Kuki insurgents demand an independent Kuki Homeland along ethnic lines. It is also to be noted that Manipur has been in a state of turmoil since May 2023 due to the ongoing ethnic conflict between the Meiteis and the Kukis.

60 Kshetrimayum Subadani, “Kangshillaklaba Ichel” (“Fading Dreams”), in Meisha Amasung Meichak [Heat and Agony], Imphal, Manipur: Linthoingambi Publications, 2012, 127.

61 Ibid., 144.

62 “Disappeared” persons in the context of the “disturbed area” refer to those civilians who were picked up by the armed forces but whose whereabouts or whether they are alive (or dead) remain unknown.

63 Kathleen Barry, Unmaking War, Remaking Men. New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2012, 105.

64 Idem.

65 Ibid., 12.

66 Ibid., 13.

67 Ibid., 106.

68 Kshetrimayum Subadani, “Laak-khini Hairammi” (“The Promised Homecoming”) in Meisha Amasung Meichak [Heat and Agony], Imphal, Manipur: Linthoingambi Publications, 2012, 47, translation and emphasis mine.

69 Nepram Maya Devi, “Cheinakhol (Trauma)”, in Wakat [Grievance], Imphal: Manipuri Literary Society, 2004, 74, translation mine.

70 Kathleen Barry, Unmaking War, Remaking Men, op. cit., 107.

71 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 147-148.

72 Ibid., 148.

73 Idem.

74 The perverse, debilitating, and systematic violence done to the bodies of Kashmiri youths are often reported (and consequently denied as baseless by the alleged armed forces) by media. “Electric Shocks, Beatings” https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/9/10/electric-shocks-beatings-kashmiris-allege-abuse-by-india-army; Jean Dreze, https://thewire.in/politics/torture-testimonies-detained-youth-kashmir#google_vignette. Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, “Torture”, op. cit.

75 Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator, England, Penguin Books, 2012, 4.

76 Ibid., 294.

77 Ibid., 90.

78 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 48.

79 Ibid., 63.

80 Ibid., 177.

81 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 165.

82 Ibid., 57.

83 Ibid., 17.

84 Ibid. 24.

85 Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator, op. cit., 17.

86 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op. cit., 153.

87 Ibid., 83-84

88 Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator, op. cit., 17.

89 Idem.

90 Ibid., 27.

91 Mirza Waheed, op. cit., 108.

92 Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, op.cit. 239-240.

93 Ibid., 42.

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Leisangthem Gitarani Devi, « “Boot Power, Butt Power, Bullet Power! – Gendering Violence (against Men) in the ‘Disturbed Areas’ of India” »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], vol.23-n°59 | 2025, mis en ligne le 12 mai 2025, consulté le 12 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/16962

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Leisangthem Gitarani Devi



Leisangthem Gitarani Devi teaches literatures at Shivaji College, University of Delhi, and presently a Fellow at the Prime Ministers Museum and Library, New Delhi. Her research interests focus on narratives from conflict zones, particularly the North-East India and narratives registering Second World War experiences (Burma-India). She was awarded of the Zubaan-Sasakawa Peace Foundation Grants for Young Researchers from the Northeast (2018-2019). Her project entitled “How Women Remember: Unearthing Memories of the Second World War in Manipur,” was published as an e-essay by Zubaan. Her latest publications are: “Writing Lives, Re-membering History in Easterine Kire’s Mari” (in Telling Lives, Signifying Selves: Life Writing Representation and Identity, Vol 44. No. 4 Winter 21, JCLA).and “Liminal Lives: Imagining (Lost) Childhood in Kashmiri Fictions” (in Reimagi(ni)ng Identities in the Global South: Challenges, Transgressions and Articulations, Vol 6, 2020, The IACLALS Journal)

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