Saiba Varma’s book, Occupied Clinic: Militarism and Care in Kashmir (2020), documents implications of the ongoing militarisation and counterinsurgency in Kashmir through an intensive ethnography of mental health facilities in the region.
However, a few months ago, the context of its production came under attack when an anonymous Twitter account “Settler Scholarship”, claiming to represent Kashmiri scholars, charged the author with having failed to disclose her father’s professional involvement in counterinsurgency in Kashmir and thus having kept her informants and colleagues in the dark.
Saiba Varma, The Occupied Clinic
Militarism and Care in Kashmir. Duke University Press, 2020.
Given the prevailing conditions in Kashmir, the person or persons behind the anonymous handle said they felt too vulnerable to come out in the open and take a public stand. But they accused Varma of having violated academic ethics concerning informed consent, of having compromised trust and potentially endangering the lives of the people involved.
This was followed by a bunch of short letters of condemnation variously signed by expatriate Kashmiri and non-Kashmiri scholars working on Kashmir, Indian scholars and the wider academic community concerned about academic ethics, and a few popular articles. The letters – to which Varma has also responded in a lengthy statement to The Wire – accused her of having failed to make a “full disclosure” to her informants during her fieldwork, and subsequently to her colleagues and collaborators. Some called for the publishers and the institutions she is affiliated with to disassociate themselves from her work for this reason. The book’s Indian publisher, Yoda Press, scrapped plans to bring out a local edition. As a consequence, her work can no longer be examined without a serious reflection on the controversy it has engendered. What follows are my views on what is at stake in the debate.
Besides the high voltage, and yet loosely conducted, debate on social media and short petitions that flew around rapidly, only a few considered pieces have appeared on the subject. These include an open letter by Varma addressed to Kashmiri scholars and her colleagues. What pushes me to write on the subject is my dissatisfaction with the manner in which the debate has proceeded, conflating a number of issues that emanate from the controversy.
But for the controversy that unfolded around it, Varma’s monograph would perhaps have passed off as yet another book length work on the impact of ongoing militarisation and political repression in Kashmir, ignored by the wider public and mostly confined to debates in specialist circles. Sometimes a non-salutary focus on a publication is helpful, if not to the author personally but for the issues that the work seeks to bring attention to. Varma’s book, the context of its production and the debate that it has generated each call for a close, critical examination.
Having encountered a few monumental ethnographies like Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman’s Empire of Trauma (2009), and a few half-hearted efforts that sought to replicate them in Kashmir during my student and activist days, I have been a bit averse to the repetitive critiques of psycho-social interventions in political conflicts like Kashmir that do not add to what we already know. What compelled me to read Varma’s book was an invitation by a college to be a discussant on a panel that would engage with its contents. The controversy around the book broke out even as the deadline for the discussion was approaching. The proposed discussion soon became a casualty of the controversy. Therefore, I also paid attention to the tone and tenor of the charges that were being made against the author and the statements she made in her defence. but I felt that it was all the more important to engage with a book and an author who was being so vociferously condemned.
Like some of the other academic controversies that have raged in the past, I feel that this one is potentially productive in the sense that it forces us to think more seriously about the function of scholarship and scholarly writing in politically fraught contexts like Kashmir – the ethical concerns around such writing, the meaning of academic and ethical solidarity, and the outrage it sometimes engenders.
Even while the letters attacking Varma have triggered a significant amount of noise, I found much of the debate disappointing for its brevity, shrillness and unanimity, particularly because it concerns a book-length academic work on which the author has invested more than a decade. Such brevity and what appeared to be a rush to trash the scholar and her work – noticeably without any focus on the work itself – and the lack of engagement by experts in various fields, many of whom I hold in high esteem for their scholarship, seemed too facile and convenient. It appeared as though many of them were lazily shoring up their own reputations by getting themselves counted in favour of the campaign and in solidarity with Kashmir by simply signing a readymade petition.
It is not that Varma’s prior work has not been in circulation before. Some of it has been published in volumes edited and co-authored by the very scholars who were now condemning and disassociating themselves from her, as though there were nothing in their prior association with her and in her work in question to be discussed any more, nothing to reflect upon or redeem.
While this is better than the complete indifference with which work on Kashmir is often met, I expected a more troubled reflection from the scholars I value, at least a few of them, if only because the work was being so readily and unanimously condemned. I found it intriguing that a group of scholars from diverse academic backgrounds should come together and agree with such ease and readiness on a half-page letter of condemnation against a person, and her assumed failure to fully disclose and reflect on her background, and in the process dismiss her and her work without a pause or reflection.
