Presenters
Srivastava Sanjay - Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London, LONDON, United KingdomWani Ibrahim - Kashmir University, Kashmir University, Srinagar, India
Panel
121 – Religious Infrastructures and City-Making: Governance, Governmentality and Urban Moral GeographiesAbstract
The city of Srinagar in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir has a population of around 1.5 million and. Since the late 1980s, the city has been deeply affected by a secessionist movement as well as the military and para-military responses to it. During this period, many aspects of the state infrastructural and pastoral responsibilities – health, education, municipal functions etc. – have fallen into disrepair. In many instances, these tasks have been taken over by a range of religious organisations. Mosques, shrines, orphanages as well as educational institutions sponsored by religious bodies have become the new sites of urban networking, sociality and provisioning of essential services. In this paper, Srinagar is a case study of the particular ways in which cities deal with endemic conflicts and disruptions to produce networks of sociality, sustenance and liveability.
The paper suggest that religious caring for a city of greatly troubled urbanism has produced a range of spatial and temporal affects. And that the morality of space and time, ehsas (a sense of sensing the world that is difficult to pin down), a ‘state affect’, sitting room as new forms of urban spatiality and death are the various affective dimensions through which we might understand the troubled urbanism of Srinagar.
