Tag Archive for: Women and peace.

‘Her-story’ and not ‘His-story’ is what I have portrayed in this paper.

We have an enormous amount of work done on the feminist perspective of conflict; from essentialist to post modern feminism, we have a plethora of literature dealing with the entire spectrum of the feminist thought, but here, I did not go into those theoretical nuances, rather, I put forward in the simplest form, how Kashmiri woman look at the conflict in their backyard. 1989 was a watershed in the recent history of Kashmir, when people took to streets and youth to arms, against the state, resulting in a violent conflict which affected all the shades of her people.  Generally, the entire narrative is seen from a male eye, and, even if women are included, they are simply used as a tool and a weapon in the larger male narrative. Her sufferings, her struggle and her misery are not hers; rather, they belong to the collective honor of an entire community, fed into an already existing patriarchal outlook of the world. Here in, I have made an attempt to see the conflict from a feminine prism, from the eyes of a woman, not as a miserable cog in a patriarchal wheel of honor, rather, an individual who is complete in herself. In this project I have used both feminist literature as well as the literature available on Kashmir and Kashmiri women. Besides, I have conducted interviews with many women from Kashmir, who have seen the rise of militancy and how it affected their lives.