Kashmiris Research Articles

Results of a Population-Based Survey to Estimate the Seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 Specific IgG Antibodies in Kashmir, India, Seven Months after the Appearance of the First COVID-19 Case

Background: Seroprevalence surveys are useful in estimating past infections and provide an appraisal of the cumulative number of infections in a population. We designed a population-based survey in Kashmir to estimate the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 specific IgG antibodies in the general population aged 18 years and above. Methods: The survey was conducted among 110 villages and urban wards across ten districts in Kashmir from 17 Oct 2020 to 04 Nov 2020. Serum samples were tested for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 specific IgG antibodies using the Abbott SARS-CoV-2 IgG assay. Seroprevalence estimates were adjusted for the sampling design and assay characteristics. Findings: Out of 6397 eligible individuals enumerated, 6315 (98.7%) agreed to participate. The final analysis was done on 6230 participants. Seroprevalence adjusted for the sampling design and assay characteristics was 36.7% (95% CI 34.3%-39.4%). Seroprevalence was higher among the older population. Only one-half of symptomatic individuals reported having been tested. One out of every ten seropositive individuals reported a history of COVID-19 like symptoms. We estimated an infection fatality rate of 342 deaths per million infections. Interpretation: During the first seven months of the COVID-19 epidemic in Kashmir valley, approximately 37% of individuals were infected. There is still a significant pool of susceptible people in Kashmir. The number of infections will continue to rise unless infection prevention measures are practiced by the population. Funding: National Health Mission Jammu & Kashmir Declaration of Interests: We declare no competing interests, financial or otherwise. Ethics Approval Statement: The study was approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee of Government Medical College Srinagar.

Impact of local arts; Bhand Pather and ladishah, on the people of Kashmir

Impact of local arts; Bhand Pather and ladishah, on the people of Kashmir

Indigenous knowledge on the uses, management, drying and marketing of Celosia cristata L.- A culturally significant flower of the Kashmir Valley, India

Cockscomb flower (Celosia cristata), commonly known as ‘Marwal’, is an important part of Kashmiri culture. However, it has received little attention from researchers. In the present study, an effort has been made to document the indigenous knowledge of the native Kashmiri population about its ethnobotanical uses and bring this valuable plant into focus. The indigenous knowledge about C. cristatan was gathered by adopting Participatory Rural Appraisal technique. It involved interviews, and discussions with a total of 55 respondents. All the documented data was quantitatively analyzed using several ethnobotanical indices including Use Value (UV), Fidelity Level (FL), Informant Consensus Factor (FIC) and Index of Cultural Significance (ICS). The results revealed that the flower plays a crucial role in folklore medicine, local cuisine, and beautification of surroundings, and most importantly as a food colorant, which can serve as an alternative to the harmful synthetic color additives used in food industries. This innovative practice developed by the Kashmiri people need to be well protected. In addition, extensive studies are required to investigate, identify and characterize the biologically active compounds responsible for the pharmacological effects of C. cristata.

Not Paradise but Prison

Abstract In the fall of 2019, Pinjra Tod (Break the Cage), an autonomous collective of women students working to ensure secure, affordable, and non-discriminatory accommodation for women students throughout Delhi, joined forces with other student organizations to coordinate a joint protest and public meeting against the continuing siege of Kashmir. The action took place at the Arts Faculty of Delhi University. In this pamphlet, Pinjra Tod interrogates Narendra Modi's corporate plans for a “paradise” in Kashmir under the capitalist guise of “freedom,” and its intersection with far-right racialized nationalism. Further, they report on the horrific stories emerging from Kashmir: stories of the detention and torture of minors and young men, arbitrary midnight raids, and constant threats and danger of sexual violence against women by the armed forces. They articulate the present state of emergency as an intensification of the long and brutal history of oppression by the Indian state impacting the lives and democratic aspirations of the people of Kashmir. Raising their voices against the continuing lockdown and in support of and solidarity with the people of Kashmir, Pinjra Tod presents a set of demands which include that Articles 370 and 35A of India's constitution be reinstated; that the popular participation of Kashmiri people in any further policy decision be ensured; that all political leaders, social activists, youth, and children be released; and that special provisions be made for all Kashmiri students across all universities whose studies were disrupted.

Carpet Weaving Occupation in Kashmir: An Analysis of Socio-economic Conditions of Carpet Weavers of Pulwama District

The carpet industry of Kashmir occupies an important place in handicrafts. The carpet Industry plays a significant role in the economic development of the rural areas. Carpet weaving in Kashmir is largely practiced in the informal sector. It contributes significantly by providing employment opportunities to the rural people in Kashmir. The present paper attempts to make an in depth study of socio-economic conditions, problems and challenges of carpet weavers in Pulwama district of Jammu and Kashmir. The study is based on both, primary and secondary data sources. The primary data is gathered through interview schedule. The study revealed that the situation of carpet weavers is not satisfactory due to low education level, health issues, low wages, lack of government support and exploitation by the middleman/master weaver.

