Dr Gowhar Fazili, Assistant Professor, Sociology and Social Anthropology, SIAS presented a paper at the 8th International Conference on Public History – The Public History of Difficult Pasts at Lisbon, Portugal, held from 7-11 September 2026.
The paper was titled ‘Everyday Ethics in a Fractured Public: Memory, Responsibility, and Return in Kashmiri Pandit–Muslim Relations’.
Abstract
This paper explores how everyday forms of ethical responsibility emerge when members of estranged political communities attempt to reinhabit shared spaces marked by violence, displacement, and historical grievance. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork with Kashmiri Pandits who have returned to the Valley—or who maintain active ties to it despite displacement—this study examines the narrative, affective, and imaginative strategies through which individuals reconstruct social worlds fractured by the conflict of the 1990s.
The analysis centres on extended life-narratives of four Pandit interlocutors: a man whose dream-encounter with the seventeenth-century Kashmiri poet-saintess, Roop Bhawani precipitated his return to a shrine he found literally “suffocated” by military occupation; an auto-rickshaw driver and labour organiser whose political and emotional life remains deeply entangled with Muslim peers despite his current residence in a migrant colony; a Delhi-based Pandit who has re-established a second home in Kashmir while carrying forward memories of his grandfather, a leftist organiser revered across communal lines; and a Pandit activist who never left Kashmir and maintains an interrogative, often critical relationship with the political life of the region. Together, these stories reveal the possibility of alternative grammars of repair, re-habitation or at the least relation.
These narratives illuminate an everyday ethics of care that cannot be reduced to rational deliberation or formal reconciliation frameworks. Instead, they trace how responsibility is enacted through dreams, neighbourly attachments, shared labour, intergenerational memory, and the fragile renewal of trust and at times as “pure acts of madness”. I read these accounts in conversation with Hannah Arendt’s reflections on personal and political responsibility, Michael Rothberg’s concepts of multidirectional memory and the implicated subject, and Jacques Derrida’s writings on the aporia of forgiveness. My effort is not to apply these theories instrumentally, but to show how vernacular practices of return and coexistence complicate and enrich philosophical understandings of these ideas through acts of everyday, ordinary ethics (Veena Das, Michael Lambek) in divided societies.
By foregrounding the micro-histories through which individuals narrate, inhabit, and regenerate fractured public worlds, this paper argues for a public history attentive to affect, vulnerability, and the subtle labour of rebuilding social life in Kashmir’s contested present.
