Sounds of Dispossession: Hindutva Pop and the Management of the Audible in Kashmir

Introduction

On August 5, 2019 the people in Kashmir woke up to the sound of helicopters, drones, and the announcement of an indefinite curfew. The Indian state deployed an expansive system of concertina wires, barricades, and checkpoints, with entry and exits being reconfigured every few hours. With half a million troopers already stationed in Kashmir, making it among the world’s highest militarized regions, an additional thirty-eight thousand troops were brought in. The acoustics of this carceral and vertiginous architecture, with its “compartmentalized system of spatial exclusion” and temporal control, were systematically engineered to coerce people into an obedient listening and to ensure a total soundproofing of the region.¹ Moreover, the state imposed a communications blockade across Kashmir, suspending mobile networks, landlines, internet, satellite television, newspapers, and postal services. 

As we remained under siege, Article 370 of the Indian Constitution was unilaterally and “militarily” removed.² Following the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 and Kashmir’s conditional merger with India, Article 370 had granted Kashmir nominal autonomy, including its own constitution and legislative powers, except in matters of foreign affairs, defense, and communications, pending the implementation of a United Nations-mandated plebiscite. Over subsequent decades, however, successive Indian governments substantially diluted these provisions. The revocation of Article 370 in 2019 led to the region’s total assimilation into the Indian constitutional order. It also rendered Article 35A — which safeguarded residency as well as land and property rights of the locals in the region — defunct.³ These revocations led to multiple further erasures, including accelerated land dispossession and extraction. Recent scholarship has examined these erasures through the analytic of settler colonialism and foregrounded how settler-colonial logics have historically undergirded India’s colonial control and military occupation in Kashmir since 1947.⁴

While the Indian state amplified a narrative of normalcy and development, reports of mass arbitrary detentions, night raids, torture, deaths, and protests were systematically obscured in the official narratives and across Indian media.⁵ Thus Kashmir was muted through an infrastructural siege as well as through an intensified narrative control, which not only sought to obscure state violence but also frame coercion as care. Simultaneously a barrage of what have been called “Hindutva pop” songs celebrating the revocation of Kashmir’s nominal autonomy proliferated outside the region through the internet.

The political ideology of Hindutva, often translated as “Hindu nationalism,” has been understood as “racist supremacism” and “fascism” rallying for the idea of India as a Hindu nation and its expansion into Akhand Bharat or Greater India, which includes much of the subcontinent.⁶ Hindutva’s ideologues in India and its global circuits have appropriated and weaponized indigeneity as well as co-opted decolonial thought towards their fascist politics.⁷

Rooted in this supremacist and expansionist ideology, Hindutva pop harps on exclusionist vocabularies and imaginaries, aggressive militarism and “muscular nationalism,” Islamophobia and misogyny, including upholding a culture of rape and lynching.⁸ Sung in several languages such as Bhojpuri, Hindi, and Haryanvi, Hindutva pop songs celebrating the removal of Article 370 were released by local music labels or independently operating YouTube channels with millions of subscribers. For instance, one such channel, Wave Music — which identifies itself as “a leading Bhojpuri music record label” — has about seventy million subscribers. (For comparison, that is more than twice the number of subscribers to the official YouTube channel of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi).

Sound’s entanglement with violence, particularly through music, has been examined in several contexts, among them the United States’ use of music as a torture weapon against “war on terror,” the use of iPods by American soldiers during the US invasion of Iraq, the appropriation of folk songs and religious hymns by the Nazi ideologues, and the culpability of Simon Bikindi’s music in the genocide against the Tutsis.⁹ This essay seeks to unpack how Hindutva pop circulated gendered and racialized settler logics and territorial assertion over Kashmir. Within the broader and growing genre of Hindutva pop — anchored in religious majoritarianism, militarism, territorial expansion, and anti-Muslim racism — Kashmir-focused songs form a large subgenre. Focusing primarily on songs released in celebration of Kashmir’s nominal autonomy being dissolved in August 2019, this essay demonstrates how the state’s systematic management of audibility,enacted through silencing Kashmir and the concurrent amplification of Hindutva pop, undergirded the territorial “annexation” of Kashmir.¹⁰

Hindutva pop operates under the patronage of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Hindutva pop singers have performed in BJP rallies and events, and openly boast about their connections with the BJP and other Hindu nationalist politicians. Their songs have been shared via widely subscribed BJP-linked accounts. A BJP legislator even performed a Hindutva pop song during a religious celebration rally in Hyderabad in 2022.¹¹ Examining Hindutva pop is crucial to grasping how Hindutva ideology operates at a granular level. Indeed, Hindutva ideologues explicitly frame cultural production as integral to the ideological consolidation within the Hindu right. In 2024, two BJP politicians attended the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Washington, DC, which sought to forge an ideological coalition of the global far right.¹² One of these figures was Ram Madhav, BJP member and former spokesperson of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) — the ideological fountainhead of Hindu supremacism; the other was Swapan Dasgupta, a journalist and the current finance minister of West Bengal.¹³ This was the first time Hindu nationalists were formally invited to the conference, where both Madhav and Dasgupta made the case that “India was best suited to lead this upsurge of conservatism.”¹⁴ Speaking about the rise of the right wing and the BJP’s success, Madhav attributed it to “cultural mobilization from below, [a] grassroots assertion of conservative ideology.”¹⁵ Hindutva “cultural” productions, such as Hindutva pop, are central to understanding this “grassroots” “cultural mobilization,” which is unmistakably and quite literally drenched in blood.

Hindutva pop songs are meant to violate and impinge upon many thresholds — of space, bodies, and hearing itself. As a Kashmiri Muslim woman — one among many toward whom this violence is directed — how does one listen from within this space-time of violation? Perhaps that entails crossing a threshold, too. This essay attempts precisely that: listening over and again; pausing, rewinding, repeating. Listening in order to disassemble the soundtrack to its constituent elements; to dismantle its wholeness, to arrest its tempo and attend to what lies beneath. Listening alongside other sounds, histories, spaces, and temporalities. Listening against and along the grain such that the conditions of production and circulation become audible: networks, ideologies, processes, techniques, and infrastructures that sustain Hindutva pop. In this essay, I am thinking with James Parker and Joel Stern’s invitation to hold “listening to matters of ethics, law, and politics” and to orient it toward “subversive practices of listening back.”¹⁶ I am thinking with Gascia Ouzounian’s and this issue’s notion of “counterlistening,” which entails “listening for evidence,” a listening that is “attuned to histories of appropriation, extraction, and oppression.”¹⁷ Finally, I am also thinking with Alison Young’s thesis of “listening criminologically,” which invites us to not only examine the entanglement of sound with regulation and resistance, but also to attend to sound’s materiality and relationality.¹⁸

Accordingly, the first section of this essay traces Hindutva pop’s continuities with audio cassette cultures and audio-visual productions of the 1990s, the Indian national television of the late 1980s and 1990s, and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s conception of music. The second section examines the Hindutva pop songs released following the abrogation of Article 370 in August 2019, delving into how the cultural apparatus of Hindutva pop, its lyrics and visual and sonic techniques, frame the revocation as the advent of a “new” temporal settler order. Further, it unpacks Hindutva pop’s settler assertion over land and women’s bodies and reveals how voice is enlisted toward such logics. Drawing from these threads, the concluding section foregrounds the Indian state’s infrastructures of silence as well as the structures that sustain the circulation of Hindutva pop to argue that the state’s systematic management of audibility is foundational to processes of territorialization. In other words, the saturation of Hindutva pop was entwined with the production of silence in Kashmir, elucidating how voice and sound are implicated in the production of territory.

Hindutva Pop’s Media Genealogy

My introduction to the songs of the right in India was through a forwarded WhatsApp message I received in 2015, a year after prime minister Modi’s coming to power, which saw a resurgence in the circulation of Hindutva audio-visual productions. It was a bhajan (or a devotional song) with the refrain:¹⁹

Oh Goddess Jagdambe, bless our brave soldiers
Along with Kashmir, give us the entire Pakistan too 
Hail Mother Ambe²⁰
[…]

A desire for Greater India, each one of us harbors
Every child of the nation is ready to sacrifice for you, Mother India
Along with Lahore and Karachi, give us Multan too 
Along with Kashmir, give us the entire Pakistan too (“Maa Jagdambe”)

The song, which I thought was an obscure WhatsApp forward, is in fact part of a devotional album released by T-Series — India’s largest music record label and the second-most subscribed and the top-most viewed YouTube channel in the world. The album was released about seven months after the anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat in 2002.