Therapeutic value of wild vegetables of Kashmir valley - Review

Wild vegetables have been the mainstay of human diets since times immemorial. There is an increasing consensus that wild foods could significantly contribute to alleviate hunger and cure diseases. Wild vegetables are receiving renewed attention as their potential human health benefits are being recognized. These are the cheapest and most readily available source of food that can contribute significantly to human nutrition and health as these are regarded as easily obtainable and palatable. Earlier people relied solely on wild plants as these were most abundant or readily available. With the advancement in agriculture, wild vegetables are underutilized, the present review documents therapeutic promise of 20 wild vegetables, which have remained an important part of the diet of Kashmiri people in India and are sources of potential therapeutic compounds, useful both for product development and awareness raising. These wild vegetables are generally good source of anti-oxidants, anti-carcinogenic, anti–microbial, hepato-protective, anti-diabetic, immuno-enhancing etc. Their promotion and integration into the human diets could assist in their protracted use and consequent health benefits. If these plant species continue to be neglected and underappreciated, knowledge about them may soon be lost in time and never be recovered. It is believed that there will be more dieticians rather than physicians in coming years as many diseases can be prevented and better health can be maintained by taking the right kind of food and nutrition which contains certain plants with specific functional attributes.

Kashmir: International Community Turning a Blind Eye to a Historical Dispute

International Community has been oblivious to the suffering of the Kashmiri people. This disappointing reaction has been ignoring the fact that the dispute is one of the first that came before the United Nations Security Council and has attracted 11 UNSC resolutions. This paper further explores the historical nuances surrounding this historical dispute, the insertion and later abrogation of Article 370. It also looks at a possible step that Pakistan can undertake if the suffering of Kashmiris fails to subside.

Stress and coping in relation to gender and domicile among college students in Kashmir

Due to the long-standing conflict, people in Kashmir, particularly college students, are subjected to constant stress. This has deleterious effects on their wellbeing and education. Unlike in safe situations, students living among conflict situations may have different experiences of stress and the ways of dealing with it. As per transactional theory of stress and coping, the perception and reaction to the stressors may vary considerably among people. This variance may be attributed to some factors such as gender and domicile. Research regarding the role of gender and domicile on stress and coping is inconsistent and scarce. Therefore, the purpose of the current study was to examine the impact of gender and domicile on stress and coping among a sample of 80 college students in Kashmir. A 2*2 factorial design was employed for analysis. Results suggest that male participants display higher stress levels than female participants, if they belong to a rural domicile. Further, it suggests that all rural and female participants, in general, employ distancing coping strategy more frequently than their counterparts. In addition, female participants employ accepting responsibility coping strategy more frequently than male participants, if they belong to a rural domicile. Male participants, on the other hand, were found to employ positive reappraisal coping strategy more frequently than females; however, this was the case when their domicile was urban. Lastly, urban male participants were found to employ accepting responsibility and positive reappraisal coping strategy more rigorously than rural males.

The city and the beloved witness: Mapping cityscapes of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry

The reputation of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, as a poet of exile is well established. Much of his poetry deals with themes of loss, lamentation, and longing where he speaks in a powerful voice about the plight of people of Kashmir. Shahid’s personal memories are not only of Kashmir but also of Delhi, the city where he was born, studied, taught, and published his first collection of poems. In his poems about Delhi he revisits both old Delhi and New Delhi: he roams around the city, listens to Qawwali at Saint Nizamuddin’s mausoleum, meets Muslim butchers, remembers his parents, remembers Shahjahan, and recites Bahadur Shah Zafar’s poem. This article investigates the representations and recollections of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s poems and explores the city’s centrality in understanding socio-cultural history, the importance of particular individuals, and spatial specificity. It studies how the poet explores the city in relation to its languages, histories (the Rebellion of 1857, Partition, post-Partition), and cultures (Mughal and modern). I further investigate how Ali’s literary cartography of Delhi is influenced both by indigenous genres such as Shehr Ashob and the modern English poetic tradition, and how certain Indo-Islamic tropes become central to the poet’s literary memorialization of India’s capital city.

Of Braids, Blades and the Djinns of Winters Past

The essay is second in a series of ethnographic writings documenting events and practices that make the Kashmiri people’s resistance today. The protracted, violent political conflict in the region ...

