A critical essay examining how short-form video platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok are accelerating the erosion of regional identities, with Kashmir as the backdrop.  

The essay dissects how these platforms flatten language, gesture, and identity into reproducible, depthless tropes. Drawing on theorists like Baudrillard (hyperreality) and Bourdieu (cultural capital), I argue that the “Reelocene” epoch—a term I coin to describe our current moment—privileges performative affect over meaning, turning even obscenity into an aesthetic commodity. From literature students who can’t spell Shakespeare but mimic viral catchphrases to influencers exoticising borrowed dialects, the essay reveals how algorithmic mimicry quietly dismantles local idiom in favour of a globalised, disposable vernacular. 

The piece balances rigorous critique with satirical bite, exposing the paradox of “viral diversity” masking homogenisation. Why do we reward those who shed their native speech for influencer cadences, yet mock others for failing to code-switch “correctly”? Why does a forced Californian “oh my god” signal clout, while a regional accent often signals lack? I trace this asymmetry to digital capitalism’s demand for frictionless content, where identity becomes a buffet of curated fragments and authenticity is measured in engagement metrics. The reel doesn’t just reflect culture; it rewrites it, one 15-second clip at a time.

This isn’t just about Kashmir, of course—it’s about how digital capitalism commodifies marginalisation. 

We are living in what might be termed, with no small irony, the “Reelocene Epoch,” a cultural moment defined by the hegemony of the short-form video. The reel, that flickering dopamine syringe, has become the dominant aesthetic form of our time, colonising attention spans with ruthless efficiency. As Jean Baudrillard might observe, we no longer consume content; we consume the spectacle of consumption itself, a fragmented, accelerated loop of imagery that demands nothing and offers even less (Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation). The reel’s tyranny is absolute: lectures, prayers, even human interaction must now be compressed into digestible, forgettable morsels. In this economy of attention, brevity is not just the soul of wit, it is the death of thought.

As an educator, I perform the obligatory ritual of cautioning students against this “clip-ification” of consciousness, invoking the Frankfurt School’s fear of cultural industrialisation (Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment). Reels, I proclaim, erode analytical rigour, replacing sustained engagement with the cheap thrill of the swipe. Yet, like a hypocritical priest preaching temperance, I too am ensnared. My recent obsession? The performative expressions of actors, particularly actresses and influencers, whose exaggerated mannerisms seem less like human affect and more like semiotic ghosts haunting our collective psyche. The content is irrelevant; it is the style that seduces. As Roland Barthes noted in Mythologies, the signifier often eclipses the signified, and here, the how obliterates the what entirely.

What is most unsettling is the cultural seepage of these artificial expressions into everyday life. There is no taxonomy for their absurdity, no critical framework to dismiss them as the hollow theatrics they are. Yet, as Bourdieu (Distinction) would wryly note, the moment one fumbles with cutlery in a “decent hotel,” the cultural gatekeepers descend with their taxonomy of shame: awkward, backward, uncivilised. The irony is exquisite. We welcome the staged grimaces of influencers into our cultural lexicon without scrutiny, yet a misplaced fork becomes a moral failing. The reel, in its infinite democratisation of nonsense, has rendered us all fluent in the language of superficiality, while the old hierarchies of “taste” remain, weaponised as ever.

Let us dissect, with the precision of a Barthesian semiotician (Mythologies), the spectacle of a popular celebrity in question—a paragon of “manufactured authenticity.” Her dress, more articulate than her expressions, functioned as what Baudrillard might call a “hyperreal” costume (Simulacra and Simulation), a visual manifesto screaming “Look, but do not think!” Every strand of her hair, inflated to near-architectural grandeur, obeyed the unwritten laws of “reel aesthetics”, where naturalism is the enemy and effort is the unspoken fetish. One does not simply exist in the reel; one must perform existence itself, like a Sisyphus cursed to eternally reapply lip gloss.

The video, a mercilessly truncated snippet, was not a vessel for meaning but a shrine to how meaning is staged. The question she answered was irrelevant, mere background noise to the ballet of her lips, the calculated dilation of her pupils, the precisely calibrated flash of teeth. Here, Goffman’s “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” collapses into farce: her gestures were not communication but choreography, each movement rehearsed to mimic spontaneity. The hands moved with the eerie precision of a Victorian automaton, the smile erupted on cue, less an emotional response than a Pavlovian concession to algorithmic demand.