Since then, such songs have found a renewed and wider circulation, to the point that they are now ubiquitous. They are played during religious festivals and processions, election rallies, cultural functions, musical shows, and even used as ringtones. They serve as a background score to Instagram videos, such as the one showing Hindu “vigilantes beating a man, presumably Muslim, for transporting beef.”²¹ They circulate via YouTube, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter, while some are featured in the entertainment section of major news platforms like The Times of India.²² Hindu religious processions passing through Muslim neighborhoods in India blare Hindutva pop songs from their convoys of trucks equipped with DJs, powerful speakers, and sound systems, evoking Lautsprecherwagen of Nazi-era Europe. They create what Carolyn Birdsall calls a “sensory overwhelming and spatial omnipresence” toward “mass affirmative resonances in public spaces.”²³ Such scenes serve to “orchestrate sensory experience” and “facilitate the consumption of national mythology.”²⁴ Analyzing far-right music in the United Kingdom and Australia, Liam Gillespie argues that “nationalist soundscapes are a technique of sonic violence which nationalists use to ‘defend’ the nation by preserving and reproducing a national sensorium.”²⁵ Gillespie suggests that these soundscapes “not only play a role in allowing nationalists to colonize and (re)territorialize spaces, but also in constituting the very nationalist groups that come to occupy those spaces” — or in other words the very “production of collective nationalist bodies.”²⁶ Further, Gillespie, examining the relationship between sound and movement, notes that nationalists use sound“ both as they move and in order to move, projecting sound over and across space, ahead of themselves and in advance of their arrival.” Once they have arrived, they then work “to (re)territorialize space through the production of affective atmospheres that allow participants to connect to one another through the embodiment of the shared affects.”²⁷ A member of the BJP’s IT cell — known for its disinformation campaigns and coordinated trolling —described Hindutva pop as an “easy medium to propagate the message,” emphasizing that these songs “generate energy like no other medium.”²⁸ This “generation of energy,” as well as its circulation and currency, is tied to what Sara Ahmed has called “affective economies.”²⁹ As Ahmed notes in The Cultural Politics of Emotions, the “circulation of signs of hate involves movement and fixity; some bodies move precisely by sealing others as objects of hate.”³⁰ Hindutva pop’s affective economy is not only located in its discursive aspects but also in its sonic materiality and relationality (“the generation of energy”) through which the nationalist constellations of sound, bodies, space and movement are produced. These discursive, material, and relational capacities undergird the grassroots cultural mobilization which Ram Madhav pointed to at the NatCon conference in Washington.

Birdsall further notes how the Nazi party, following its seizure of power in 1933, increasingly rendered violence “festival-like” and how festivals (such as the carnival) were appropriated toward “radical exclusion.”³¹ In India, Hindutva pop songs — leveraging, Birdsall enables us to say, “sound to mark out territories”³² — have emerged as precursors to anti-Muslim pogroms and violence.³³ For instance, in April 2022, Ram Navami processions — large-scale public celebrations of the birth of Hindu deity Rama, held across India — became sites of anti-Muslim violence across several Indian cities. In nearly all cases Hindu nationalist mobs entered Muslim neighborhoods armed with swords, sticks, and guns, shouting communal slogans and playing Hindutva pop songs as they went.³⁴

Arvind Rajaopal argues that paying attention to the language of politics enables us to challenge the understanding of Hindutva as “a separable and aberrant phenomenon somehow existing apart from the mainstream of national politics.”³⁵ This is especially evident in Kashmir where normalization of violence and dispossession sustain the deeper state structures across political regimes. It is important, then, to situate the political project of Hindutva pop and its media ecosystems within a larger constellation of Hindutva audio-visual productions and the Hindu right’s broader conception of music, as well as the national television of the late 1980s and 1990s.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw India’s shift toward economic liberalization. This period witnessed an urgency in the “narration of nation” in films and songs.³⁶ It also saw an “opportunistic alliance” between economic reforms and Hindutva, with the Hindu right turning to cassette-tape and video-based communication for propaganda.³⁷ As Rajagopal writes, by the 1990s “Hindu nationalism participated in a new currency of images, building on possibilities that arose in the wake of economic liberalization and national television.”³⁸ Under the Congress government, India’s official broadcaster Doordarshan serialized and aired the Hindu epics Ramayan and Mahabharat in 1987 and 1989 respectively to “consolidate its Hindu vote and to profit from a growing consumer market.”³⁹ More importantly, “It was against the perceived truth of a golden Hindu past, declared week after week, that the opportunity of religious nationalist mobilization was eventually seized.”⁴⁰ This resulted in the largest political mobilization “around the symbol of Lord Ram” (the protagonist of the Ramayan and avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu) “led by Hindu nationalists” post-1947.⁴¹

In 1993 Peter Manuel examined the role of widely distributed audiocassettes — containing inflammatory songs and speeches — in the “grassroots” mobilization by the Hindu right, especially the “archetypically fascist” coalition of the BJP, the RSS, and the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP).⁴² Like the contemporary Hindutva pop, Manuel writes, these cassettes were “playing direct roles in instigating the wave of anti-Muslim riots and pogroms that subsequently swept north India, in which thousands of lives (mostly Muslim) have been lost.”⁴³ Tapes containing “bloodcurdling screams, gunfire, and inflammatory slogans were blared from speakers on cars that drove at night through tense neighborhoods of Agra, Ghaziabad, and elsewhere, bringing armed men into the streets and directly igniting riots.”⁴⁴ Despite the official ban, Hindutva cassettes continued to be circulated freely and were used during the 1993 regional elections, reinforcing the political messaging of the Hindu right. Although describing the 1990s, Manuel’s description of the heavily armed Hindu processions, the communal slogans, and the anti-Muslim violence of the time deeply resemble the present times.

Likewise Christiane Brosius examines the audiovisual materials used by the Hindu nationalist institutions between 1989 and 1993, which, like today, invoked Ayodhya and Kashmir as sites of Hindu nationalist belonging toward the “awakening” of the “dormant” Hindu, called upon to uphold India as a Hindu nation.⁴⁵ These materials were mainly produced by the Delhi-based Jain Studios, a video production company set up in 1985 by a member of the RSS. The techniques and grammar of these productions — such as the idiom of devotional song and films songs, the documentary form, stock footage, voice-overs, or sound effects — continues to inform the visual and aural language of Hindutva pop. Brosius notes that the filmic renditions of the BJP’s political pilgrimages across India functioned as “audio-visual living maps,” constructing “a ‘new’ virtual cartography of India, based on an itinerary that employs patriotic sites as tools of orientation and order.”⁴⁶ An excerpt from Brosius’s interview with L.K. Advani (one of the BJP’s founding members and leaders who led the Ram Rath Yatra), provides a peek into Hindutva’s turn toward “popular culture, in particular, religious imagery, narratives and practices”:⁴⁷

I hold that in India the religious appeal is very intense, extremely intense. It cuts across all caste and linguistic divisions. So, when we undertook this Rath yatra [i.e., political pilgrimage] to affirm that this is a temple, this should be a temple, and that the whole country should contribute towards the construction of the temple . . . We tried to interpret it as a political campaign against pseudo-secularism. But there were masses who viewed it as a religious issue. And so there was a massive appeal.⁴⁸

Moreover, it is important to locate Hindutva pop’s activation of nationalist collectivities within the Hindu right’s broader ideological conception of music. Music has been central to Hindutva since the RSS’s inception, with its musical wing established about two years later. RSS founder K. B. Hedgewar introduced an all-male band to “support marches, make them disciplined and uniform, and thereby bring in unity in Hindu society.”⁴⁹ Alongside weapons training camps, military drills, and marches, the RSS organizes large-scale band camps and musical events centered on cultivating homogeneity and control. Such musical events are integral to the RSS’s recruitment and mobilization strategy. At one such event in 2017, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat framed the RSS’s development of its own musical repertoire as an effort to address the absence and harness the potential of an Indian battlefield song tradition. Bhagwat described RSS’s musical regime as a means of evoking “feelings” directed toward the nation’s service, with “unisonance” and “collective” belonging at its core.⁵⁰ This again foregrounds how sound and its affective force are central to the formation of far-right collectivities.

Hindutva Pop After the Revocation of Article 370

It is worth noting that the production and circulation of Hindutva pop songs throughout 2019 unfolded alongside the advancement of key Hindutva agendas and within broader electoral dynamics, contributing to popular mobilization and consolidation toward India’s fascist project. 

A clear and striking overlap emerges when one examines the Hindutva pop songs produced in 2019 alongside BJP’s political trajectory and key decisions of that year. In February 2019, ahead of the general elections, an attack on an army convoy in Kashmir’s Pulwama district resulted in the deaths of 40 Indian paramilitary personnel. In response, Hindutva pop criticizing the government for its complacency rallied for the revocation of Article 370. In the lead-up to the general elections in April–May 2019, a wave of songs emerged, campaigning for Narendra Modi and offering votes in exchange for action on the long-standing Hindutva demands such as the demolition of the Babri Mosque and the abrogation of Article 370. Following Modi’s electoral victory, celebratory songs reinforced these calls, emphasizing the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya and the removal of Kashmir’s special status. When Article 370 was revoked in August 2019, a new barrage of Hindutva pop songs celebrated the move, while also invoking other key promises — most notably, the construction of the temple in Ayodhya. Just months later, on November 9, 2019, the Supreme Court of India cleared the way for its construction. Hindutva pop, thus, is instrumental in the strategically timed mobilization toward India’s fascist project.