Why Should the People of Kashmir Have a Legitimate Right to Self-determination?

The right of Self-determination started getting recognition as a legal right from the second half of the nineteenth century. This right has transformed the International Law, yet left few International lawyers and states with uncertainty. The Right of Self-Determination allow people to live freely with their political, social and economic virtues. As the right still subsists, however, the vagueness sometimes leads towards the ambiguity. Although the Right of Self-Determination is getting popular with the transformation of the International Community, it is not practiced freely by some indigenous nations. The objective of this assignment is to analyse the importance of the right of peoples’ to Self-Determination, mainly discussing the Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir, as well as their legitimacy in claiming the right of secession. Moreover, it will also analyse those specific aspects of Human Rights Law and its violation under the domination of Indian armed forces which come under the justification of impunity.

Blinding Kashmiris

Since July 2016, Indian-administered Kashmir has again raged with mass protests favouring self-determination and freedom from India. In the protests more than ninety-eight people have been killed, over eleven thousand wounded, and more than eight hundred Kashmiris injured in the eyes or blinded by Indian troops using force against protestors and non-protestors alike. Since 1947, when the region was temporarily bifurcated between India and Pakistan, Indian-administered Kashmir has clamoured for a plebiscite, which the United Nations mandated so that the Kashmiri people could choose their own fate. The original options in the plebiscite were mergers with either of the two countries, but Kashmiris have increasingly demanded that a third option for an independent Kashmiri nation-state be added. While the majority of the Kashmiris seek independence, a small faction favours merger with Pakistan. Despite continuing demands for an independent nationhood – one that preceded the creation of India and Pakistan – Kashmir continues to be perceived simplistically as a bilateral dispute between the two nation-states. Using the analytic of “right to maim,” this essay illustrates how the Indian state “blinds” Kashmiri subjects by perfecting a technology of punishment that produces bodies incapable of physical resistance and as a representational threat to the rest of society. By making maiming as a punishment central, this essay will examine India's control of the Kashmir valley as a de facto military occupation.

Kashmiri Folk Literature can Change Behavioural Patterns of Kashmiri People

Kashmiri Folk Literature can Change Behavioural Patterns of Kashmiri People

War Trauma, Collective Memory, and Cultural Productions in Conflict Zones: Kashmir in Focus

Euro-American exclusivity has mostly been responsible for eclipsing the universalizing appeal of trauma studies. In a bid to cater for trauma accounts of the Global South, the present study attempts to look into the trauma of people living in Kashmir, a conflict zone in the middle of the third-world Asian countries. Kashmir is one of the disputed regions and a center point of conflict between India and Pakistan since the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. The political turbulence as well as the resulting militarization has rendered the entire Kashmiri community listless and prone to traumatic experiences. Despite the serious nature of the traumatic experiences of the people living in Kashmir, and as depicted in the literature produced therein, little scholarly attention has been given to it to voice out these accounts, which are necessary for claiming the truthful depiction of the Kashmiris. This article uses Jeffery C. Alexander et al.’s Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity and Kai. T. Erikson’s Collective Trauma as the theoretical framework to analyze the selected Kashmiri Anglophone literary text titled The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed. The study finds that the traumatic memories of Kashmiri people, as a community, are no different from the likewise traumatized people of the Global North. Here, the Kashmiri narrative takes the responsibility of presenting the reality of life. The investigation concludes that fictional narratives, through memory of the past, bring a compelling tale of eternal suffering, establishing the fact that it is not the individual that must bear the moral responsibility; rather, it should be the collective.

The New Wave of Mobilisation in Kashmir: Religious or Political?

The intractability of the Kashmir conundrum continues despite the success of counter-insurgency operations carried out by the Indian state which can be seen in militancy levels climbing down since the early 2000s. While in part, this is because India and Pakistan are unable to break new ground on Kashmir, a key factor is that alienation still runs deep among Kashmiri people despite duly elected governments being in place. It does not help when their anxieties are further stoked by religio-political mobilisation, such as the Amarnath land agitation in Jammu in 2008, when Hindutva forces enforced a blockade of essential supplies to the Kashmir Valley. A spate of protests have since wracked Kashmir with stone-pelters confronting security persons who use disproportionate violence to quell them. Though each street protest, whether in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013 or 2016, had a different trigger, the underlying restlessness and alienation are constants which pose a very real danger of breeding anarchy. This article seeks to explore whether this new wave of mobilisation in Kashmir is religious or political or both in nature, its causal factors and how it is different from the armed insurgency that erupted in 1989. It contends that the state must address and fix such alienation urgently to prevent things going further downhill in the Valley.

