Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Arshi Javaid is a post-doctoral critical residency fellow at the Freie Universität Berlin. Previously she has earned her PhD on Contestation of Self and Other in Kashmiri Nationalism,1989-2016 from Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Her post-doctoral project looks at the everydayness of life between Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmir Pandits before 1989, in the old city of Srinagar.

Information about her current project

The project looks at the everydayness of life between Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits before the 1989 exodus. The study approaches the question of commonality of food and eating habits and yet restriction on inter-dining as entry points to weave through the larger contestations between the communities. It looks at how friendships and cordiality worked in this context of maintenance of strict boundaries and underlying latent tensions. Dr. Arshi Javaid also tries to map out an interpretative understanding of insider’s knowledge of particular social processes that existed between the Kashmiri Pandits and the Kashmiri Muslims in the society. The project problematises daily life as it existed in geographically close neighborhoods.

Her project departs from both the syncretic scholarship and also Pakistan focussed scholarship and tries to understand how the religious places of both the communities rested next to each other, people lived in spatially non-distant quarters with dependencies on each other visible in a peaceful way and how it suddenly transitioned into the contestation of migration and exile.

List of Publications

• “Ambiguity of Concealment: Forgotten Stories from Jammu Massacre in Displacement and Citizenship”: Histories and Memories of Exclusion.
   Edited by Vijaya Rao, Shambhavi Prakash, Mallarika Sinha Roy and Papori Bora

• “Top Down Peace-Building in Kashmir,1989-2014.
  [Journal of North-East Region- A peer reviewed interdisciplinary research Journal, (April 2018, Issue 6 Vol 1) (ISSN -2321-0583)].