The first casualty of any political conflict is its history. The more complex a political conflict is, the more complex is the claim to history by different agents and actors engaged in the conflict. The protracted conflict in the region of Jammu and Kashmir is no exception to this. The claims to its history have always been multiple, and equally complex. Here, the very Kashmiri body presents itself as a memory of the struggle against attempts at erasure of its identity- which has found its ways in local cultural productions. However, instead of looking at different forms of cultural production, the present paper will attempt to locate the Kashmiri body as a source and repository of embodied memory of response and resistance. Through the body-mediated memories, further, the paper will attempt to make sense of the political conflict in Kashmir, which subjects this body to control and domination in private and public spaces. At the same time, the paper argues that there is a subversive potential in these body-memories of conflict. The Kashmiri body, thus scared, scarred, injured, tensed, yet still living and surviving acts as a vehicle of counter-history through which, they refuse to be silenced. The very connotation a Kashmiri body invokes, paints that memory-scape wherein all the memory-communities converge, for be it a Kashmiri Muslim, Kashmiri Pandit or a Kashmiri Sikh, it is the Kashmiri body that has suffered collectively. The paper finally will accentuate how the Kashmiri body thus is that symbol of resistance through which collective memory becomes activated, as a response against the furtherance of a statist reading of history.  

This paper interrogates what it means to "embody" history. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in a racially diverse South African high school, I document how teachers employed simulations and role-playing exercises to teach about apartheid. Teachers argued that these would help build historical empathy. However, not only did the simulations fail to capture the actual costs of being black-or the privileges of being white- during apartheid, they also reinforced the notion that racial stratification was separate and distinct from students' current situations. Through the simulations, apartheid was presented as a system that has no legacy. Connections were not drawn between the past system and the present context, which students might recognise as real and familiar. The simulations thus ironically served to delegitimise black students' claims about ongoing racism at school and in the broader society.

This intervention uses embodied walking methods to explore the mobilities of genocide, marching with others as a form of walking to remember, and stands against introspective methods of walking alone in the countryside. It turns attention to a death march out of Srebrenica fleeing genocide, reclaimed by survivors as a march of peace, arriving in Srebrenica a day before the annual mass funeral for victims who have been located in mass graves and pieced together so as they can finally be buried in a marked grave. I show a layering of war-time and post-war mobilities in the landscape of eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina: a journey of 'survivors', a journey of the bodies of 'victims', and a journey of 'mourners'.