Journey of Survivance from a Cultural Practice to Legal Precedent in Kashmiri Rhetorics: An Indigenous Study of Memoirs of Basharat Peer and Rahul Pandita

Abstract

This research focuses on the practice of survivance and its journey from a cultural practice to legal precedent for likely move to constitutional praxis in the Kashmiri context. It analyzes this practice as a priori argument of the Kashmiri narrativized rhetorics selecting two memoirs, Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night and Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon has Blood Clots, representing two Kashmiri communities. The objective is to pinpoint survivance practices as the basis of the Kashmiri assertion for indigenous sovereignty over the land, assuming Kashmiri narrativized rhetorication of the Kashmiri culture assists survivance practices transforming them into legal precedents even if they are oral testimonies of the indigenous legal claims likening them to the Vizenorian claim of the fourth person. The research validates this argument that the Kashmiri survivance practices enter the political realm and compete with paracolonialism in legal validation of the native claims but fall short of claiming constitutional praxis which requires further research through a legal standpoint regarding their affectivity in this arena.