
Between Desolation and Death
Kashmir, Unknown Graves, and India's Military State
Angana P. Chatterji(Author)
Verso Books (Publisher)
Will be published approx. on 20. October 2026
Book
Paperback/Softback
208 pages
978-1-83976-459-2 (ISBN)
Description
Pioneering investigations led by Angana Chatterji, Parvez Imroz and Khurram Parvez across India-administered Kashmir during 2007 and 2011 revealed thousands of unknown graves. The findings linked bodies found in the graves with enforced disappearances and extrajudicial executions. It prompted acknowledgment by state institutions, even as the intensity of targeting halted the inquiry.
The landscape of death outlines the relations between occupier and subjugated. The graves are living monuments, pervasive, like the walls of an internment camp for the prisoner within. Alongside, people live in terror, as gravediggers and civilians search for justice. Tracing the archaeology of desolation and death following 1989 and its performative relation to the post-2019 settlerism of the Narendra Modi government and Hindu nationalists, this singular memoir of Kashmir's present records suppressed knowledge that is exhumed and must be held to account.
The landscape of death outlines the relations between occupier and subjugated. The graves are living monuments, pervasive, like the walls of an internment camp for the prisoner within. Alongside, people live in terror, as gravediggers and civilians search for justice. Tracing the archaeology of desolation and death following 1989 and its performative relation to the post-2019 settlerism of the Narendra Modi government and Hindu nationalists, this singular memoir of Kashmir's present records suppressed knowledge that is exhumed and must be held to account.
More details
Edition
Paperback original
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 153 mm
Weight
367 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-83976-459-2 (9781839764592)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Angana P. Chatterji is Founding Chair, Political Conflict, Gender and People's Rights Initiative, Center for Race and Gender, University of California, Berkeley. An anthropologist and feminist historian of the present, she is also a Research Fellow at the Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Stanford University. Variously acclaimed for her work, Chatterji's investigations with colleagues into Kashmir's unknown mass graves exposed their existence. Works include Majoritarian State: How Hindu Nationalism is Changing India; Kashmir: The Case for Freedom; Conflicted Democracies and Gendered Violence; Contesting Nation: Gendered Violence in South Asia; and Violent Gods: Hindu Nationalism in India's Present.