The calls for the revocation of Kashmir’s nominal autonomy had emerged as a recurring theme within the Hindutva popular music for at least a year prior to its official announcement. The removal of Article 370 on August 5 initiated a spate of activities. As Kashmir remained under a brutal siege, Bollywood filmmakers rushed to register film titles such as Article 370, Article 370 Abolished, Kashmir Mein Tiranga (Tricolour in Kashmir), or Kashmir Hamara Hai (Kashmir is Ours), among others; at least fifty titles were registered with various registration bodies.⁵¹ An eatery in New Delhi offered an “Article 370 Platter,” a “United India Platter” to celebrate the revocation.⁵² Ten days later, on India’s 73rd Independence Day, UK-based confectioners Cadbury launched a Unity Bar, “India’s first chocolate made of dark, blended, milk and white chocolate — all united in one bar” to “celebrate a country that stands united in its diversity.”⁵³ The Union Information and Broadcasting Minister released a single track, “Watan,” as a tribute to “new India” whose music video opens with picturesque visuals of Kashmir and features displays of national progress and military might.⁵⁴ The lyrics of the song are telling: “time has come for what has never been materialized before / eyes fixed on the future / crossing every limit / with choicest embellishments, O Nation, you shall be adorned.”⁵⁵

Within hours of the announcement that Article 370 had been revoked, as Kashmir remained under siege, India’s social media was inundated with Hindutva pop songs circulating widely across multiple networks. These songs enact what Dylan Robinson calls “settler colonial forms of perception,” structured by logics of “possession” and “extraction.”⁵⁶ Through an analysis of the songs produced in that period, I will return to explore more fully how Hindutva pop frames the revocation of Kashmir’s nominal autonomy as the onset of a declared “new” temporal order. In other words, settler extraction does not only entail control over land and bodies, but also over time. Using this context, I will then trace Hindutva pop’s settler assertion for territorial possession and control over women’s bodies — logics that have long been central to the military occupation of Kashmir and that persist within the Indian nationalist imaginary of the region.

The “semiotics of Indian fascism” via which the Hindu nation is narrated in Hindutva pop songs does not only operate through the logic of the lyrics but through the technics of image-making and sound design.⁵⁷ Repetition and simplification are central to how meaning is constructed and circulated within and through these pop songs, toward creating and sustaining (again in Rajagopal’s words) the “singular truth of the nation.”⁵⁸ Hindutva pop music is low-budget and leverages the affordances of social media platforms, especially in the repetition of form and content. Specifically, this repetition comprises the reproduction of key lyrical arcs, visual and sonic elements, and editing techniques, and it is the aggregation of these components that defines Hindutva pop as a genre. This produces, as Anirban Baishya writes, “an aesthetic of seriality and repetition that becomes key to the work of techno-fascist politics.”⁵⁹ In other words, these easily replicable and reproducible elements operate as a kind of DIY toolkit, enabling the rapid production and widespread circulation of content that amplifies a common ideological message. Hindutva’s mediated violence, as Baishya argues, must be viewed “as part of an ecosystem of violent articulations” where “each instance of violence becomes a node in networked circulation, replication, and repetition.”⁶⁰ Further, this mediated violence “exists in constant dialogue and exchange” with Hindutva violence beyond the platforms.⁶¹

The Settler “Now”

The Indian state, as I have argued elsewhere, has long sought to assimilate Kashmir into its national temporal fold.⁶² The revocation of Kashmir’s nominal autonomy was announced as a savior mission, a “break from the past,” to reorient Kashmir back into the path of progress toward a brighter future.⁶³ In his speeches, Manoj Sinha, the New Delhi-installed head administrator in Kashmir, repeatedly framed Kashmir’s future as a project of “accelerated pace of development” and “unprecedented progress” toward “building modern India.”⁶⁴ Modi proclaimed that a “new age has dawned” which will “liberate the people of the region and bring them closer to the rest of the country.⁶⁵ What this developmental jargon obscures is the acceleration of India’s settler logics — ordaining Kashmir’s future as a site of a permanent and multimodal extraction. Moreover, the revocation was justified as a rescue project for Kashmir’s women and framed as an intervention aimed at gender equality and women’s empowerment.⁶⁶

Scholars have long since not only dismantled such claims by questioning their legal premises but also underscored how the state’s supposed rescue and emancipation of women is grounded in its territorial control over and erasure of Kashmir.⁶⁷

The advent of this settler temporal order is a recurring trope in Hindutva pop songs. A settler assertion over land is announced through the proclamation of a new “now.” In Hindutva pop, this settler “now” points to a temporal reset and Kashmir’s temporal assimilation into nationalist time. For example, this assertion is evident in a music video with the refrain, “the tiranga [i.e., tricolor, or the Indian flag] will now unfurl in Kashmir.” The song, titled “Dhara 370” (or “Article 370”), was released by Sonotek on August 5, 2019 — the day of the revocation. The song has amassed 3.1 million views as of August 2026.⁶⁸ It also featured in the entertainment section of India’s highest-read English-language newspaper, The Times of India’s website. Here is an excerpt of the lyrics (in translation):

What couldn’t be achieved in seventy years 
Modi has made it possible
From the pages of our history
Article 370 has been erased
We shall celebrate, and no one can stop us
The tricolor will now unfurl in Kashmir (“Dhara 370”)

The song also references the RSS’s and prime minister Modi’s assertions of a singular national identity: “one nation and one symbol.” For years, Modi and his government have repeatedly called for “one flag, one constitution,” and the RSS for “one nation, one culture.” The Indian state’s attempt to integrate Kashmir within India and assert territorial control over the region has come to be anchored in the act of hoisting the Indian flag in Kashmir, particularly in the city’s main square, which the Hindu right has long pursued as part of its political agenda.⁶⁹ This new temporal order is reinforced through proclamations such as “Kashmir is ours now” and “Kashmir has been freed now.”

“Dhara 370” is fast-paced, with auto-tuned vocals throughout; a consistent programmed dhol rhythm lends the song a sense of forward movement and energy. The dhol, a double-sided percussion instrument popular across South Asia, is commonly played at weddings, religious processions, and other cultural festivities. One side produces a deep, resonant bass thump, while the other produces a sharper, higher-pitched slap. In the track, the dhol is a key element, propelling the song’s tempo, while punctuating it with an assertive and triumphant tone. This sense of triumph is then reinforced through the refrain, “The tricolour will now unfurl in Kashmir.”

The song’s visual grammar is likewise ideologically oriented toward settler logics. For instance, the music video opens with wide-angle and aerial shots of the landscape, abruptly cutting to a medium close-up of India’s home minister, Amit Shah, speaking in the Parliament, followed by combat visuals. The next scene reveals the singer against a backdrop of Kashmir’s snow-laden mountains, produced through chroma-key compositing — effectively a green screen.⁷⁰ In the Sonotek song, the digitally constructed setting is Kashmir’s landscape devoid of its people. Over this setting constituted through the “discursive elision of the body from the landscape,” a disproportionately large Indian flag is graphically superimposed. Kashmir is reduced, quite literally, to a mute backdrop against which the nationalist voice, proclaiming the new “now,” clamors.⁷¹ These sequences occur in a repetitive loop throughout the video. This repetition of a fixed set of references and a cumulative visual ordering undergirds the formal logic of Hindutva pop.

In addition to Kashmir’s landscapes, combat footage, and images of BJP politicians, this cumulative logic also operates through the harnessing of religious iconography, stock and archival footage, and visuals of recording equipment, including microphones and mixing consoles. The use of archival footage and text overlays invokes an evidentiary visual grammar and leverages the documentary form’s claims to truth and facticity. A song by the Touchwood Girls which has about 1.78 million views is interspersed with such text overlays.⁷² One of these overlays appears in Hindi as well as English, titled “How Article 35A Hurt the People of Jammu & Kashmir,” framing the abrogation as a reprieve from impediments to investment and economic growth. In the video, three women singing against the backdrop of the Parliament House in New Delhi proclaim a new “now” through a narrative of recovery:

The rallying cry of “one nation, one constitution” resounds once again
We belong to Kashmir, and now, Kashmir is ours (“Ye Kashmir Humara Hai,” emphasis added)

Here “once again” signals a recovery: a restoration of the nation’s wholeness. Kashmir’s annexation through the revocation of Article 370 is framed as a fulfilment of a desire for nationalist possession and belonging. The song’s rhythm is anchored by the dafli, a handheld frame drum similar to a tambourine. Compared to “Dhara 370,” this song unfolds at a slower pace and features a wider dynamic range; its pace and relatively quiet moments establish a sense of calm certainty. Relying on the trope of paradisiacal Kashmir, the song further underscores Kashmir’s instrumentalization toward the political consolidation of Hindutva, figured as a “surge of saffron”:

Oh Kashmir, you are the ultimate heaven — what a breathtaking sight!
To you, we owe the surge of saffron in India […]
We belong to Kashmir, and now, Kashmir is ours (“Ye Kashmir Humara Hai”)

The video opens with visuals of Kashmir’s snow-laden landscapes. A voice echoes an Urdu verse: “Kashmir, the beautiful refrain of the universe’s poetry / that no poet could ever fully describe.” It is important to point out that Urdu is reductively cast as a Muslim language. It is not only exoticized but also framed as “foreign” and has been the target of a sustained crackdown by the Hindu right. This poetic voice is abruptly followed by Amit Shah’s parliamentary announcement of the revocation of Article 370. This associative logic, especially through sound, encodes both a longer genealogy of Kashmir’s representation as a “territory of desire” — articulated here through the poetic invocation — and a culmination of that desire through the “annexation” of Kashmir.

