Colonialism Otherwise: Reading Uzma Falak’s Kashmir

This chapter introduces the concept of “colonialism otherwise” to describe how the post-colony perpetuates colonial violence against marginalized peoples. Such violence is often overlooked in postcolonial theorizing that tends to understand coloniality as a binary relation between the West and the rest. This chapter centers on the work of the Kashmiri poet, filmmaker, and essayist, Uzma Falak, to develop a decolonial feminist methodology responding to her demands to bear witness to Kashmiri people’s abjection that is perpetuated by the Indian and Pakistani states. Using dual memorialization to foreground India’s and Pakistan’s colonial claims over Kashmir, the chapter outlines the erasures, silences, and re-narrations of living memories that serve to position Kashmiris as unknowing. The everyday colonialism of memory and lived experience through state-sanctioned narrative thus requires accounting for innate privileges and oppressions of postcolonial state before articulating solidarity with Kashmir. The otherwise postcolonial reading of MOS proposed in the chapter subverts the binary essentialism of coloniality on the one hand and highlights the role of memories as vehicles for colonial violence on the other.