And oh, the laughter! A burst of sound so meticulously timed it could have been engineered by Fordist efficiency experts (cf. Gramsci, “Americanism and Fordism”). The triviality of the conversation only heightened the absurdity, proof that in the reel economy, even banality must be gilded with performative ecstasy. Her tone, a surface paint, was less human speech than what Adorno would deride as “the jargon of authenticity”, a veneer of charm lacquered over the void of substance.

What we witness here is not grace, but “gracefulness”, a patented, mass-produced simulacrum of allure, designed for maximum swipe-appeal. The reel does not capture life; it replaces it with a pantomime of affect, leaving us, the viewers, both mesmerised and vaguely nauseated, like children who’ve eaten too much candy and now crave something real, only to forget and reach for another reel.

We are witnessing what Walter Benjamin might call the “mechanical reproduction of affect”, where the mannerisms of influencers, YouTubers, and actors, endlessly proliferated through the digital assembly line of reels and social media, have seeped into the groundwater of popular culture (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction). Their curated tones, exaggerated expressions, and sartorial hyperbole are no longer mere performance; they have become scripts, mimicked with the fervour of a cargo cult, as if adopting the right affect might conjure the same social capital. The younger generation, those unwitting disciples of the algorithm, now speak in the borrowed cadences of influencers, their gestures a patchwork of viral tics, each movement a citation, each expression a plagiarised emotion.

What’s fascinating, in a grimly Bourdieuian sense (Distinction), is how this mimicry is largely confined to a specific class, those enchanted by the spectacle of showbiz, for whom every conversation is an audition and every social interaction a potential reel. The same phrases, delivered in a different context, say, a grocery store or a government office, would sound absurd, yet in the right echo chamber, they are performed with solemn reverence. Not all these gestures are inherently malignant; some are benign, even charming. But when they morph into unrealistic, dross theatrics, a pantomime of “high society” or a fetishised dialect that screams “I do not belong here but wish I did”, they become a cultural pathology.

There is, as Zadie Smith notes, nothing wrong with linguistic multiplicity (Speaking in Tongues). But there is something grotesque about affectation, when a forced accent, an unnatural gesture, or a rehearsed laugh betrays not fluency but cultural desperation, like wearing a costume that doesn’t fit. It’s the difference between speaking another language and performing linguistic tourism, a clumsy, often cringe-inducing pantomime of belonging that only highlights the distance between the self and the desired identity. The reel, in its infinite wisdom, has turned us all into amateur method actors, forever rehearsing a role we weren’t cast in.

And so, we arrive at the great irony of digital culture: the more we imitate, the less we inhabit; the more we perform, the less we are. The reel giveth, and the reel taketh away, leaving us with a generation of expert impersonators who’ve forgotten how to simply speak.

What we are witnessing is nothing short of a Bakhtinian carnival (Rabelais and His World) gone digital, where the exaggerated movements of pupils, the performative arching of eyebrows, the ritualised baring of teeth, and even the fetishised utterance of obscenities are no longer mere expressions but cultural signifiers, meticulously curated and weaponised by the reigning class of reel aristocracy. These gestures, in isolation, are harmless, perhaps even endearing in their absurdity. But when monopolised by the influencer elite, they mutate into hegemonic codes (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks), where even vulgarity is laundered into sophistication, and crassness is rebranded as authenticity.

Consider the irony: in my own classroom, undergraduate literature students, who stumble over the spelling of Shakespeare and for whom metaphor remains as elusive as a coherent thesis statement, nevertheless wield phrases like ouch, shit, and god damn it with the precision of Orwell’s Newspeak (1984). These are not words learned semantically, through the labour of reading or the discipline of discourse; they are cultural viruses, transmitted through the algorithmic ether, bypassing cognition to lodge themselves directly in the performative subconscious.

What makes this particularly grotesque is the class dynamic at play. When the reel bourgeoisie deploys these phrases, they do so with the smug assurance of Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction, turning obscenity into a badge of cosmopolitanism, a way to signal I am above the provincial constraints of your linguistic norms. But when the same words are mimicked by those outside the cultural inner circle, they ring hollow, awkward, forced, a betrayal of native idiom in exchange for borrowed coolness. The result? A generation that can’t define synecdoche but can moan oh my god with the cadence of a Netflix teen drama.

In this post-linguistic dystopia, words are no longer tools of meaning but props in a globalised pantomime, where the more you disclaim your own language, the more you think you belong to some imagined elite. Ouch ceases to be an exclamation of pain; it becomes a performance of cultural surrender. And the reel, that great meritocratic lie, rewards only those who best erase themselves in the service of its endless, empty spectacle.