The assemblage of varied sonic registers, such as parliamentary speeches, military parades, religious chants, and party beats is a recurring formal logic in Hindutva pop. This also includes digitally produced “conch, war drums, and bells” in order to inspire heroism and “incite aggression.”⁷³ The genre also appropriates folk, religious, and devotional music and grammar, toward normalization of its violent logics — akin to how Nazi ideologues, as Birdsall writes, instrumentalized the notion of the “ethnic German “‘folk’ identity and culture” toward nationalist agenda. Moreover Birdsall explains how traditional repertoires were appropriated as “symbolic bridge[s] between past and present,” and military victories were imbued with a religious symbolism in Nazi campaign songs.⁷⁴ The similarities between Hindutva pop and the Nazi Party’s mobilization of sound are striking. In Nazi Germany, religious hymns were appropriated to reinforce “Hitler’s status as an infallible leader pre-ordained by God.”⁷⁵ Modi has likewise ascribed divinity to himself: Hindutva pop as well as members of his party celebrate him as an incarnation of God to “end the atmosphere of despair.”⁷⁶ Hindutva pop, therefore, should be understood within a longer history of nationalist projects drawing on discourses of sacralization and deification and activating various media apparatuses to shape and circulate these discourses — toward normalizing, legitimizing and naturalizing exclusion and extermination.

In his essay on the use of pop music in the 2012 US presidential campaigns, Justin Patch asserts that “the artifice of popular music is embedded in the project of nationalism.”⁷⁷ Examining popular music’s ideological shaping of past, present and future, Patch notes that campaign and popular music “exist in an assemblage of facts, fictions, imaginings, affects, and ideologies” which generate simultaneously a “timeless and modern” affect by “constructing and narrating a mythical past and utopian future.”⁷⁸ Through its lyrics, sonics, and visual techniques, Hindutva pop also harps on a mythical, glorified Hindu past, a recovered present through a savior narrative, and a settler future in relation to Kashmir. Further, it enacts what Brian Massumi calls the “operative logic of preemption” with its locus in the future, producing and continually circulating a narrative of an imminent threat, while simultaneously offering a pathway to an imagined utopia of a Hindu nation.⁷⁹

Moreover, Hindutva pop lyrics reference sound itself as a technology of control. In other words, Hindutva pop lyrics frame control and domination over Kashmir’s territory in sonic terms. It enacts an aggressive mobilization of sound against an imposed soundlessness. This is most prominent in Laxmi Dubey’s song, “Har Gahr Bhagwa Chhayega” (“Saffron Will Take Over Every Home”).⁸⁰ Dubey, whose incendiary songs are popular in political rallies, rose to prominence following Modi’s ascent to power in 2014. The song was first uploaded to YouTube in 2017, and subsequent continuations were released over the years across multiple platforms, including Apple Music and Shazam, garnering millions of views.⁸¹ Although this particular song does not directly address the revocation, it does repeatedly invoke Kashmir. It is punctuated by calls for a unisonant chanting of “Hail Lord Ram, Hail Lord Ram.” The repeated invocation of “pukarti,” derived from the verb “pukarna” (“to call out”), recurs throughout as a call to action, toward the “awakening” of the dormant Hindu.⁸² The first version of the track begins with forceful percussion, followed by dramatic music that evokes a battle scene. Its call-and-response structure relies on repetitive slogans and chants, which — together with the dhol’s steady, forceful tempo — create a sense of forward momentum, urgency, and collective belonging. The song announces the onset of a “renewed” history and enacts a resounding territorial assertion over Kashmir:

Mother India is calling, over and again:
Smear your foreheads with blood, and perform the ritual of aarti with bullets
Kashmir is calling on you, Mother India calls on you
Smear your foreheads with blood, and perform the ritual of aarti with bullets

Every nook and corner will echo
exultations of Lord Ram
Without Ram, this is country is but naught —
go tell the governments

If you wish to live in Hindustan,
You must say Vande Mataram [Salutations to the Motherland] […]
Kashmir is ours
In its entirety, it is ours (“Har Gahr Bhagwa Chhayega”)

Here, thus, sound’s materiality is discursively invoked, for instance, through the registers of “calling” and “echo.” Moreover, it is clear from such examples that sonic materiality does not merely act as a medium but is an active agent in shaping the affective force of Hindutva pop (“the generation of energy”) in producing nationalist collectivities and enacting territorialization.

Indeed, this referencing of the sound itself is a recurring trope within Hindutva pop released following the abrogation of Article 370. For instance, a song by Kavi Singh foregrounds both sound as a material force as well as listening itself toward the announcement of a restored “now.”⁸³ (The song has nearly thirty-six million views as of August 2026.) Dressed in a white kurta, a vest, and a colorful turban, with a tilak on her forehead, Singh is chroma-keyed onto Kashmir’s landscape, with a graphically imposed Indian flag atop a mountain. To the left of the screen, an Indian map appears with a saffron turban wrapped around Kashmir, its flowing ends extending across its cartographic length and breadth, as Singh sings forth:

Now slogans of Lord Ram will reverberate in the valley of Kashmir [. . . ]
Listen carefully traitors, give up your treachery
Either seal the burrows you’re hiding in or leave the country and run away. [. . . ]
Today, the whole world has heard India’s roar 
It feels like a true government now rules my nation
On this joyous occasion, Kavi Singh sings 
And bows in reverence for the martyrs who died for the country
Say with pride, 
I bow to thee, Motherland (“Dhara 370 Patriotic Song 2023,” emphasis added)

Dafli’s resonant thump and metallic timbre propel the track forward and lend the song a festive character. Assertive vocals paired with a slower tempo also imbue it with a sense of certainty. This song, like several other Hindutva pop songs, includes the names of the singers or their associates in the lyrics, positioning their individual voices directly within the violent settler logics. Indeed, the referencing of sound through expressions such as “roar” and “reverberate,” as well as the inclusion of proper names, underscores how sound, and voice in particular, is implicated in the assertion of territorial control. The inclusion of names — authorial and producer tags — also evidences the impunity with which these singers and producers operate. 

Listening to these songs alongside the silence enforced through the siege and the communications blockade of 2019 reveals how voice operates as a technique of territorialization. 

Iris Sandjette Blake’s astute framework of “voice-as-territory” enables us to attend to how “sound and the physical occupation of colonial territory are intertwined in discursive and physical ways.”⁸⁴ Although Blake is writing about the nineteenth-century scientific, medical, and pedagogical shaping of the “vocal apparatus” in colonial Algeria and settler colonialism in North America, her framework enables us to attend to other configurations of voice, regulation, and territoriality.

Hindutva pop’s sonic assertions announcing a settler present operate in tandem with the logics of the siege and the imposed soundlessness; they overwrite Kashmir’s muted voice and actively bolster the erasures that mark Kashmir. They point not merely to the normalization, but to the blatant assertion of majoritarian aggression through sound and voice. In Hindutva pop, voice, therefore, is not only a medium but also the message. The Indian state’s management of audibility through the concurrent production of silence and the settler assertion over land and women’s bodies through a massive volume of Hindutva pop, then, directly implicates “voice” in territorialization.

