Kashmiri Women Authors Are Defying Censorship and Prejudice

DELHI, India — After 25 books were banned by the Indian government last year, security forces have been raiding bookshops and authors’ homes in different parts of Kashmir for supposed secessionist content. Despite this climate of censorship, numerous women are writing and publishing books about the region and bringing much-needed new perspectives on the conflict there — and on the needs and hopes of Kashmiris. 

Kashmir, a Himalayan region of some 15 million people, has been shaped by conflict since 1947, when British rule ended and India and Pakistan were created. Kashmir tried to claim autonomy, only for the territory to then be disputed by both countries. Now, with an estimated 700,000 troops stationed in the Kashmir Valley (neither country has openly stated how many troops it has there), Kashmir is regarded as one of the most militarized regions in the world. 

In addition to books, media outlets are also facing severe, ongoing censorship, with journalists harassed and detained by police. Generations of Kashmiris have lived through periods of uncertainty and political volatility, with many continuing to demand self-determination. However, any significant protests are met by repression and curfews from authorities, with 120 civilians reportedly killed in protests in 2016 alone.

In this climate, women’s rights have not been a priority. Kashmiri women are typically seen by society as “pure victims” who are weak and vulnerable, Saiba Varma, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego and author of “The Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir,” tells Truthdig. 

However, over the past few years, the number of Kashmiri women being published has increased noticeably, and they are providing a more nuanced view of both conflict and everyday life, illustrating how political violence seeps into the most intimate parts of people’s lives, Varma says. 

“They are revealing how communities learn to live with a pervasive atmosphere of violence. … They create pockets of hope and humor, form relationships,” and tell stories that then help them “endure and survive upheaval,” she explains.

Writing under siege

Nevertheless, these women authors are writing in extremely difficult conditions. Long periods of curfews are stifling free movement and the local economy of a region known for its tourism, art and culture. There are also human rights violations, including extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions and a lack of freedom of association. The Free Speech Collective, a civil liberties group tracking free speech violations in India, found that 154 journalists faced arrest, detention or interrogation between 2010 and 2020. The Kashmir Valley’s largest independent media body, the Kashmir Press Club, was raided by police and shut down in 2022.

Kashmir has also faced frequent internet and communication shutdowns. The Software Freedom Law Center noted that the region has witnessed the highest number of shutdowns in India (446 since 2012). The longest communication ban was in August 2019, when Article 370 of the Indian Constitution was repealed and India gained more control over the previously autonomous region of Jammu and Kashmir. All mobile, internet and landline services were suspended, and Kashmir went 213 days without internet access and 550 days with partial or no connectivity for some or all of those services.

In August 2025, the government issued its book ban, including on political commentaries and historical accounts of Kashmir. The list included “Kashmir: The Case for Freedom” by Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhat, Angana P. Chatterji, Pankaj Mishra and Arundhati Roy; Roy’s “Azadi”; Anuradha Bhasin’s “A Dismantled State”; constitutional expert A.G. Noorani’s “The Kashmir Dispute”; and Australian political scientist Christopher Snedden’s “Independent Kashmir.” 

The government condemned the books for propagating “false narratives” and “secessionism,” and impacting the “psyche of youth by promoting a culture of grievance, victimhood and terrorist heroism.” Following the ban, police raided bookshops, inspected roadside vendors and confiscated the prohibited titles across Srinagar and other locations in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir.

Despite these attacks, literature remains one of the few spaces where culture, demands for autonomy, memory, dissent and lived experiences are articulated in Kashmir. For decades, the region’s literary scene has been dominated by male authors such as Basharat Peer, Mirza Waheed, Shahnaz Bashir and Feroz Rather, whose works offered powerful insights into Kashmir’s political situation. Texts like “Curfewed Night,” “The Collaborator,” “The Half Mother” and “The Night of Broken Glass” became key references, alongside influential academic works such as Ather Zia’s “Resisting Disappearance,” Hafsa Kanjwal’s “Colonizing Kashmir” and Essar Batool’s “Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora.”