Saiba Varma. Photo: University of California at San Diego
While Varma’s context is special, it made me wonder how many of us make our backgrounds absolutely transparent during our fieldwork or seriously engage with the implications of our prior histories in our work. It is my firm belief that a scholarly response to a book, a scholarly book for that matter, regardless of the context of its production and its limitations, should not be mere condemnation and boycott. Given the context, and being part of the community in question, I feel morally compelled to engage with the controversy and the work involved.
Also read: Does Nondisclosure of Familial Proximity to ‘Security State’ Compromise Research on Kashmir?
I begin with the disclaimer that I have never met the author and confess to not having read her work with diligence before. Regardless of its tone and tenor – and the personal and professional damage it may have rendered – the controversy forces us to engage with deeper questions: What is the social, psychic and political function of academic writing in contexts like Kashmir? How should academics respond to controversies like the one that unfolded around Varma’s work? What does ethical solidarity in such contexts mean?
I see three more or less independent strands that invite attention:
1. The author’s reasons for implicitly or explicitly revealing, selectively revealing or not revealing, her familial affiliation to her respondents, colleagues and collaborators during her fieldwork and afterwards;
2. The book in itself, what it does or does not do and the implication of her silence on the work, the place and the people involved; and
3. The extent of the author’s reflexive engagement with herself and her background or lack thereof in her work, and what it would amount to had it been otherwise.
Once a book or a manuscript is published, it acquires a life of its own. It is out there for people to engage with regardless of the author’s original intent or politics. Now that we have been made aware of the supposed silence of the author around her background and its potential implications on how the book must be received, scholars must not merely condemn the silence they see but attempt to understand and interpret it. The perceived silence and its implications exist as an additional text, an addendum to the book in question.
A book crafted with professional care
Let us move on to the book. What is it about? What work does the book do? Regardless of my apprehensions, I was pleasantly surprised when I finally managed to read the book. I expected theories on the proliferation of psychiatry and PTSD and affiliated discourses in contexts of war and conflict being applied to Kashmir. On the contrary, what I found was that though the book does take off from such prior scholarship, it moves on to harness local vocabulary as a counter-discourse to expert knowledge that operates in medical practice. It draws parallels between vocabularies and processes involved in three disparate domains – the clinical psychiatric practice, the processes of counterinsurgency that seek to tame politically subversive bodies and minds just like psychiatry, and the one involved in professional welfarist (care) services offered by the governmental and non-governmental interventions in Kashmir.
The professional care with which the work has been crafted does not seem to endanger its informants, in my view. My own field experience in Kashmir taught me that however hard I tried to explain the purpose of my endeavour, the people in various locations who chose to engage with me or let me be around them had their own understanding of what I was up to and sought to impress their worldview on me accordingly. Regardless of my protestations, I was often recognised variously as a journalist, an empathetic listener, a suspect figure, a political ally, a jobless nuisance, a potential benefactor or a friend.
Varma and her informants would have similarly worked out a relationship between themselves. Whether they feel betrayed by Varma regardless, because of what they did not know about her before, is something only they can say, not academics who aren’t engaged with them or even with Kashmir. The wider local opinion in Kashmir on the issue is difficult to gauge at the moment given the curbs on the media and increased suppression of opinion in Kashmir since August 5, 2019.
Though the flourishes of descriptive language bordering on the exotification of Kashmir is not something that I am comfortable with, I would not regard it as a serious impediment to understand the critical import of the book. Throughout the work, the author is acutely conscious of herself as a privileged Indian who finds herself largely insulated from everyday risks and humiliations that native Kashmiris are subject to by various instruments of the militarised state on a daily basis. At the same time, she is aware of her own vulnerability as just another human being working in a politically charged, militarised to the teeth context.
Even as Varma displaces the meanings of lazily deployed words like Care, Siege, Disturbed Area, Disappeared, Shock, Disbelief, Gratitude and Duty by imbuing them with varied local senses, she comes into her own while she dwells on the vernacular used by her informants. She labours to translate the meanings of dense words they invoke and theorises on some of them at length. At times I liked the train of her thought so much that I wished for more.
Detail of cover of The Occupied Clinic
Varma deploys the concepts she thus chisels out against the vocabularies of psychiatric treatment, torture and formal facilities of care that often serve to violently mutilate what people actually desire or what actually ails them by force-fitting these into categories their respective domains trade in. The institutions involved measure their success and failure in their own terms and run their procedures with total disregard to what people are trying to say, claim and at times give up their lives for. Thus, animation of local words like Kamzori (35-42), Karant (115-116), or the locally appropriated English ones like Duty (196-199) help Varma texture the worldview of ordinary Kashmiri subjects even as she renders these words into discursive tools to subvert the cold instrumental rationality of what she sees as the occupation of Kashmir and the “scientific” psychiatric practice based on expert knowledge.
