Feroz Rather: Every society inherits a language. Inherent within the language, in the Foucauldian sense, is a structure and inherent within that structure is a structure of meaning. When someone who is (perceived to be) an outsider comes home and begins the systematic process of controlling and exploiting us, we resist. With resistance develops an iconography, a set of symbols and songs drawn from our historical memory. Resistance evolves a language that comes from the text central to the culture of the oppressed. That text and the body of its diverse interpretations—including the philosophical, or so to say heretical ones developed by the mystics in the case of Kashmir, is the Qur’an.
We are under a fierce physical and psychological siege. And while the outsider collides with us, in the torturous, endangered process of meaning-making, it is to this text that we resort ever so forcefully, it is from here we derive our songs and slogans and ideals of justice. And it is this unique intensity that distills our idea of who we are and who, under occupation, we must be and distinguishes us not only from India but also from Pakistan. Our language is Koshur and not Urdu nor Hindustani nor Mandarin.
One remarkable character of Kashmir’s struggle for freedom is that, despite an overarching religious episteme—and sociologically speaking that is cultural in nature—it is tolerant in character. In one of his videos, even Burhan quite clearly said that he wouldn’t harm the Hindu pilgrims who come to visit Amarnath from different parts of India to Kashmir during the summer. He never opposed the return of Kashmiri Pandits, only their ghettoization in the separate colonies which the state is in the process of constructing, positing us against our own society. More here.