We find ourselves in the throes of what Guy Debord might diagnose as “the society of the spectacle” in its most insidious form, not through overt propaganda, but through the unconscious osmosis of reel culture’s aesthetic norms. Like Adorno’s “culture industry” (Dialectic of Enlightenment), this phenomenon does not announce its colonisation; it simply embeds itself, naturalising foreign gestures and linguistic tics until they supplant local idiom without resistance. The problem is not merely imitation, but normalisation, the quiet violence by which the imported displaces the indigenous, not through force, but through sheer ubiquity.

Expressions, as Raymond Williams reminds us (Marxism and Literature), are never merely individual acts, they are collective articulations of cultural consciousness. When a generation adopts the vocal fry of American influencers, the exaggerated gasps of K-drama reactions, or the clipped consonants of British prestige accents, not for communication, but for performative sweetness or seduction, they engage in what postcolonial theorists would call linguistic self-exoticization. Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture) might frame this as mimicry without mastery, where the borrowed dialect does not elevate but diminishes, rendering the speaker neither authentically local nor convincingly foreign, just a ventriloquist’s dummy for globalised affect.

The tragedy is not in the borrowing itself (cultures have always hybridised), but in the asymmetrical cultural economy at play. The reel era has turned language into a pick-and-mix identity buffet, where the privileged curate accents like accessories, while the marginalised shed theirs like shameful baggage.

In the end, this is not just about sounding ridiculous, it’s about sounding erased. Every exaggerated uwu or forced vocal fry isn’t just cringe; it’s a small obituary for a linguistic heritage that no longer feels worth keeping. And the algorithm, that great cultural homogeniser, rewards only those willing to auction off their dialects to the highest bidder. The reel giveth clout, and the reel taketh away dignity.

Ghulam Mohammad Khan was born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora); an outlying town located on the wide shores of the beautiful Wullar Lake. Ghulam Mohammad believes that literature is the most original and enduring repository of human memory. He loves the inherent intricacies of language and the endless possibilities of meaning. In his writing, he mainly focuses on mini-narratives, local practices and small-scale events that could otherwise be lost forever to the oblivion of untold histories. Ghulam Mohammad considers his hometown, faith, and family to be the most important things to him. His short stories have appeared in national and international magazines like Out of Print, Kitaab, Indian Literature, Muse India, Indian Review, Inverse Journal, Mountain Ink and more. His short story collection The Cankered Rose is his forthcoming work. Presently, he teaches as an Assistant Professor at HKM Degree College Bandipora, Kashmir.

You can find more of Ghulam’s work here on Ink Pantry.

The essay offers a philosophically engaged and theoretically rich examination of how power operates and perpetuates itself, weaving together insights from Foucault, Bourdieu, Spivak, and Gramsci to dissect the subtle mechanics of caste, class, and gendered domination. Set against the microcosm of a village, it reveals how supremacy regenerates not only through overt violence but also through cultural codes, normalized practices, and silent complicity. By blending narrative storytelling with critical theory, the essay challenges static conceptions of power, urging a deeper awareness of its fluid and resilient nature.  

Reductionism, as a philosophical methodology, operates on the premise that complex systems or abstract ideas can be dissected into simpler, more tractable components to facilitate comprehension. This epistemic strategy, while often critiqued for its potential to oversimplify ontological richness (as warned by emergentist theories in the philosophy of science), nevertheless serves a hermeneutic function—allowing us to trace the capillary workings of grand constructs like religion, caste, or hegemony back to their micro-social instantiations.

In my small teaching career, I have observed students who seek mere conceptual clarity rather than a praxis-oriented understanding of these ideas. This exemplifies what Heidegger might critique as a prioritisation of “present-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit) theoretical knowledge over the “ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit) embeddedness of these structures in lived experience. Indeed, phenomena like structural repression, ideological displacement (Freud’s Verschiebung meets Althusser’s ideological state apparatuses), or the Lacanian unconscious do not merely exist as abstract schemata; they perform iteratively through quotidian social rituals, often in ways that escape agential awareness.