Settler Desire: Land and Women’s Bodies

A day after Article 370 was revoked, a BJP legislator, explaining the benefits of the revocation, remarked that the party workers were excited about being able to marry “fair” Kashmiri girls; “the bachelors,” he said, “could now settle in Kashmir by buying land and getting married.”⁸⁵ Similarly Haryana’s chief minister, Manohar Lal Khattar, stated that “People nowadays have started saying the route to Kashmir is cleared and we will now bring girls from Kashmir.”⁸⁶ This rhetoric was centered on “the objectification and misogynist fetishization of Kashmiri Muslim women.”⁸⁷ Social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter were flooded with videos of men “asserting victory by claiming they can now ‘get girls’ from Kashmir.”⁸⁸ According to Google Trends data, there was a surge in searches such as “Marry Kashmiri girl,” “Move to Kashmir,” “Buy land in Kashmir” following the blockade.⁸⁹

This colonial fetishization of Kashmir’s women in conjunction with a settler claim over land— an entitlement to both Kashmir’s territory and women’s bodies — emerged as a dominant theme within the widely circulated Hindutva pop songs. Images of Kashmir brides superimposed onto picturesque Kashmiri landscapes commonly appeared as YouTube thumbnails for these songs.⁹⁰

A Bhojpuri song released on August 8, 2019 by Maa Jaanki Series (Mother Sita Series) — a music record label founded in 1996 and primarily focusing on Bhojpuri music — underscores the gendered and racialized settler logics of the songs.⁹¹ This track entitled, “Laib Kashmir Se Dulhaniya” (“I Will Get a Bride from Kashmir”) articulates what Nivedita Menon calls “proclamations of conquest and plunder” against Kashmiri women:⁹²

Oh brother, Article 370 has been removed
Oh yeah, Oh yeah
Now we will bring Muslim brides from Kashmir
We will go and buy land in Kashmir (“Laib Kashmir Se”)

The song’s thumbnail portrays a Kashmiri bride in red bridal attire and the singer against a blingy indigo background. At the top of the image, bold Hindi text states that Article 370 has been removed from Kashmir. Dominating the center of the thumbnail is the song title, rendered in large, brightly colored Hindi lettering: “I will get a bride from Kashmir.” At the bottom, a credit for the vocals identifies Vishwanath Anand and includes his phone number, while additional text provides lyricist, music, and recording credits. The song itself opens with spoken references to the record label and recording studio. It features auto-tuned vocals and progresses through a sustained dhol rhythm combined with a prominent repetitive electronic beat. In addition to the lyrics, the track is punctuated by colloquial catchy verbal hooks, such as the vocative “Eho” or “Hey/O.” The song maintains a euphoric momentum as it proclaims a new “now” defined by buying land in and bringing brides from Kashmir.

In another song released by Haryanvi Lok Geet (Haryanvi Folk Songs) on August 5, the opening lines — voicing Modi — frame the revocation as a response to those criticizing him for failing to deliver a key promise in the BJP electoral manifesto. The song ventriloquizes for Modi, “I heard too many taunts / That’s why I had to revoke Article 370.”⁹³ Its thumbnail features a wedding couple posed against a scenic backdrop of mountains and pine trees. The title, “Bahu Kashmir Ki” (“Daughter-in-Law from Kashmir”), is displayed prominently across the center of the image in large cursive lettering. A bright red banner bearing the text “Artical 370 [sic]” appears below the title. Additional text identifies the singer and music label, and “2019” appears vertically along the right edge of the thumbnail. As in the previous song, “marriage” here encodes violence, possession, and extraction. Here, too, the track exudes euphoria and is predominantly driven by consistent electronic beats and other synth elements, including regional melodic patterns. It claims control over Kashmir’s territory and women’s bodies through the gendered, colonial trope of Kashmir’s hospitality, exoticization of women, and assertions of masculine virility:

Oh, thank you Modi for you have achieved an incredible feat
Boys from Haryana will go to Kashmir as grooms
Now in the summers, we will get attended to by our Kashmiri in laws,
No more brides from Bihar — we will now get brides from Kashmir

For the first time the government has heard the pleas of bachelors
Kashmir is in dire need of the bulls of Haryana
The alluring fairies and mountain queens…
No more brides from Bihar — we will now get brides from Kashmir (“Bahu Kashmir Ki”)

A chilling detail in an essay by Tanika Sarakar, written in the aftermath of the Gujarat pogrom, underscores this violent sexual obsession with Muslim bodies:

VHP [Vishva Hindu Parishad] leaflets, openly circulating in Gujarat today, signed by the state general secretary, Chinubhai Patel, promise: “We will cut them and their blood will flow like rivers. We will kill Muslims the way we destroyed Babri mosque.” This is followed by a poem: “The volcano which was inactive… has erupted / It has burnt the arse of miyas and made them dance nude / We have untied the penises that were tied till now / We have widened the tight vaginas of the bibis…”⁹⁴

This phallic nationalism and normalization of rape and lynching is central to Hindutva communications. The colonial and settler logics in the song above are also sounded through an invocation of Kashmir’s pastoral bliss and home and marital domesticity.

We will get a plot in the mountains and build a mansion
In the courtyard, we will park our car and motorcycles, tie our buffaloes
DS Nirwaniyaa and Gurdeep Dubbal had to tell this story
No more brides from Bihar — we will now get brides from Kashmir (“Bahu Kashmir Ki”)

The pastoral has long functioned as a mode to obscure colonial violence and dispossession through an idealization of leisure, harmony, and repose; naturalizing domination and recasting coercion as care.⁹⁵ Writing about the musical pastoral, Ian Biddle asserts that the genre dwells in the logic of “abundance in enclosure.” The pastoral, he argues, “constitutes an attempt to represent as ideal or beautiful the exile of bodies to deadly silence, a mute Arcadian scene in which cries of suffering are permanently stifled.”⁹⁶ Hindutva pop similarly invokes the pastoral toward settler assertion over land, at the same moment that Kashmir remained under siege. In other songs too, Kashmir is imagined not just as a summer holiday destination, but as a bonanza for economic adventure, with recurring themes of purchasing land and setting up juice parlors and rice mills.⁹⁷

This settler euphoria operates through songs’ fullness, repetitive beats, and insistent rhythm. It is also rooted in the construction of Kashmir as what Ananya Jahanara Kabir calls “territory of desire” — primarily through Bollywood and tourism, which has rendered Kashmir as a pastoral “landscape of love.”⁹⁸ This desire, Kabir notes, is closely tied to India’s territorial claims on the region.⁹⁹

Another articulation of this desire is rooted in the construction of the Indian nation as the goddess Bharat Maata (Mother India), which is central to Hindu nationalist politics and its cultural productions. In this divine imaginary of the nation, thebody of the goddess-mother is superimposed onto an expansionist map of Greater India, drawing from the spatial logics of British colonial cartography.¹⁰⁰ This imaginary also dwells in the “romanticised visions of an Indian Arcadia or a Hindu Golden Age,” rooted in “nationalist desire” and claims to “territorial nationality.”¹⁰¹

In this “bodyscape of Mother India,” Kashmir is figured as the goddess’s gold-crowned head.¹⁰² It is positioned as the ultimate embodiment of this nationalist desire. This spatial order is not only tied to the relegation of certain geographies as “sacred” but also to the cosmological order underpinned by hierarchical conceptions of geography, body, polity, and society — structured around an ideology of purity.¹⁰³ This “landscape-system” is further woven into a network of pilgrimages through a “grammar of sanctification” and is constituted “cumulatively” through a constant repetition and circulation of a system of references, as we have seen.¹⁰⁴ The fusing together of the scientific, the romantic, the cosmological, the religious, and the familial (mother) into the map of India forms the locus of the Hindutva project. Within this frame, the circulation of “home” merged into a map-goddess evokes not only a desire for the lost territory (Greater India), thus constituting the “Hindu” as “homeless,” but also evokes a “cartographic anxiety” of invasions, fueling the movement for reclaiming the lost “home.”¹⁰⁵

This gendered territorial imaginary is at the heart of the Indian state’s politics in Kashmir: the body must not be severed, the head decapitated. This framing activates a trope of saving, which translates into a hyper-masculine nationalist duty of protection. It is toward this duty that the dormant Hindu is repeatedly called to “awaken.” For instance, Hamlavar Khabadar Hindustan Hai Taiyar (Attackers Beware, India Is Ready), a thirty-nine minute video produced by Jain Studios in 1990 rallying for abolishing Kashmir’s special status, invokes “Mother India” as a narrator. Kashmir is presented as the “Eden” of India, toward which the greedy gaze of the enemies is directed. As Brosius writes, such examples “personify territory as a woman and make her the focus of (male) nationalist desire and jealousy.”¹⁰⁶

However, the construction of Kashmir as a locus of nationalist desire is not only confined to the Hindutva imaginary. It is very much part of the Indian secular liberal imaginary as well.¹⁰⁷ For instance India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote about his wanderings “possessed and drunk with beauty” in Kashmir, describing the valley with “its feminine beauty of river and valley and lake and graceful trees.”¹⁰⁸ Nehru’s account is thus premised on the gendering — and indeed sexualizing — of Kashmir’s landscape.¹⁰⁹ Perry Anderson calls Nehru’s description “a dithyramb of sexualized gush to embarrass a tourist brochure.”¹¹⁰ Likewise Hafsa Kanjwal shows that India’s tourist propaganda materials “replicated Nehru’s colonial and gendered gaze toward Kashmir through the bodies of Kashmiri women.”¹¹¹ Several guidebooks, she points out, reproduce the “continued fascination with the ‘Kashmiri belle,’” and depict “orientalized images of rustic beauty.”¹¹² This gendering, as Mona Bhan argues, is also evident in the Indian military’s comparing of Kashmir’s landscapes to women’s bodies and the assertion of its masculine presence over these feminized landscapes.¹¹³ India’s construction of Kashmir as an object of desire thus relies on gendered figurations of landscape and women toward its territorial claims over the region.

