Resisting political forgetting through cultural productions: Viewing the Kashmir Question through the frames of collective memory – Sana Shah and Aishwarya Bhattacharyya

The present paper will attempt to understand the interfaces of history and memory, in Kashmir, by looking at the kind of challenges presented by memory, as a mode of engagement, response, and resistance to the statist reading of the Kashmir Question. The paper attempts to focus on the counter-memory practices as alternative means of expressions and protests, that the local population has lately devised through popular cultural productions like musicals and arts in circulation through latest media technologies. The paper in particular will look at the potential of cultural productions, not only as alternative means of protest and resistance but also as archives of resistance, building on the works of scholars like David Lowenthal and Patrick Hutton. The paper highlights the potential for simultaneous uses of memory-making as an artifice by both the oppressor groups and the oppressed groups to necessitate further research into identification and self-identification premised on memory-politics as conceptual categories towards determining the nature, scope and challenges of memory-making for different types and scales of nationalist projects.