There is a small village that I know intimately—a microcosm that perfectly illustrates how societal concepts operate on a grander scale. By examining this village closely, we can uncover how much of our socio-cultural behaviour unfolds unconsciously, revealing deeper patterns that shape human interaction. My invocation of the village as a microcosm echoes Wittgenstein’s notion of “forms of life” (Lebensformen), where the grammar of social norms becomes intelligible only within localised practices. By examining how caste hierarchies or religious dogmas are unconsciously reproduced in the village’s daily interactions (Bourdieu’s habitus at work), I attempt to expose the dialectic between macro-structures and micro-practices. This approach not only demystifies the “bigger ideas” but also reveals, via a Foucauldian lens, how power operates diffusely through seemingly innocuous cultural repetitions. The village, then, becomes a site of thick description (Geertz), where the unconscious socio-cultural performance is laid bare in its most unmediated form.

The origins of a family’s ascent in this village to dominance remain obscured by time, as though their authority had always already existed—a self-justifying myth that naturalised their power as celestial ordination or inherent superiority. Their material hegemony was undeniable: the oldest orchards, the most fertile rice fields, and the labour of villagers harvested along with the crops. But more than wealth, it was their monopolisation of institutional roles—bureaucrats, physicians, professors, teachers—that cemented their dominance, transforming their lineage into a self-replicating elite, a mohalla that was both a physical enclave and a synecdoche for the village’s power structure.

What is crucial, however, is not their luxury but the unconscious machinery of their supremacy. Despite their education, they remained blind to the artifice of their own hierarchy, trapped in what Marx would call false consciousness, though here it is less a proletarian misrecognition than a bourgeois amor sui—a narcissistic attachment to their own legitimacy. Any challenge to their authority was met not just with resistance but with visceral indignation, as though the act of questioning was itself a sacrilege. The family’s reactions were not calculated manoeuvres but unreflective reflexes, revealing how deeply their dominance had been internalised as natural law.

This belief in their innate superiority was not theirs alone; it was collectively reproduced by the village laity, a Gramscian cultural hegemony in miniature. Their influence permeated every collective endeavour—developmental projects, dispute resolutions, land disputes, committee selections, panchayat decisions, elections, religious rites, funding allocations, even matrimonial alliances. Their counsel was not merely consulted; it was constitutive of the village’s social ontology. Decisions made without their sanction were inherently unstable, as though legitimacy itself flowed through their approval. When bypassed, they retaliated not as scheming oppressors but as righteous arbiters of order, their contrivances framed—even to themselves—as just retribution for transgressors.

And so it continued, decade after decade, until their dominance ceased to be perceived as dominance at all. It became doxa (Bourdieu)—the unquestioned order of things, so deeply sedimented into habitus that it was indistinguishable from nature itself. The family did not rule; they simply were, and the village, in turn, could not imagine itself otherwise.

Yet philosophy—from Heraclitus’ panta rhei to Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence—reminds us that no structure, no matter how ossified, can eternally resist the forces of change. Every hegemony carries within it the seeds of its own subversion, for power is inherently discursive (Foucault), contingent (Derrida), and vulnerable to the event (Badiou) that ruptures its illusory permanence. Tradition masquerades as natural law until a crisis exposes its constructedness, revealing that even the most entrenched hierarchies are but temporary fictions awaiting disruption.

This rupture arrived during Ramadan, a month of heightened spiritual reflection that, paradoxically, often becomes a site of hermeneutic conflict. As observed across Kashmir, the act of scriptural interpretation—far from yielding singular truths—unleashes a plurality of contested meanings (Gadamer’s fusion of horizons clashing with the fundamentalist desire for closure). The village mosque, too, became an arena where the family’s authority was challenged—not through direct revolt, but through the very mechanism they had weaponised: religious orthodoxy.

The Imam, a humble figure anointed by the family’s patronage, embodied the Gramscian organic intellectual—subaltern yet legitimised by tradition. His forced resignation over an impossible demand (memorising the entire Quran for Taraweeh prayers) was a performative assertion of the family’s power, a spectacle meant to reinforce their role as arbiters of sacred order. But their overreach backfired. The replacement—a young Hafiz whose faltering recitation disrupted the liturgy—became the event that shattered the villagers’ docility. Here, Žižek’s parallax gap emerges: the family’s insistence on textual perfection revealed not divine order but their own fallibility.

The collective hiss that followed was more than dissent; it was the return of the repressed (Freud), the unconscious recognition of systemic hypocrisy erupting into public consciousness. When one villager dared to speak— “What was wrong with our Imam?”—it marked the crystallisation of what Rancière calls dissensus: the intolerable gap between the imposed order and lived experience. Religion, often the opium of the masses (Marx), here became the toxin that poisoned the family’s authority. The mosque, once a site of their control, transformed into the stage for their symbolic undoing.

