Episode Nine: Experiences Matter: The Process of Understanding and Becoming!

The Kashmir Podcast with Ifat Gazia

(FINAL EPISODE SEASON ONE)
A question that most of us get asked is why do we do what we do? This is something I wanted to understand for myself and therefore I had a conversation with two Kashmiri academics, to understand why our experiences are central to what we become and why it is important to leave behind a collective understanding of events that have shaped the present in Kashmir . One of our guests is a historian in making and another one is an anthropologist. As Kashmiri researchers I hardly see us working on topics other than Kashmir and yet everytime we start this research process, it only feels like a beginning. In this conversation with Mohammad Junaid and Iffat Rashid, I realised how this is not the start. There have always been kashmiri historians, writers, ethnographers and journalists who have tried to document our past and our present. It's a different question altogether as to how much their voices were recognised. Mostly our story has been told through the colonial gaze. We have had people outside of Kashmir telling our stories, writing about us and some even exotifying or demonizing the people of Kashmir by saying things like Kashmiris have red cheeks, they have fair skin, they are incapable of ruling themselves or even worse - that kashmirs are terrorists. Therefore, Kashmiri scholarship is important and it is the only way we not only write our own history and present but also collectively understand possibilities for our future.
This episode features Iffat Rashid, a researcher at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford. And Mohamad Junaid, an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.