Ethnography, Solidarity and Outrage in Kashmir: Reflections on Saiba Varma’s 'Occupied Clinic' https://thewire.in/books/ethnography-solidarity-and-outrage-in-kashmir-reflections-on-saiba-varmas-occupied-clinic
Even while the letters attacking Varma have triggered a significant amount of noise, I found much of the debate disappointing for its brevity, shrillness and unanimity.
Ethnography, Solidarity and Outrage in Kashmir:
https://thewire.in/books/ethnography-solidarity-and-outrage-in-kashmir-reflections-on-saiba-varmas-occupied-clinic
Saiba Varma’s book, Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir (2020), documents implications of the ongoing militarisation and counterinsurgency in Kashmir through an intensive ethnography of mental health facilities in the region.
However, a few months ago, the context of its production came under attack when an anonymous Twitter account “Settler Scholarship”, claiming to represent Kashmiri scholars, charged the author with having failed to disclose her father’s professional involvement in counterinsurgency in Kashmir and thus having kept her informants and colleagues in the dark.
Given the prevailing conditions in Kashmir, the person or persons behind the anonymous handle said they felt too vulnerable to come out in the open and take a public stand.
The book’s Indian publisher, Yoda Press, scrapped plans to bring out a local edition.
Even while the letters attacking Varma have triggered a significant amount of noise, I found much of the debate disappointing for its brevity, shrillness and unanimity, particularly because it concerns a book-length academic work on which the author has invested more than a decade. Such brevity and what appeared to be a rush to trash the scholar and her work – noticeably without any focus on the work itself.
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Varma deploys the concepts .. against the vocabularies of psychiatric treatment, torture and formal facilities of care..The institutions involved measure their success and failure in their own terms and run their procedures with total disregard to what people are trying to say, claim and at times give up their lives for. Thus, animation of local words like Kamzori (35-42), Karant (115-116), or the locally appropriated English ones like Duty (196-199) help Varma texture the worldview of ordinary Kashmiri subjects..
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Why does Varma not reflect on herself and her background in her work that concerns mental health and trauma induced by counterinsurgency when her own self is indirectly but intimately – via her father – implicated in the project?
.. many scholars working on different subjects may also not be able to come up with specific reasons for why they chose to study X or Y – perhaps her father’s role as a counterinsurgent unconsciously animated her choice.
If we assume that to be the case, why would the scholar in Varma not make it a subject of her analysis? Several lines of research suggest themselves:
What does it mean to be the offspring of a counterinsurgent, an intelligence official or a police officer implicated in a dirty war against a civilian population and its political aspirations?
Posed differently, how do we understand the sons and (mostly) daughters of Indian officers involved in the most repressive, masculinised professions aligned with the Indian establishment, frequently venturing into empathetic intellectual and activist enterprises in Kashmir or similar places elsewhere? .. Gowhar Fazili