The family’s most vocal member—a figure whose arrogance had long been tolerated as an extension of their perceived supremacy—silenced the murmurs of dissent with a performative assertion of authority: “How dare you talk like that? The Imam was removed by the mosque committee. Nobody can bring him back.” This moment crystallised what Althusser termed interpellation—a hailing of subjects into ideological submission, where the very act of speaking back is rendered unthinkable. Yet, as Foucault reminds us, power provokes resistance precisely where it seeks to impose silence.

The backlash was inevitable. The village, previously fragmented in its docility, now converged in collective curiosity—even those who had never entered the mosque were drawn into its orbit, not by piety, but by the intoxicating possibility of rupture. Suddenly, religious texts were scrutinised, traditions debated, and authority questioned. This shift exemplifies Sartre’s radical conversion, where individuals, once passive, awaken to their own agency through confrontation with oppressive structures. The newcomers’ notice, pasted defiantly on the mosque entrance, weaponised scripture against its arbiters, exposing the hypocrisy of a committee that had operated in shadows. The Quranic verses cited were not just theological arguments but counter-hegemonic tools (Gramsci), dismantling the family’s monopoly on religious legitimacy.

The conflict escalated into raw agonism (Mouffe)—a clash not just of egos but of competing regimes of truth (Foucault). The family’s dominance, once naturalised, now appeared fragile, its supremacy exposed as a contingent performance. The refusal of young newcomers to pray behind the inept Hafiz was not mere disobedience; it was a performative contradiction (Habermas), revealing the absurdity of the family’s claims to religious authority. The irony was inescapable: only one family member attended the mosque, yet they dictated its order. The rest, insulated by privilege, had long abandoned the very institution they sought to control—a stark illustration of Marx’s critique of religion as the illusory happiness of the oppressed, maintained by those who do not even believe in it.

The scuffle inside the mosque marked the first materialisation of revolt—a bodily defiance against symbolic violence (Bourdieu). But the family’s response was even more revealing: they locked the mosque and renamed it after their caste, transforming sacred space into private property. This act laid bare the latent function of religious institutions under hegemony: not as houses of worship, but as instruments of social control. The newcomers’ counter-action—unlocking the mosque—was a reclamation of commons (Hardt & Negri), a defiance of propertisation.

Then came the final, devastating twist: the family produced documents, claiming ownership of the mosque’s land. Prayer ceased. The sacred was suspended by the juridical. In this moment, the mosque, once a site of collective faith, became a battleground of material and epistemic dispossession (Spivak). The family’s move was not just about land; it was an assertion that even the divine could be subject to their authority.

This crisis laid bare the instability of meaning itself. The mosque, once a stable symbol of communal unity, now became a site of semiotic slippage (Derrida). Was it a house of God, a caste’s property, or a battleground for liberation? The villagers, caught in this hermeneutic chaos, fractured along new lines: some retreated into private prayer, others ventured to the marginalised wicker-workers’ mosque, only to recoil at its perceived “impurity,” exposing the latent casteism that even dissent could not fully erase. The family, meanwhile, began tallying enemies based on something as mundane as greetings withheld, a performative unravelling of social codes. The absence of a customary salaam became a silent insurrection, a Lacanian acte manqué where the failure to speak carried more meaning than words ever could.

When the resistance leader demanded accountability for the “mosque committee,” he uncovered a farcical truth: no such democratic body existed. The villagers, long complicit in their silence, now feigned ignorance, dissociating from a fiction they had passively sustained. This was the ultimate Althusserian misrecognition—the illusion of decentralised authority sustaining centralised oppression. The village, once unified under the family’s hegemony, now splintered into factions: the loyalists, the covert resisters, and the openly defiant.

The resistance leader stood at a liminal threshold—between history and its redefinition—a living embodiment of Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit (“now-time”), where the past is not a fixed narrative but a contested terrain. He knew the family’s dominance was not merely political but epistemic, woven into the very fabric of social cognition. To dismantle it would require more than protests; it would demand a revolution of the symbolic order (Žižek). Yet he also recognised the paradox of his position: to fight caste supremacy, he had to instrumentalise religion, replicating the very structures of ideological warfare he sought to overthrow.

This was not a battle of brute force but of hegemonic rearticulation (Laclau & Mouffe). The family’s power, though wounded, persisted through what Foucault called the microphysics of power—the daily, invisible reinforcements of hierarchy. The resistance leader, for all his rhetoric, was trapped in the same discursive prison: to oppose the family, he had to play by the rules of their game, where even rebellion risked becoming another form of subjection.

