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

Abstract

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.

Trauma in the Kashmir Valley and the mediating effect of stressors of daily life on symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety

“…A pre-occupation with injustice was also demonstrated by Silove et al [51] to have a negative association with poor mental health outcomes. While we did not look at this relationship specifically in this study, a protracted history of human rights violations, lack of prosecution of perpetrators, a generalized community feeling of ‘occupation’ and impunity has been widely documented in the context of the Kashmir Valley both in the media and the literature [54–58]. The potential impact of preoccupation with injustice on mental health outcomes in the Kashmir Valley should not be underestimated and is worthy of further exploration.…”

“We Are All Alive . . . But Dead”: Cultural Meanings of War Trauma in the Tamil Diaspora and Implications for Service Delivery

“…Aside from the violence and loss, collective trauma is also a crisis of meaning (Hirschberger, 2018). The unbearable brutality of war and the resulting silencing and collective numbness of communities, such as among the Kashmiri people, is noted by Hanif and Ullah (2018).…”

“…This is obviously unfortunate, as the field would benefit from a broader approach, informed by knowledge derived from lived experiences of war which is naturally lacking in the contemporary Western context. As evidenced in other cases such as in Kashmiri people (Hanif & Ullah, 2018), internally displaced persons from Lebanon (Yamut & Chaaya, 2011), and Rwandans who lived through the genocide (Jansen et al, 2000), populations affected by armed conflict and war are affected as an entire society and perceive its impact both at an individual and collective level. A medical view on trauma, informed by PTSD, is narrow in its perspective, and is limited in its ability to incorporate the broader and more collective dimensions of lived experiences of war.…”

Inheritance and Dissemination of Cultural Collective Memory: An Analysis of a Traditional Festival

“…Marcuse summarized the various terms derived from collective memory as including public memory, social memory, cultural memory, historical memory, national memory, official memory, print memory, and local memory, and so on (Marcuse, 1992). Scholars, including sociologists, philosophers, and historians, tend to analyze collective memory broadly as belonging to a country, nation, or culture, but it is worth noting that some scholars combine collective memory with tourism and festival activities (Hanif & Ullah, 2018).…”