Anthropological/ethnographic writing is wide-ranging and diverse, both in style and content. While some scholars maintain an objective and distanced tone and tenor in their writing, treating the self, the home and the field as exclusive domains not to be muddled up in their analysis, others overtly reflect on the inter-subjective processes, turning the reflection on the self or the transformation it undergoes in the course of fieldwork as the most critical and profound means of knowing the other. While in practice, individual writers may variously place themselves on the one or the other end of the objective-subjective spectrum, for an Indian scholar, whose Indianness is a given, what is an ethnographic encounter with militarisation, state terror and violence in Kashmir if not a radical encounter with the most abhorrent and demonic aspects of one’s own self – the self that one is born into, the unconscious fabric of ones being, the one that by its very nature remains unexamined or unexaminable unless it is brought face-to-face with radical alterity? If this is taken to be true, can such a radical encounter ever be complete without the unravelling of the self?
While much of Indian scholarship on Kashmir is oblivious of its authorial stance, anthropological fieldwork and ethnography as a mode of reflection and writing carries within it the possibility of radical transformation of the self. This inception of knowledge is more than mere virtue-signalling or a site to affirm or exhibit one’s prior political convictions. The controversy around Varma’s work brings to the fore the paucity and necessity of reflexive Indian writing on Kashmir.
The addendum: Making sense of the issues not explored
In response to the controversy, Varma has elaborated on her reasons for sharing, partially sharing or not sharing her background in various contexts but, intriguingly, there is limited, if any, engagement with the question prior to that in the book itself. How are we to make sense of this?
The lack of engagement of the author with her own background can be read either as a conscious strategic choice or a failure to consider that it would at some point invite attention. The conscious choice may at best be seen as an avoidance of an unnecessary digression from what she chose to be the focus of her work – which is the clinical, psychiatric practice in militarised and traumatised Kashmir. At worst, it can be seen as concealment of a troubling detail, perhaps warranted by the fear that it might invite adverse attention, which it eventually did. We can also see it as a sign of privilege that allows for people of a certain class and background to seamlessly convert one kind of social and cultural capital into another, a luxury not equally available to all.
Why does Varma not reflect on herself and her background in her work that concerns mental health and trauma induced by counterinsurgency when her own self is indirectly but intimately – via her father – implicated in the project? Prior to that question, we may ask why she chose to work on Kashmir given (or in spite of) her father’s professional involvement in the region. In one place, Varma suggests that this choice was incidental – a result of a casual suggestion made by a colleague before she had herself thought of it. Why militarisation, why counterinsurgency and mental health? Why in Kashmir? We do not have access to Varma’s interiority. In its absence, we can only speculate on the possibilities.
Though Varma may not have a specific reason to offer for this – many scholars working on different subjects may also not be able to come up with specific reasons for why they chose to study X or Y – perhaps her father’s role as a counterinsurgent unconsciously animated her choice. Even while he may not have spoken to her about his work, he would invariably have brought the affect home. This makes me think of the awkward intimacies described in Carl Sandburg’s poem ‘‘The Hangman at Home’ that was taught in school. Such silences speak louder than words.
If we assume that to be the case, why would the scholar in Varma not make it a subject of her analysis? Several lines of research suggest themselves:
- What does it mean to be the offspring of a counterinsurgent, an intelligence official or a police officer implicated in a dirty war against a civilian population and its political aspirations?
- Given the context, what are the implications of her father’s silence about the nature of the work he undertook in Kashmir?
- Given the shared geography of their work and overlapping areas of interests, though they approach these from the opposite ends of the political spectrum, why was there no exchange of ideas around this between them? However awkward, this is something that one would expect in the intimacy of a father-daughter relationship.
- Is the work at hand to be read as an unconscious attempt to process the implication of those silences or a sign of blindness to them? Given that our subjectivity blinds us, particularly to the most intimate aspects of our selves, how is that silence or blindness to be made sense of in the context?
Posed differently, how do we understand the sons and (mostly) daughters of Indian officers involved in the most repressive, masculinised professions aligned with the Indian establishment, frequently venturing into empathetic intellectual and activist enterprises in Kashmir or similar places elsewhere? Is this mere opportunism? Is this guilt or an outcome of an ethical compulsion felt towards the other? Or is there some other psychodynamic process involved? What do such ventures tell us about human psyche and its ability or need to work through its inherited liabilities or the opaqueness and obstinacy of social conditioning? In short, do we read it as a sign of hope or despair?
I have no ready answers to offer to these questions, but feel inclined to read the author’s work as an unacknowledged, perhaps unconscious, processing of the awkward silence that may have operated between father and daughter.
Gowhar Fazili teaches sociology at Ambedkar University Delhi.