Politics of Medical Networks and Caring Resistance Under Militarization in Kashmir
Bidisha Mukherjee, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Focusing on the Indian state-occupied militarized zone, Kashmir, my paper examines how families and neighborhoods of victims of enforced disappearances navigate through medical networks around biomedical systems, Unani and Tibb-e-Nabawi. I show how prolonged conflict and neo-colonial governance complicate the community’s perceptions and practices around health and illness, producing an ambivalent character of medicine that oscillates between state repression and caring resistance across the systems of medicine.
Drawing from scholarship on the Kashmir conflict and the ethnographic evidence from my fieldwork, collected during the summer of 2023 and 2024, I highlight how the occupying state weaponizes biomedicine in the Valley under the garb of care, how the practice materializes itself by manipulating medical concerns and insecurities. Based on this critique, I proceed to elaborate on how, beyond the biomedical structure, Unani and Tibb-e-Nabawi produce a medical site where illness experiences are shared based on the unique Indigenous knowledge of the Kashmir Valley that has existed since pre-modern times. It brings in the more than human worlds into the medical paradigm of treatment. The spirits world of Jinns or Shaytans. Healers also often help patients make sense of their suffering in a similar language or by alluding to popular myths or legends. Eventually, these healers usually gave their patients an amulet or read Qur’anic verses to them, blowing over the person’s forehead as treatment.
I ground these provocations on the implications of the recent abrogation of articles 370 and 35A in 2019, which ripped off the special status and some of the exclusive rights from the community. In light of this event, I argue that Biomedical networks of state-governed care assault and instrumentalize the health of the Kashmir community, which makes it urgent to think beyond Biomedicine as the only available, efficient, and scientific system as people of the community have long been accessing the sites of Indigenous practices that resist the State’s medical project.
This paper, thus, challenges the ongoing occupation in Kashmir, which annihilates conditions of well-being and takes away hopes of a healthy life, whilst simultaneously, the paper is also a quest to understand the resilience and resistance of the community that continues to work around such critical conditions to create and shape a caring life by invoking decolonial religio-cultural practices of health.
Drawing from scholarship on the Kashmir conflict and the ethnographic evidence from my fieldwork, collected during the summer of 2023 and 2024, I highlight how the occupying state weaponizes biomedicine in the Valley under the garb of care, how the practice materializes itself by manipulating medical concerns and insecurities. Based on this critique, I proceed to elaborate on how, beyond the biomedical structure, Unani and Tibb-e-Nabawi produce a medical site where illness experiences are shared based on the unique Indigenous knowledge of the Kashmir Valley that has existed since pre-modern times. It brings in the more than human worlds into the medical paradigm of treatment. The spirits world of Jinns or Shaytans. Healers also often help patients make sense of their suffering in a similar language or by alluding to popular myths or legends. Eventually, these healers usually gave their patients an amulet or read Qur’anic verses to them, blowing over the person’s forehead as treatment.
I ground these provocations on the implications of the recent abrogation of articles 370 and 35A in 2019, which ripped off the special status and some of the exclusive rights from the community. In light of this event, I argue that Biomedical networks of state-governed care assault and instrumentalize the health of the Kashmir community, which makes it urgent to think beyond Biomedicine as the only available, efficient, and scientific system as people of the community have long been accessing the sites of Indigenous practices that resist the State’s medical project.
This paper, thus, challenges the ongoing occupation in Kashmir, which annihilates conditions of well-being and takes away hopes of a healthy life, whilst simultaneously, the paper is also a quest to understand the resilience and resistance of the community that continues to work around such critical conditions to create and shape a caring life by invoking decolonial religio-cultural practices of health.