The newcomers’ resistance took on a theological dimension—a strategic masterstroke. By declaring that a mosque cannot be named after a caste, they weaponised religious orthodoxy against the family’s hubris, invoking fatwas from esteemed ulemas to dismantle the legitimacy of the family’s claim. Yet, the leader of this group, though ostensibly fighting for religious purity, harboured a deeper, more personal vendetta: a seething hatred for the caste supremacy that had structured village life for generations. In seizing this moment of crisis, he revealed the Nietzschean truth that all moral crusades are born from ressentiment—a sublimated will to power masquerading as righteousness.

The late-evening scuffle that left the resistance leader nearly dead was not just an act of violence—it was a spectacle of power (Debord), a brutal reassertion of dominance meant to terrify the village back into submission. The family’s calculated ambiguity, “It will be verified”, while never explicitly claiming responsibility, exposed the banality of evil (Arendt) in their rule: power thrives not just through overt oppression, but through the plausible deniability of its mechanisms.

Then came the masterstroke: the family “discovered” land records (real or forged) proving their ownership of the mosque’s grounds, only to magnanimously declare they would not reclaim it, for it “belonged to God.” This was pure ideological alchemy (Žižek)—a move that transformed their violent hegemony into an illusion of benevolence, reinforcing their authority while appearing to relinquish it. The locks were broken, the mosque “restored,” the old Imam reinstated, and the committees “reformed”—yet nothing had truly changed. The structure of power remained intact, merely repackaged as concession.

The resistance leader, now silent, confronted the bitter truth: the family’s dominance was not just political but metaphysical, woven into the village’s collective unconscious (Jung). His struggle had revealed the meaninglessness at the core of all social order (Camus), where every attempt to “balance” injustice only reinscribes it in new forms. Like the Phoenix, hegemony rises from its own ashes—not despite resistance, but because of it, metabolising dissent into renewal (Foucault’s productive power).

The lesson was clear: power does not simply repress—it adapts. The family’s triumph lay in their ability to stage surrender while tightening their grip, proving Adorno’s dictum that “the whole is the false.” The leader’s defeat was not a failure of courage but of imagination: he had fought the family’s form without seeing that its essence was hydra-headed, always already reconstituting itself.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 2001.

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham, Continuum, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1968.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice, Cambridge University Press, 1977.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice, Harvard University Press, 1984.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1995.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage, 1990.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Translated by James Strachey, Basic Books, 2010.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, Continuum, 2004.

Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 1973.

Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, International Publishers, 1971.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Translated by Thomas McCarthy, Beacon Press, 1984.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Harvard University Press, 2009.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper Perennial, 2008.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Norton, 1977.

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Verso, 1985.

Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Translated by N. I. Stone, International Publishers, 1904.

Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. Verso, 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin, 1978.

Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose, University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes, Washington Square Press, 1992.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.

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Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. MIT Press, 2006.

Ghulam Mohammad Khan was born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora); an outlying town located on the wide shores of the beautiful Wullar Lake. Ghulam Mohammad believes that literature is the most original and enduring repository of human memory. He loves the inherent intricacies of language and the endless possibilities of meaning. In his writing, he mainly focuses on mini-narratives, local practices and small-scale events that could otherwise be lost forever to the oblivion of untold histories. Ghulam Mohammad considers his hometown, faith, and family to be the most important things to him. His short stories have appeared in national and international magazines like Out of Print, Kitaab, Indian Literature, Muse India, Indian Review, Inverse Journal, Mountain Ink and more. His short story collection The Cankered Rose is his forthcoming work. Presently, he teaches as an Assistant Professor at HKM Degree College Bandipora, Kashmir.

You can find more of Ghulam’s work here on Ink Pantry.

In Anecdote, History and Kashmir, the writer explores the profound power of personal narratives to reshape our understanding of history. Through a compelling personal encounter on a highway, he captures the shared struggles of individuals caught within rigid systems, shedding light on the deeper, often-overlooked layers of authority, duty, and humanity. By juxtaposing this anecdote with broader historical narratives, the essay delves into how anecdotes serve as counter-narratives, challenging dominant historical accounts and opening windows to individual experiences that history tends to overlook. It draws on literary examples from George Orwell, Saadat Hasan Manto, and Basharat Peer to reveal the nuances anecdotes can bring to complex socio-political contexts like Partition and the Kashmir conflict. This essay argues that by embracing anecdotal storytelling, we can enrich historical discourse, deepening our empathy and understanding of human experiences that otherwise risk being lost in sweeping narratives. A must-read for those interested in the intersections of history, literature, and the lived experience of conflict.