But as women’s voices have gained ground recently, other aspects of the conflict and of Kashmir are coming to light, including intimate accounts of love, grief and girlhood. Some of these writers trace this shift to Farah Bashir’s 2021 memoir “Rumours of Spring,” which bravely recounts her childhood in Srinagar during the 1990s  — a time of intense militarization — and shows how school, friendships, family life and daily routines were reshaped by curfews, violence and fear. She exposed how many Kashmiri women were subjected to sexual violence by the Indian army or faced other types of traumatic vulnerability.

Arshi Javaid’s book is one of the recently published works to join this growing literary phenomenon. A Kashmir-born academic and writer, Javaid moved to Berlin to pursue her doctoral degree, and rather than distancing her from her homeland, that move only sharpened her connection with it. The cold German weather and long hours in her kitchen cooking turnips and nadur (lotus stem) kept taking her back to her home, Srinagar, in the Kashmir Valley, she tells Truthdig. By the time she walked into a Berlin bookshop known for amplifying voices from overlooked regions, the essays she had been quietly writing no longer felt like fragments, but like a book waiting to take shape.

“Yaadgah: Memories of Srinagar” was published last year. It is an anthology of essays by Javaid and others that trace family life and old-city neighborhoods to evoke a Srinagar marked by care, loss and longing. 

“It is important for women to intervene into the literary landscape” long dominated by conflict-driven narratives, Javaid says.

Under militarization and censorship, literature becomes a way of preserving those aspects of life that are slowly slipping away, Javaid says, “before they vanish completely.” “By talking about our memories, articulating them, we can carry them forward to the next generation,” she says.

The city through a woman’s eyes

The people of Kashmir have an “inherent knack for storytelling,” says Javaid, adding that it often begins in childhood when grandmothers narrate folklore to them. In her book, she describes bittersweet memories of the multicultural past of Srinagar when Muslim and Hindus coexisted. This was before the exodus of Kashmiri Hindus in the late ’90s when Pakistan-backed militants demanded self-determination and the Indian state increased its military presence to suppress any insurgency. 

Javaid says her book is a “testimony” to the women she grew up around and encountered at different stages of her life. “Women’s voices across regions, classes and caste locations are crucial and must be encouraged,” she says.

However, when Kashmiri women write, in addition to potentially facing surveillance, legal repercussions and censorship, they also deal with social scrutiny because of their gender. They are often dismissed by the general public as “too masculine” when they address topics like geopolitics and history that are seen as the domain of men, or as being incapable of writing about subjects like cities and political life well, explains Sadaf Wani, another young Kashmiri author whose book came out in 2025. 

Hence, women authors can cause discomfort that “unsettles people,” she says, “and I find that slightly exciting.”

Writing under surveillance directly shaped Wani’s methods and content as she worked on her debut book, “City as Memory: A Short Biography of Srinagar.” “Growing up in Kashmir feels like being in a post-truth society. You navigate a lot of information and disinformation as you try to figure out who you are, and why things are the way they are,” she says.

She has been attentive to the ways narratives about Kashmir are policed, she tells Truthdig, especially when they are written by women. “Most criticism names only women writers and excludes male writers completely,” she says, referring to public scorn, particularly on social media, and pointing to how “people seem to have a specific problem with women writing about Kashmir.”

In her writing, Wani links Srinagar’s architecture with lived experience. The city in her book is shaped by people’s recollections of how it once looked, felt and functioned. 

“I used Srinagar as a prompt to trigger people’s memories of the city and to speak about what they had been through. It was a heavy and complex task to engage with the suffering and discontent of different groups and present them in a way that does not pit communities against each other, but instead highlights the shared pain and complexity of being Kashmiri in the present,” she says, adding, “For me, writing has enabled this inward-facing exercise for our community, especially in the absence of formal spaces or processes to address our historical trauma.”

And by addressing trauma and personal experiences, the emergence of female writers in Kashmir over the past few years has led to a “crucial shift” in the literary landscape, Dharini Bhasker, associate publisher at HarperCollins, tells Truthdig. 

