Tyranny of Indian nationalism and resistance in Kashmir: Reading a Kashmiri narrative with Iqbal and Freud

This paper is a reflection on Indian nationalism and political resistance in Kashmir. Using Freud's myth of the primal horde as an allegory for Indian nationalism, I suggest that the Indian nation-state functions in Kashmir like the primal father seeking to violently extract identification and obedience from non-consenting Kashmiri subjects to assimilate them into the Indian nationalist mass. Following a Kashmiri interlocutor's narrative, I read Muhammad Iqbal's myth of Adam's disobedience as an allegory for the Kashmiri resistance. While Freud enables one to see the tyranny of nationalism as its politics of identification, through Iqbal's myth I offer a reading of Kashmiris' resistance as described by my Kashmiri interlocutor in terms of their disidentification from Indian nationalism and assertion of their distinct selfhood as a Kashmiri community. Bringing to bear the meaning of psychic resistance on political resistance, I ask whether the Kashmiri resistance movement may conserve and repeat the nationalist demand for identification by seeking unwavering allegiance from Kashmiris to the movement and its political ideal. I argue that to keep freedom a living concern of the movement would mean to create room for ambivalence. Lastly, I suggest that ambivalence is also critical to imagine a Kashmiri alternative to a nationalist mass, a less cohesive form of community based not on identification but recognition of the otherness of the many communities living in Kashmir.