ABSTRACT
Contemporary literature emerging specifically from the South Asian contexts have deliberated upon children’s lives in varied educational, political, medical, and juridical contexts and processes. More recently, writings on the lives of children in disputed territories have often focused on the nature of trauma and violence that children face owing to their relatively vulnerable position. In this chapter, I ethnographically elaborate upon the realm of children’s play in the Eidgah neighborhood in Srinagar in Kashmir, which is spatially exposed to routine violence owing to its location near the city’s oldest Martyr’s graveyard. Specifically, I consider how children’s practices of expressing their emotions of love and affinity in the domain of play tell us about the textures of everyday political and social life in conflict-stricken Kashmir Valley. I argue that attention to the fictive frames of children’s play tells us about the political work done by games like cricket, which enables us to move away from the binary understanding of childhood in Kashmir as oscillating between polemical caricatures of nationalist vs. anti-nationalist, or innocent vs. criminal.