It is through these long-constructed imaginaries that settler desire for land and women is articulated and normalized in Hindutva pop, rendered legible and consumable through the songs’ visual and aural strategies. These strategies are optimized for wide circulation and algorithmic visibility across digital platforms.

The Infrastructure of Silence and Management of the Audible

On August 9, 2019, three days after the Indian state abrogated Kashmir’s nominal autonomy, several international media organizations reported that thousands of people took to the streets in Srinagar’s Soura in protest. The police opened fire and used tear gas against the protestors. The Indian government denied that the protests took place and dismissed the reportage, adding that the videos of the protests were “fabricated.”¹¹⁴ As the state repeatedly maintained that the “situation is peaceful” and “life is returning to normal,” there were at least five instances of death directly linked to the actions of the armed forces.¹¹⁵ Thousands of men, including young boys in their early and mid-teens, were subjected to arbitrary detentions by the state’s armed forces during widespread military raids — including midnight raids — across the region. There were also disturbing accounts of torture from across the region. This offers only a glimpse into the workings of the silencing apparatus, one that controls and stifles Kashmiri voices by sustaining a culture of terror, controlling the narrative, and by literally gagging: speaking about August 2019, a torture survivor recounts, “They put mud in our mouths. They said, ‘Don’t scream, don’t scream, why are you screaming?’”¹¹⁶

The Indian state has long deployed silence as a technique of control. Kashmir’s silence is either idealized through an evocation of its serene “stillness” or framed as a return to “normalcy.” Sound studies scholars have argued for decentering the assumption that “peacetime is quiet and wartime is noisy.”¹¹⁷ In Kashmir, silence — far from being an index of peace and normalcy— is not ancillary but systemic to the military occupation in the region. In other words, the production and sustaining of silence cannot be understood as an exception or merely as a repressive tactic, but rather as the norm, foundational to Indian control in Kashmir and its material and discursive consolidation. Death and disappearance, torture, sexual violence, and other forms of state terror enact silences of multiple kinds. In Kashmir, the production of silence is also entwined with the multiple synergised apparatuses and logics such as the military-industry complex; surveillance architecture; the judicial, medical, and carceral apparatus; military-humanitarianism; and the broader convergence of logics of military occupation, settler colonialism, and colonialism. These mechanisms and infrastructures constitute the overarching silencing apparatus which operates through and reinforces spatial and temporal control — a control over bodies and voices.

In the immediate and longer period following August 5, 2019, Kashmir saw a massive expansion of the already robust surveillance architecture. In particular a wide net of high-resolution CCTV cameras with facial recognition technology were installed, accompanied by a scaling up of aerial surveillance using visible and invisible drones for “mapping” areas.¹¹⁸ This expansion also included gathering data on latitude-longitude coordinates of properties, statuses of CCTV installation in the premises, and photographs of the house and family members, in addition to key biodata.

The state, moreover, resorted to an unprecedented level of narrative control via cybersurveillance, and control over digital and media infrastructures such as internet blockades. The region witnessed a systematic targeting of journalists, human rights activists, lawyers, and academics among other individuals. These practices were later consolidated through the establishment of units such as “Dial 100” and “Ecosystem of Narrative Terrorism” aimed at data gathering and targeted surveillance of individuals, including journalists, human rights activists, lawyers and academics.¹¹⁹ This data gathering has been followed by a subsequent punitive action through invoking anti-terror laws, impounding passports, and imposing travel restrictions. As the state intensified land dispossession, extraction, and demographic restructuring, it simultaneously bolstered its silencing apparatus, wielding control over territory, body, and voice. Thus territorial annexation operated in tandem with mechanisms of silencing, each reinforcing the other. Framing Kashmir through a settler colonial analytic, Haris Zargar and Goldie Osuri succinctly argue, “The settler colonial project undertakes the simultaneous strategies of land dispossession and narrative dispossession.”¹²⁰ This leads to “epistemic/discursive erasure to ensure that the Kashmiri Muslim native does not occupy the position of indigeneity in relation to land or even in relation to the narrative of a dispossessing land grab.”¹²¹

The systematic management of audibility dictates which bodies move, what sounds and narratives circulate. The convergence of Hindutva with neoliberal, market-driven logics gives rise to a form of technofascism that fosters what Shakuntala Banaji calls “vigilante publics,” sustained through Hindutva communications.¹²² According to Banaji, vigilante publics “describe the wholesale co-optation of India’s caste Hindu and Jain populations to the cause of the Indian far right.” While these publics, Banaji argues, are pervaded by a fascist consciousness, they are, in turn, an indispensable base for state fascism. Sahana Udupa, conceptualizing the “enterprise Hindutva” as a “mediatized form of Hindu nationalism shaped largely by the affordances of social media and the cultural practices surrounding them,” similarly highlights how the BJP strategically leveraged social media during 2014 elections how it “continued to be at the center of the party’s public face.”¹²³ She notes that the BJP’s IT cell “evolved into a significant wing of the party, drawing support from fully paid workers to manage the ‘digital assets’ of the party and (unpaid) volunteers.”¹²⁴ Indeed, BJP’s IT cell amplifies Hindutva pop songs across social media, and helps sustain their continuous circulation.¹²⁵ Moreover a June 2026 report by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH) documents the complicity of four major digital platforms — YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, and Meta — which not only host Hindutva pop but, through their recommendation algorithms, monetization, and advertising systems, also amplify and incentivize its continued production and circulation. Despite violating the platforms’ content policies, these songs continue to be financially sustained through them, making them significant sources of “financial patronage.”¹²⁶

Thus, Hindutva pop singers and BJP politicians exist in a symbiotic system: the politicians leverage the singers’ popularity and expansive following across social media platforms towards electoral gains, and the singers continue to produce content that drives platform visibility, generates revenue, and expands their political influence. Documenting at length the proximity of Hindutva pop singers and their managers to BJP politicians and members of the RSS, Kunal Purohit writes about how singer Kanhiya Mittal — ahead of February 2022 elections in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Punjab — emerged as a popular campaigner for the BJP.¹²⁷ Mittal, known for his devotional songs especially in northern India promoted Hindutva “as an almost organic extension of his devotional music.”¹²⁸

Together, these infrastructures reveal the apparatus that manages audibility in Kashmir. They also reveal how the control over voice is foundational to territorialization.

Concluding Remarks

The Indian state’s production of silence in Kashmir during the siege of August 5, 2019 operated as a mechanism of territorial control, materialized through infrastructures of siege, surveillance, communication blackouts, mass detentions, and stringent narrative control. This silence, however, is not to be understood as an absence of sound but a systematic management of audibility. This managing of the audible, at its core, operates through the deployment voice as a technique of territorialization. Rendering Kashmir inaudible and muting people’s voices was accompanied by the amplified circulation of nationalist discourse and Hindutva pop outside Kashmir. It is no surprise, then, that as Kashmir saw an internet blockade in which platforms like Facebook and Twitter censored Kashmir-related content and suspended Kashmiri user accounts outside the region, Hindutva pop saw widespread media circulation through Indian social media with songs racking up millions of views and ad revenue. The production of silence constituted the elimination of the Kashmiri voice, and Hindutva discourse not only framed the “annexation” as act of benevolence and saving but also produced a settler assertion over land and women’s bodies. We require a deeper examination of how states activate and rely on cultural apparatuses and media infrastructures complicit in territorialization, dispossession, and erasure, as in Kashmir.

Attending to what I have called the management of audibility unsettles the binary between sound and silence and instead allows us to apprehend formations of violence produced through their dialectical relation. It draws attention to the political valences of audibility and inaudibility and the infrastructures that produce them. Such an approach also enables us to attend to sound’s material and relational dimensions as well as its discursive and broader political contingencies that inflect the relationship between sound and affect; foregrounding how nationalist collectivities are assembled and mobilized toward dispossession.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Gascia Ouzounian and María Edurne Zuazu for inviting me to contribute to this special issue. Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers and to the editorial team — especially Sandra Moyano Ariza and Sarah Ross — for their careful reading, astute comments, and generous support. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Global Meeting on Law and Society (Lisbon, 2022) and remotely at the Modulating Realities symposium (New Delhi, 2023) — the closing chapter of Capture All: A Sonic Investigation, a collaboration between Liquid Architecture (Naarm/Melbourne) and Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (New Delhi). Many thanks to my Capture All cohort, whose murmurs continue to resonate.