Kashmir at Crossroad: The Partition’s Unfinished Agenda

Independent dominions in shape of Pakistan and India emerged as result of partition on 14 August and 15 August 1947 respectively while the fate of over 500 princely states awaited decision. Due to overwhelming majority of Muslims, Jammu and Kashmir should have acceded to Pakistan. The hardness in Indian stance resulted in the two wars i.e. of 1965 and 1971 besides two limited wars of 1947-48 and 1999Kargil war. South Asia remained on the brink of war in 2002 standoff and the current escalations in Azad Kashmir. Contrarily, both Pakistan and India had agreed upon the United Nations resolutions, including, "the accession of the state of Jammu and Kashmir will be decided through free and impartial plebiscite under the auspices of United Nations". The Indian strategy was to gain time on the pretext that "Indians are superior to Pakistanis in military and industrial power therefore Pakistan would accept a settlement imposed by the Indians". Additional India pleaded that Pakistan had joined defence Pacts with west, so India moved away from the process of Plebiscite. Now, India wants to discuss only terrorism brushing aside the core issue of Kashmir. Resultantly, the people of Kashmir are at the mercy of despotic and tyrant Indian Forces and they are suffering the most. How long the innocent population of Kashmir will be looking to ask the world to come forward for an open hearted settlement of this long outstanding dispute? The situation may escalate into a nuclear flashpoint.

A Study of Psycho-Educational Variables in the Light Socio-Economic Status

In spite of strict religious prohibition of caste system, yet the social stratification features have deeply crept into some Muslim societies and Kashmiri society is no exception. The proper reason might be due to the fact that Kashmiri people have retained some Pre-Islamic features despite conversion. The Kashmiri society is considered to be composed of 1906 castes which are just like other societies categorised into upper, middle and lower castes. At the upper end are Syeds, Khans and Pathans and at the lower end are watal, teeli, Gurjar, lohar etc. In the light of social psychology, the caste in which an individual is born and reared has a significant effect on the personality of that individual (Linton, 1936). Personality traits are expressed in learning styles, which in turn are reflected in learning strategies which eventually produce a certain learning outcome (Heinstorm, 2000). For the present study a sample of 800 students was drawn from seven castes of Kashmir valley i.e. two from dominant upper caste (Syeds and Khan) and another five from under- privileged lower caste (Hajam, Kumar, Gurjar,Lohar and Teeli,) through cluster sampling technique.

Beyond Indigenisation: Hamlet, Haider, and the Pain of the Kashmiri People

ABSTRACT“Indigenised Shakespeare” offers one way to conceptualise the changes involved in localised reimaginings of Shakespeare’s drama, but it carries a complicated legacy. Indigeneity is not innocent of colonialism’s dubious hierarchies, however much it seems to privilege what came before. Indigeneity lodges contemporary cultural innovations within a timeframe that reaches deep into history, sealing them off from the chaotic temporality and political entanglements of a world that is simultaneously globalised and specifically located. This essay reflects on the value of this critical lexicon for the field of Global Shakespeare as it grapples with the tensions inherent in a model of cultural transmission and appropriation that risks perpetuating a set of assumptions about Shakespeare’s hegemony, even as it attempts to tell a new story, through a discussion of filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation of Hamlet. Haider explores the surprising resonances of Hamlet in a very particular time and place: India-administered Kashmir saw a period of intense conflict immediately following the promulgation of the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act of 1990. The world inhabited by Bhardwaj’s modern-day anti-heroic Kashmiri Hamlet, a world where people disappear without trace and the military police torture dissidents with impunity, is infinitely more complex than a term like “indigeneity” could encompass.

Increase in Depression among the People of Kashmir Due to Insurgency

The present research article has been written as it highlighted the influence of insurgence on the people of Kashmir. It has shown the depression among the people has increased in their life and affected their mental health. The routine life of Kashmiri people got affected by the various issues of conflict. These elements have changed the normal life of people into depressive life.

Constraints in Solving Kashmir Problem

The Kashmir Issue between India and Pakistan is there since its accession to India on 26th Oct. 1947 after all the princely-states were said to join either India, Pakistan or to remain independent. After tribals from Pakistan attacked Kashmir, the ruler of Kashmir went to Indian Prime Minister J. L. Nehru and signed Instrument of Accession and Kashmir becomes part of India under certain conditions like the most important one was when the condition will be stabilized there, the people of Kashmir through a referendum will decide whether to remain with India or stay independent. The focus of this paper is to look into different factors which make Kashmir issue a complicated one. This has now become the most difficult thing to solve such an issue because of some constraints which are there and which are hindering the dispute to get solved.