A Dulling of Memory

Books live beyond bans. In the digital age, measures like banning books are not only moot, but also reiterate that the state continues to fear ideas

- Ather Zia

INDIA'S war on Kashmiri narrative memory is longstanding, far preceding the recent ban on 25 books that made the headlines on August 5, 2025. The selective outrage over the book ban reveals the systematic erasure embedded in the 70+ year military occupation, where persecution, extrajudicial killings, native dispossession, and land grabs steadily dismantle Kashmiri life.

The project has focused on controlling, assimilating, and ultimately erasing Kashmiri indigeneity under the guise of integrating the territory, development, and fighting Kashmiri resistance, cast as terrorism or proxy war. The war on bodies renders Kashmiris killable subjects, and the steady annihilation of Kashmiri society unfolds under the colonial logic of the forcible disappearance of Kashmiri life, land, and culture.

The weaponisation of democratic symbols is swift and terrifying in its capacity to erase bodies, language, art, archives, and the very idea of a Kashmiri future. The simmering, invisible war has rendered Kashmiri lives expendable, and their memory contraband and the intergenerational sorrow of dispossession has become a haunting legacy. The day of the ban itself saw colonial theatre in sharp relief: amidst the aisles of books of a state-sponsored Chinar literary festival stood the effigy of a BrahMos missile, symbol of India's military prowess. The image collapses the space between literature and war, making it clear that cultural life pivots around the panopticon. It was also the sixth anniversary of the unilateral removal of Kashmir's autonomy. The war on memory runs parallel to the war on the ground, where combatants are killed routinely away from the headlines, patrols are thick, and checkpoints and military convoys multiply like exploding stars around the PTSD-ridden population.