Endnotes

1. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (Verso Books, 2024); Uzma Falak, “Resisting the Clockwork of Occupation: Thinking through Ruptures,” English Language Notes 61, no. 2 (2023).[↑]
2. Ather Zia, “The Specter of Gender Discrimination in the Removal of Kashmir’s Autonomy,” Association for Political and Legal Anthropology, September 1, 2020, https://politicalandlegalanthro.org/2020/09/01/the-specter-of-gender-discrimination-in-the-removal-of-kashmirs-autonomy/.[↑]
3. Concurrently, the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act, 2019, bifurcated the state into two Union Territories — Jammu & Kashmir (with a legislature) and Ladakh (without a legislature).[↑]
4. Samreen Mushtaq and Mudasir Amin, “‘We Will Memorise Our Home’: Exploring Settler Colonialism as an Interpretive Framework for Kashmir,” Third World Quarterly 42, no. 12 (2021); Goldie Osuri, Settler/Colonialism in Kashmir: Sovereignty, Catastrophe, Indigeneity (Manchester University Press, 2026).[↑]
5. Atul Dev, “Manufacturing Normalcy: How the Indian media covered Kashmir,” The Caravan, December 1, 2019, https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/hindutva-pop-hate.[↑]
6. Ajay Skaria, “Why Hindutva Is a Racist Supremacism – Not Merely Communalism or Majoritarianism,” The Wire, September 10, 2021, https://thewire.in/politics/why-hindutva-is-a-racist-supremacism-not-a-communalism-or-majoritarianism; Mukul Kesavan, “India is Witnessing the Slow-Motion Rise of Fascism,” The Guardian, September 8, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/08/india-slow-motion-rise-of-fascism.[↑]
7. Annapurna Menon, “Debunking Hindutva Appropriation of Decolonial Thought,” Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics 3 (2022); Kalpana Wilson, Giti Chandra, and Lata Narayanaswamy,“ Contested Development Imaginaries: Hindutva and the Co-optation of ‘Decolonisation,’” EADI Blog, August 4, 2023, https://www.eadi.org/news-archive/2023; Audrey Truschke, “Hindutva Appropriations of Indigeneity,” The Immanent Frame, October 19, 2022, https://tif.ssrc.org/2022/10/19/hindutva-appropriations-of-indigeneity/.[↑]
8. Sikata Banerjee, “Hindu Muscular Nationalism: Politicized Hinduism and Manhood in India,” in The Routledge Handbook of Religion, Gender and Society, ed. Caroline Starkey and Emma Tomalin (Routledge, 2021).[↑]
9. Suzanne G. Cusick, “Music as Torture/Music as Weapon,” in The Auditory Culture Reader, ed. Michael Bull and Les Back, 379–91 (Routledge, 2020); J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford University Press, 2015); Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam University Press, 2012); James E. K. Parker, Acoustic Jurisprudence: Listening to the Trial of Simon Bikindi (Oxford University Press, 2015).[↑]
10. Osuri, Settler/Colonialism in Kashmir.[↑]
11. Sakunia, “A Hindu Rashtra OST.”[↑]
12. Other NatCon attendees included JD Vance (current Vice President of the United States), Reza Pahlavi (former Crown Prince of Iran living in exile in the United States), Balázs Orbán (Political Director of the Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán), Suella Braverman (UK Reform politician), Stephen Miller (White House Deputy Chief of Staff for policy), Tom Homan (Donald Trump’s “Border Czar”), and Yoram Hazony (Israeli-American theorist) among others.[↑]
13. Founded in 1925, RSS is a paramilitary organization that, as Anustup Basu contends, shares “major discursive and institutional affinities” with European fascism. Basu explains how Indological mysticism and Aryan primordialism were vital to European fascism. For instance, German Indology, Basu writes, was inflected with anti-Semitism and racism. See, Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke University Press, 2020). Further, Marzia Casolari examines at length the relation of fascist Italy and Hindu nationalism as well as the links between Hindu nationalists and Nazi Germany. See Marzia Casolari, In the Shadow of the Swastika: The Relationships Between Indian Radical Nationalism, Italian Fascism, and Nazism (Routledge, 2020). The RSS now oversees a “family” — called the Sang Parivar — of several affiliated organizations with BJP as a political front. It has over seventy thousand branches in India and has a robust transitional presence. Several current cabinet members are former RSS members including the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, Minister of Home Affairs, Amit Shah, and Minister of Defence, Rajnath Singh.[↑]
14. Dipankar Bhattacharya, “RSS and the Global Far-Right: Expanding Links, Growing Ambition,” The Wire, August 19, 2024, https://thewire.in/communalism/rss-and-the-global-far-right-expanding-links-growing-ambition.[↑]
15. Bhattacharya, “RSS and the Global Far-Right” (emphasis added).[↑]
16. James E. K. Parker and Joel Stern, eds., “Eavesdropping,” in Eavesdropping: A Reader (City Gallery Wellington, 2019).[↑]
17. Gascia Ouzounian, “Counterlistening,” English Studies in Canada 46, no. 2–4 (2023).[↑]
18. Alison Young, “Listening Criminologically: On the Materiality and Relationality of Sound,” Criminological Encounters 6, no. 1 (2023).[↑]
19. Anuradha Paudwal Official, “Maa Jagdambe Veer Jawanon Ko Aisa Vardaan Do,” August 14, 2014, YouTube, 4:11, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkR1CHlt2wQ&list=RDbkR1CHlt2wQ&start_radio=1. All translations of song lyrics in this essay are my own.[↑]
20. The mother goddess here refers to goddess Ambika who has several arms and is mounted on a tiger holding several weapons.[↑]
21. Anirban K. Baishya, “Violent Spectating: Hindutva Music and Audio-visualizations of Hate and Terror in Digital India,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (2022).[↑]
22. Latest Haryanvi Song ‘370’ Sung By Nardev Bainiwal,” The Times of India, August 13, 2019, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/entertainment/music/haryanvi/latest-haryanvi-song-370-sung-by-nardev-bainiwal/videoshow/70654988.cms.[↑]
23. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 41.[↑]
24. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 42.[↑]
25. Liam Gillespie, “Nationalist Soundscapes: The Sonic Violence of the Far Right,” The British Journal of Criminology 65, no. 1 (2025).[↑]
26. Gillespie, “Nationalist Soundscapes.”[↑]
27. Gillespie, “Nationalist Soundscapes.”[↑]
28. Samriddhi Sakunia, “A Hindu Rashtra OST: The Hindutva Pop Singers Fuelling a Politics of Hate”, The Caravan, June 30, 2022, https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/hindutva-pop-hate. [↑]
29. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Routledge, 2013).[↑]
30. Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 60.[↑]
31. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 99.[↑]
32. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 40.[↑]
33. Hanan Zaffar and Danish Pandit, “Hindutva Pop Is the New Soundtrack to the Anti-Muslim Movement in India”, Time, December 20, 2022, https://time.com/6242156/hindutva-pop-music-anti-muslim-violence-india/; Sakunia, “A Hindu Rashtra OST.”[↑]
34. Sakunia, “A Hindu Rashtra OST.”[↑]
35. Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2.[↑]
36. Aniruddha Dutta, “Nation, Liberalisation and Film Songs: Technology and Hybridisation in Contemporary Hindi Film Music,” Wide Screen 1, no. 1 (2009), 2.[↑]
37. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 3.[↑]
38. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 272.[↑]
39. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 272.[↑]
40. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 25-26.[↑]
41. Rajagopal, Politics after Television, 1.[↑]
42. Peter Manuel, Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (University of Chicago Press, 1993), 251.[↑]
43. Peter Manuel, “Music, the Media, and Communal Relations in North India, Past and Present,” in Contesting the Nation: Religion, Community, and the Politics of Democracy in India, ed. David Ludden (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 133.[↑]
44. Manuel, “Music, the Media,” 133.[↑]
45. Christiane Brosius, Empowering Visions: The Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism (Anthem Press, 2004), 100.[↑]
46. Brosius, Empowering Visions, 135.[↑]
47. Brosius, Empowering Visions, 81.[↑]
48. Brosius, Empowering Visions, 134-35. Other videos, for example, include documentation of the Ram Rath Yatra — a political pilgrimage in 1990 which rallied for the construction of a temple at the site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya. Another film documented the Ekta Yatra, a political rally conducted in 1991 for about eight weeks, in which the prime minister Modi participated as a party cadre. This political pilgrimage was aimed at hoisting the Indian flag in Kashmir.[↑]
49. Vasudha Venugopal, “How RSS Band Plans to Bring More ‘Harmony’ into its Fold,” The Economic Times, December 12, 2015, https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/how-rss-band-plans-to-bring-more-harmony-in-to-its-fold/articleshow/50145162.cms?from=mdr.[↑]
