I had never felt so relieved to hear the sound of a phone ringing than the day I finally connected a call to Manzoor after months of trying and receiving automated messages about the suspended phone services in Kashmir. Five months had passed since August 2019 when the Hindu-nationalist government in India abrogated Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status and opened the region for mainland Indians to settle and own land. In the Indian Parliament, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared, “A new era has begun . . . an era of progress and prosperity” (Ward 2019). In Kashmir, however, Indian forces had preemptively arrested thousands, shut down the phones and the internet, and forced Kashmiris to stay inside their homes. Indian bureaucrats, now empowered to rule over the region’s 13 million people directly, deployed federal agencies to silence Kashmiri activists and intellectuals. No news had arrived from Kashmir.

Manzoor’s wife, Nusrat, picked up the phone. She sounded downcast and fearful. The curfew had prevented the aging couple from receiving care for their chronic health conditions, though, she said, their neighbors had been sharing vegetables from the kitchen gardens. Both spoke in a code one learns living in Kashmir to avoid the state agents eavesdropping on private phone conversations.

“Yeti chu ti, yi oas [What is now, is what was here before],” Manzoor said. “Barabar watnaekh aes wapas Duggar Rajas manz [They have transported us back to the Dogra time],” Nusrat added.

I was surprised to hear the “Dogra Raj” invoked as an analogy for the present. In 1947, Kashmir emerged from a long century of feudal Dogra rule, which historian Mridu Rai (2004) has described as “Hindu rulers” ruling over Kashmir’s mostly “Muslim subjects.” Hindu nationalists in India idealized the Dogra state and even unsuccessfully fought to preserve it in 1947. They idealized it because the symbolic-political issues of Hindu nationalism in India, which mainly involved domination over Muslims, were consecrated into the Dogra state’s laws and political life.

“Were we even out of the Dogra Raj ever?” Manzoor said in the background. “Poz chu, chob te begaer gaye ne zanh bandh, [True, the beatings, the drudgery never stopped]”Nusrat replied.

The 2019 abrogation unilaterally proclaimed a new epoch untethered from Kashmir’s history and people’s historical consciousness. Modi had set the clock to zero. Not only the seventy-year-old struggle for self-determination in Kashmir, but also all the previous treaties, agreements, resolutions, laws, and accords India had signed with Kashmiri loyalist politicians were swept away so that Kashmir could be fully “integrated” into India. For Kashmiris, “integration” was merely a euphemism for territorial annexation and land expropriation. In keeping with the history of its coercive control, the Indian government sought no consent from Kashmiris. The dramatic lockdown of Kashmiri life was the spectacular background Modi’s government wanted to present the abrogation as a Hindu nationalist conquest.

The “new era” marked a crisis of time in the Kashmiri political subjectivity. A news report quoted a Kashmiri man as saying, “We have been pushed back into dark medieval times when kings invaded cities and held a siege until people kneeled before them.” As the years passed, I heard others relaying an uncanny feeling of displacement in time, similar to what Manzoor and Nusrat described. The events of 2019 also engendered a temporal disorder within Hindu nationalism. Through acts like the abrogation, Hindu nationalists simultaneously proclaimed to have inaugurated Amrit Kaal, a new 1000-year Hindu golden age, while atavistically seeking to return to an imagined golden era of a thousand years before, an era before Islam in South Asia.

Since 1990, the Indian military occupation radically shaped everyday life in Kashmir through control over public space and time. Still, space and time could be contested and reclaimed through resistance practices. In contrast, the post-2019 order involved elementary forms of land dispossession and denial of history, thus taking on settler colonial contours. Modi proclaimed that Kashmiris had no other way than to accept their present condition as the final reality, a fait accompli. He claimed the new era was one of “development,” and to achieve that, the Indian state asserted direct control over Kashmir’s land to auction it, extract from it, and build upon it, thus banishing the Kashmiri aspirations of sovereignty and people’s control over their land to an irrecoverable past. Days after the abrogation, Indian bureaucrats in Kashmir issued orders opening Kashmir’s public lands for Indian companies to set up factories and mine ecologically fragile riverbeds for sand. While the Indian government forced Kashmiris into silence, large earthmovers arrived to extract rock, sand, and dirt. Humming incessantly, they loaded it all on trucks to ferry it back to the Indian mainland.

The events in Kashmir unfolded at a time of a growing reckoning with the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism, especially its peculiar “chronopolitics,” to borrow the phrase from philosopher Charles W. Mills (2020, 298), that bequeaths upon the non-natives the emergent future while consigning the natives to a dying past. The Indian government’s actions were tantamount to removing Kashmiris from their own unfolding history and relegating them to a time other than that in which they live—an imperial act of allochronization, or an incision in the coevality in which people, both Indian and Kashmiri, exist.^[1] Indeed, even before August 2019, the Indian and the Kashmiri experiences of historical time had diverged. While middle-class Indians saw themselves as postcolonial subjects with the agency to revise the past and participate in the future-making, Kashmiris understood themselves as colonized subjects for whom Tehreek, the movement for national liberation, embodied their collective historical agency and was the harbinger of a future of Indigenous sovereignty.

Allochronization is part of settler-colonial realism, an enforced state of existence that seeks to denude the natives of any sense of historical agency. As it imposes its ontology on the land, the occupying state mystifies and obscures its own origins and the history before its arrival. Settler-colonial realism is analogous to Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism,” which he defined as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2009, 2).

In 2019, India sought to enunciate despair among Kashmiris, seeking to foreclose the possibility of politics and a Kashmiri future and insisting that Kashmiris must accept the condition of their disempowerment as an unalterable reality. As Kashmiris remained suspended in a space of fear and foreboding, forced to watch the impending destruction of their society, ecology, history, and future, Modi’s government wished to deflate emancipatory politics by demobilizing and demoralizing Kashmiris while giving the potential Hindu nationalist settlers a self-righteous sense of being actors in a new stage of history.

“Yiman kya chu karun yeti? Waen kya roodukh asi karnai? [What is their plan here? What haven’t they done to us yet?],” Nusrat had asked over the phone, indexing a generalized anxiety and uncertainty among Kashmiris. Predicting whether the emergent settler colonial project would eventually materialize was difficult. Still, the abrogation and its aftermath had laid the foundation for enacting its eliminative logic.

Notes

[1] I borrow the term from Johannes Fabian, who saw “allochronism” as an “existential, rhetoric, political” device that creates different temporalities to deny coevalness (1983, 32).