ABSTRACT

The chapter explores the everyday lived realities of a Kashmiri downtown neighbourhood and attempts to make sense of ‘living in violence’ rather than encounters of violence. It complicates the understanding of the neighbourhood as a monolith, which is essentialized as a ‘stone-throwing’ hub in the media and literary discourses – either showing the inhabitants as deviants/fringe groups indulging in stone-throwing or as victims/resisters of state violence. It instead underlines the nuanced experiences of suffering and survival; sociability and discord; thus highlighting the continuities and ruptures emerging from collective political subjectivity and individual subjectivity. The everyday here is described via the temporality of curfew that magnifies the relationship between ordinary and extraordinary times and underscores the state of negotiation that characterizes the neighbourhood.