Women in Kashmir have a different perspective, “shaped by awareness of the inner worlds of other women and children” that enables them to bring out “stories that are often marginalized,” Bhasker says. Their “narratives are not just ordinary domestic stories.… The smaller stories hold larger stories within them. They speak of a land, they speak of a nation,” she says.

“When we speak of conflict, when we speak of fear, when we speak of unknowing, these are words that impact women in ways that they may not impact men. And it’s only a woman who can bring that to life in a voice that is authentic and real,” she explains.

Loving amid violence

Wani, the author of “City of Memories” says love is largely absent in Kashmiri writing, but it’s a subject that demands attention, “We know people in Kashmir fall in love, we know people date, but there is hardly any literature on it,” she says. Writing about love in Kashmir as a woman becomes disruptive because it challenges older narrative structures that placed women as supporting characters whose role was to strengthen men, she argues.

“Now, the woman is the main story, and whether a man appears or not does not matter.” For many women readers, she adds, this shift was long overdue. “Women are bored of reading about women with no agency because that does not reflect the women we know.”

Mehak Jamal, a filmmaker from Kashmir, felt that the subject of love had been sidelined, especially in comparison to the documentation of the conflict. In a conservative society where romance is often spoken about in hushed tones, Jamal realized that there were stories unfolding, shaped by the quiet resilience of those who held on through uncertainty. 

In her debut narrative nonfiction book, “Lōal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land,” Jamal decided to describe those emotional lives. For her, love (“lōal” in Kashmiri) was never incidental. 

“Kashmir is always presented in a dichotomy, but there are people who want somebody to explore the middle ground of their day-to-day lives, their dreams, their desires, which is not spoken about enough,” she says, referring to how Kashmir is often portrayed as black and white; security versus terrorism or India versus Pakistan.

What often gets forgotten in the larger narrative of Kashmir’s history and politics is the “ordinary love story and how it survives in times of conflict. It’s another angle,” says Bhasker, who was also the editor for Jamal’s book.

It is understandable that women often focus on intimacy, relationships, daily life and topics like a girl’s first crush, Varma, the author and assistant professor says, since “those were the spaces they have inhabited most during curfews and long periods at home with family.” Authorities in Kashmir often respond to protests, unrest and even cultural events like religious processions by imposing curfews.

For instance, in one chapter of “Rumours of Spring,” Bashir reflects on a fleeting adolescent love, writing: “The joy of forbidden letters exchanged with an older boy — they stop not because they were found out, but because the post office is torched.” In a single line, she captures how conflict abruptly intrudes upon, and ultimately extinguishes, a young love still in the making.

Varma explains that a focus on relationships is shaped by lived experiences, “When you’re locked up in curfew and you’re at home with your family … women were often forced to spend long periods at home, whereas men could go out.” The violent environment has meant that even during breaks in curfews, for their safety, women avoid going out after dark.

Writing is a form of everyday resistance to conflict, as it “reclaims a perspective” and allows writers to “mark their presence in the world” in creative ways, even when violence restricts normal life, Varma says. 

Writers’ primary duty is “the truth … rendering that as beautifully, as poetically, as powerfully as you can,” while publishers should be “open to new voices … willing to take a risk” to allow diverse narratives to flourish. Failing to support young, risk-taking writers impoverishes public discourse, she says, “If people feel silenced … we’re all just living in a much more impoverished world.”

By chronicling these intimate narratives, Jamal says she reframed love not as an escape from Kashmir’s realities, but as a way to demonstrate hope and agency. In books or articles about Kashmir, people’s lives are often reduced to violence, loss and political struggle. By writing about love, intimacy, desire and tenderness, Jamal says she is bearing witness to what still exists despite the conflict. Love becomes proof that Kashmiri people are not only victims of violence, but thinking, feeling individuals with inner lives.

During the interviews that Jamal conducted for her book, many participants told her they had never articulated this part of their lives before. The act of remembering itself became political. “Memory is fickle, so if you don’t document it, it is going to go away,” Jamal says.