An anecdote is a concise, frequently personal narrative that communicates a certain point or idea. Anecdotes are frequently used to shed light on a person, location, or occasion and can help make difficult concepts easier to comprehend or remember. They often add a humanizing or engaging element to writing and conversation. In their famous book Practicing New Historicism, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt assert that anecdotes provide a sense of authenticity and “the touch of the real” that exists both within and outside the mainstream historical succession. The mainstream historians, who usually view individual or small-scale events in relation to a broader historical background, find anecdotes insignificant and “mere rhetorical embellishments” or sometimes “as brief moments of respite from an analytical generalisation”. In contrast to the common assumption that considers anecdotes as methodologically inconsequential, Gallagher and Greenblatt propose a theory that regards anecdotes as equally significant as the grand historical narratives. They claim that anecdote could be conceived as a tool with which to rub literary texts against the grain of received notions about their determinants, revealing the fingerprints of the “accidental, suppressed, defeated, uncanny, abjected, or exotic” – in short, the non-surviving – even if only fleetingly. This interest serves the “effect of arousing scepticism about grand historical narratives, or essentialising descriptions of a historical period”. They further argue that anecdotes function as parallel narratives that have the potential to puncture the grand narrative sequence of historical explanations and become significant narratives in their own right. Anecdote, therefore, can sometimes be used as a methodological and counter-historical tool to assimilate the multiplicity of voices and discursiveness of memory.

Let me recount an anecdote. I was speeding along the highway, knowing I had just ten minutes left before the biometric attendance system at my workplace would lock me out. After 10 o’clock, the stern officer in charge made no exceptions. Even arriving one minute late meant submitting what he emphatically called “short leave,” leading to a deduction from our salary. It was a rigid rule we had grown accustomed to, just as we had grown used to the frustrating halts for army convoys on the road. But that day, desperation gripped me, and I gathered the courage to talk to the army man who had stopped me.

“I’m sorry, but could you please let me through? Our officer doesn’t allow us to mark attendance after ten, and if I’m late, my salary will be cut,” I blurted. He didn’t acknowledge my plea. Whistle in hand, he was focused on directing the vehicles into a line that stretched seemingly for miles, as if the road itself had surrendered to the endless convoy.

Just when I thought my words had been lost in the wind, the soldier, now weary from his whistling, approached my car. He spoke softly, a stark contrast to the authority he wielded with his whistle. “You don’t need to apologize,” he said. “I never want to stop anyone like this. I understand your situation. But I have to follow orders, just like you. Our officers are strict, and so are the rules. Sometimes I feel awful when I have to stop ambulances, but there’s no choice.”

He went on to tell me about his own life—his family back home working on sugarcane fields, and his recent marriage, a flicker of personal warmth amidst the mechanical reality of his duty. The convoy, slow and deliberate, began to pass. Meanwhile, I typed out my “short leave” request, ready to submit it as soon as I reached my office.

Before he returned to his post, the soldier, still holding his whistle, said in a quiet, almost apologetic tone, “I’m sorry.”

As I continued my journey, I found myself confused, unsure of whom to blame. Was it the soldier, who had politely disallowed me passage despite his own reluctance? Was it me, for leaving home a few minutes too late? Or was it the rigid, faceless authority on both sides that enforced such inflexible rules? Or the convoy itself, groaning defiantly on the road, indifferent to the small struggles of those caught in its path. In that moment, it felt as if we were all trapped in a system of invisible forces, each of us playing our roles, unable to break free. The soldier’s apology echoed in my mind long after I had driven away, a reminder that sometimes, in the grand machinery of life, none of us truly have control.

This anecdotal occurrence disrupts the usual flow of history, adding a personal dimension that counters its tendency to generalize and sum up complex events. In considering who writes history and the methods they use, we realize the limitations of historical narratives in capturing individual experiences. This anecdote humanizes a critical aspect of history, bringing in emotions and empathy while challenging simple categorizations of “dominant” and “oppressed.” For instance, the soldier who stopped me is part of a dominant power structure, yet he himself is subject to authority and rules beyond his control, revealing the disparities in power even within the dominant ranks. Such narratives puncture historical generalizations by focusing on lived experiences over broad assessments of the collective condition.

Symbolically, such incidents don’t aim to counter history but offer alternative perspectives, running parallel to official narratives and preserving the nuances of individual experience. Methodologically, the anecdote leans more toward literary expression than historical; it captures unique, singular moments that history often excludes. Where history concerns itself with the powerful—the structural frameworks of governance, policy implications, and broad societal changes—anecdotes reveal how these structures influence individuals, their relationships, and ultimately, their consciousness.

Literature’s strength lies in handling such anecdotes as, for example, demonstrated by George Orwell’s essay Shooting an Elephant. In this personal narrative, Orwell, a British officer in colonial Burma, describes the internal conflict that compels him to kill an elephant against his better judgment. The essay serves as an anecdotal critique of colonialism, showing how the colonial system oppresses both the colonizer and the colonized. This perspective on colonialism is unique to literature, which captures the emotional, internalized cost of imperial power that history’s structural approach may overlook.

The history of Partition in India illustrates this gap between historical records and anecdotal literary depictions. While history provides dates, statistics, and geopolitical causes, literature captures the visceral human costs of Partition, giving voice to individual stories often lost in official accounts. Saadat Hasan Manto’s short stories, for example, delve into the chaos, trauma, and moral ambiguity that Partition inflicted on ordinary people. In his story Toba Tek Singh, Manto portrays the absurdity of Partition through the eyes of a mental asylum inmate who cannot understand the new lines drawn across his homeland. By focusing on a single character’s plight, Manto reveals the emotional and psychological dislocation that numbers and policy discussions fail to capture. Similarly, Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan uses a fictional village to depict how communal harmony was shattered by the violent upheavals of Partition. Through the lives of villagers who are suddenly divided along religious lines, Singh explores the betrayals, guilt, and unexpected kindnesses that emerged amidst the horror. These personal stories humanize the statistics of Partition, making us feel the tragedy on an intimate level.

Closer to home, our regional literature also uses anecdotes to offer powerful counter-narratives to mainstream historiography. Basharat Peer’s memoir Curfewed Night gives a brief anecdotal account of a 19-year-old militant in Shopian who, inspired by the Bollywood movie Tere Naam, grows long hair, frequently follows a girl to her college whom he admires and desires a romantic escape with for a life of peace. Yet the “militant tag” makes this impossible, highlighting the limits and personal sacrifices embedded within such a life. Peer also captures the longing that militants face for ordinary joys, like watching the moon while relaxing in their own homes. Peer writes, “Being a militant wasn’t only about getting arms training and fighting; it was also about being excluded from the joys of life. Being a militant was also about the near certainty of arrest, torture, death, and killing.” Similarly, The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed offers a fictional yet immersive exploration into the life of a young Kashmiri man in a heavily militarized zone. Through his collection of ID cards from fallen militants, Waheed’s protagonist serves as a haunting testament to both the personal and collective trauma of living amidst conflict. The “militarized wilderness” metaphor is powerful in underscoring not only the physical violence but also presents a different context to revisit history. On the other hand, writers like Arvind Gigoo, Siddhartha Gigoo, Rahul Pandita, Varad Sharma, and Chandrakanta offer an alternative perspective by documenting the displacement and struggles of Kashmiri Pandits. Through anecdotal depictions that go beyond polarized historical narratives, these writers bring forth the diversity of experiences, reflecting the profound pain of losing one’s home and culture, as well as the empathy needed to navigate the layered identities. Both approaches—Waheed’s focus on the militarized experience and the empathetic recounting of Pandit displacement—highlight the unique role of literature in capturing complex human dimensions. These narratives challenge monolithic perspectives, revealing how individual stories intersect with broader socio-political narratives, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the conflict and its deeply human repercussions.

In this way, the anecdote does not contradict history but enriches it, filling gaps and offering perspectives that historical accounts alone cannot convey. By bringing these experiences to light, literature and anecdotal accounts reveal the human realities behind historical structures, creating a fuller, more empathetic understanding of our shared past.

Ghulam Mohammad Khan was born and raised in Sonawari (Bandipora); an outlying town located on the wide shores of the beautiful Wullar Lake. Ghulam Mohammad believes that literature is the most original and enduring repository of human memory. He loves the inherent intricacies of language and the endless possibilities of meaning. In his writing, he mainly focuses on mini-narratives, local practices and small-scale events that could otherwise be lost forever to the oblivion of untold histories. Ghulam Mohammad considers his hometown, faith, and family to be the most important things to him. He writes for a few local magazines and newspapers. His short story collection titled The Cankered Rose is his first major forthcoming work.

You can find more of Ghulam’s work here on Ink Pantry.