50. Vsk Jaipur, “Live RSS Swargovindam Jaipur 2017, Ghosh Pradarshan & Pujya Sarsanghchalak Dr. Mohan Bhagwat Ji Speech,” November 5, 2017, YouTube, 1:56:59, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BnitwtXAxw.[↑]
51. Lata Jha, “Article 370: Film Producers Scramble to Register Related Titles,” Mint, August 6, 2019, https://www.livemint.com/industry/media/article-370-film-producers-scramble-to-register-related-titles-1565091595193.html.[↑]
52. “A Delhi Restaurant Is Offering an Article 370 Thali! Here’s All You Want to Know,” The Times of India, September 6, 2019, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/food-news/a-delhi-restaurant-is-offering-an-article-370-thali-heres-all-you-want-to-know/photostory/71006322.cms.[↑]
53. Danielle Fowler, “Cadbury Launches Four-in-One Chocolate Bar to Promote Diversity in India,” Yahoo! Life, August 23, 2019, https://uk.style.yahoo.com/cadbury-unity-bar-india-150440307.html.[↑]
54. Express Web Desk, “Independence Day 2019 Song ‘Watan’ Is a Tribute to ‘New India’,” The Indian Express, August 15, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/independence-day-2019-song-watan-is-a-tribute-to-new-india-5904346/.[↑]
55. PIB India, “‘Watan’ – A musical video song that celebrate New India,” August 13, 2019, YouTube, 4:46, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXYwUauq4cc.[↑]
56. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Here Robinson draws on Aileen Moreton-Robinson, The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Naomi Klein, “Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson,” Yes! Magazine, March 5, 2013. https://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/dancing-the-world-into-being-a-conversation-with-idle-no-more-leanne-simpson.[↑]
57. Shakuntala Banaji, “Vigilante Publics: Orientalism, Modernity and Hindutva Fascism in India,” Javnost – The Public 25, no. 4 (2018).[↑]
58. Rajagopal, Politics after Television.[↑]
59. Baishya, “Violent Spectating.”[↑]
60. Baishya, “Violent Spectating.”[↑]
61. Baishya, “Violent Spectating.”[↑]
62. Falak, “Resisting the Clockwork of Occupation.”[↑]
63. Manoj Sinha, “The Rise of Kashmir: Three Years after Break from Past, It Is Moving Forward, Becoming Destination for Tourists and Businesses,” The Indian Express, August 6, 2022, https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-rise-of-kashmir-3-years-after-break-from-past-moving-forward-8073609/.[↑]
64. Observer News Service, “J&K Has Emerged as One of the Fastest-Growing UTs: LG,” Kashmir Observer, December 17, 2022, https://kashmirobserver.net/2022/12/17/jk-has-emerged-as-one-of-the-fastest-growing-uts-lg/.[↑]
65. “‘Article 370 Gone, A New Age Awaits Jammu and Kashmir’: PM Modi’s Top Quotes,” NDTV, August 8, 2019, https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/pm-modi-article-370-gone-bright-future-ahead-for-jammu-and-kashmir-2082422.[↑]
66. Furkan Latif Khan, “India’s Modi Defends Moves in Kashmir as Lockdown Continues,” NPR, August 15, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/08/15/751416989/indias-modi-defends-moves-in-kashmir-as-lockdown-continues.[↑]
67. Seema Kazi, “Women, Gender Politics, and Resistance in Kashmir,” Socio-Legal Review 18 (2022), 95-117; Zia, “The Specter of Gender Discrimination.”[↑]
68. Sonotek, “Dhara 370 | अब कश्मीर में तिरंगा लहरायेगा | Latest Haryanvi Songs Haryanvi 2019,” August 5, 2019, YouTube, 3:29, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKtMwjlV8Ow&list=RDmKtMwjlV8Ow&start_radio=1. Based in New Delhi and established in 1985, Sonotek is among the largest producers of regional music in North India.[↑]
69. For instance, in 1992, the BJP undertook its political pilgrimage, the Ekta Yatra, which was to culminate in Srinagar with the hoisting of the Indian flag at Lal Chowk on India’s republic day. The city was placed under a military curfew — a routine occurrence in Kashmir on India’s republic and independence days. Murli Manohar Joshi, the BJP president at the time, and his entourage were flown to a curfewed Srinagar in an Indian Airforce plane. Narendra Modi, then a party cadre, was one of the organizers. According to reports, what was envisioned as a grand event turned into a hurried 12-minute charade: as they struggled with the flag, the flagpole snapped into two, and in the end, they had to make do with the state flag.[↑]
70. Specifically, chroma key compositing is a visual effect in which a subject is filmed against a solid-colored background, typically green or blue. In post-production, this background is digitally removed (“keyed out”) and replaced with a different visual, allowing the subject to appear as though they are present in this new setting.[↑]
71. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir (University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 20.[↑]
72. I first accessed this song in 2020, when it was hosted on the YouTube channel “Touchwood Girls.” The channel has since been renamed “Poem Vartaa.” See Poem Vartaa, “Ye Kashmir Humara Hai I Section 370 I Dhara 370 Song | Kashmir Song,” August 9, 2019, YouTube, 3:54, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEbpdPKNrEc&list=RDjEbpdPKNrEc&start_radio=1. [↑]
73. Anandit Sachdev, “The Anatomy and Political Currency of Indian Sound Systems,” CTM Festival, June 2024, https://www.ctm-festival.de/magazine/the-anatomy-and-political-currency-of-indian-sound-systems.[↑]
74. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 115.[↑]
75. Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes, 116.[↑]
76. See for example Press Trust of India, “PM Modi is incarnation of God like Lord Ram and Lord Krishna Born to End Despair: MP minister,” The Print, January 18, 2022, https://theprint.in/india/pm-modi-is-incarnation-of-god-like-lord-ram-and-lord-krishna-born-to-end-despair-mp-minister/806179/.[↑]
77. Justin Patch, “Notes on Deconstructing the Populism: Music on the Campaign Trail, 2012 and 2016,” American Music 34, no. 3 (2016), 365–401.[↑]
78. Patch, “Notes on Deconstructing the Populism,” 368, 70.[↑]
79. Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception (Duke University Press, 2015).[↑]
80. Laxmi Dubey Official, “Har Gahr Bhagwa Chhayega Bhag 1 | हर घर भगवा छाएगा भाग 1 | Laxmi Dubey | Laxmi Dubey Official,” September 25, 2020, YouTube, 5:36, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWusT_s4W3E&list=RDCWusT_s4W3E&start_radio=1.[↑]
81. Currently, Laxmi Dubey’s “Har Ghar Bhagwa Chhayega” is available across streaming platforms in four iterations (Parts 1–4), released and circulated over several years. According to The Indian Express, the song was first uploaded in 2017. See Mansi Dua, “Sound and Fury: The Voices Creating Aggressive Hindutva’s Soundtrack,” The Indian Express, January 20, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/aggressive-hindutva-soundtrack-fury-internet-5545915/. While all these iterations are structured around the refrain, “Saffron will take over every home; the rule of Ram will return,” and follow the same tune, each features slight lyrical variations.[↑]
82. Brosius, Empowering Visions.[↑]
83. Kavi Singh Official, “धारा 370 : कवि सिंह | Dhara 370 Patriotic Song 2023 | New Deshbhakti Song 2023 | Kavi Singh Official,” August 6, 2019, YouTube, 4:10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG7-9ggH8w0&list=RDaG7-9ggH8w0&start_radio=1.[↑]
84. Iris Sandjette Blake, “The Vocal Apparatus’ Colonial Contexts,” in Sonic Histories of Occupation: Experiencing Sound and Empire in a Global Context, ed. Russell Skelchy and Jeremy E. Taylor (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 26.[↑]
85. Asad Rehman, “Now Anyone Can Get Married to a Fair Kashmiri Girl: BJP MLA,” The Indian Express, August 7, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/india/now-anyone-can-get-married-to-a-fair-kashmiri-girl-bjp-mla-5884310/.[↑]
86. Special Correspondent, “Haryana CM Khattar Stokes Controversy with Remark on Kashmiri Women,” The Hindu, August 10, 2019, https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/haryana-cm-khattar-stokes-controversy-with-remark-on-kashmiri-women/article28973262.ece.[↑]
87. Kazi, “Women, Gender Politics, and Resistance.”[↑]
88. Piyasree Dasgupta, “‘Get A Wife From Kashmir’: Article 370 News Has Sparked A Horrible Wave Of Misogyny,” Huffpost, August 6, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/archive/in/entry/article-370-kashmir-women-tiktok_in_5d494898e4b0d291ed064107.[↑]
89. See for example: Zeba Siddiqui, “Indian Men Who See New Policy as Chance to Marry Kashmiri Women Accused of Chauvinism,” Reuters, August 9, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/world/indian-men-who-see-new-policy-as-chance-to-marry-kashmiri-women-accused-of-chauv-idUSKCN1UY113/; Shamani Joshi, “West Bengal Has the Highest Number of People Googling ‘Marry Kashmir Girl’,” Vice, August 8, 2019, https://www.vice.com/en/article/west-bengal-india-has-the-highest-number-of-people-googling-marry-kashmir-girl/.[↑]
90. H D, “बहु कश्मीर की लानी | Article 370 | New Haryanvi Song 2019 |,” August 6, 2019, YouTube, 2:51, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aV22r1hUmpA&list=RDaV22r1hUmpA&start_radio=1.[↑]
91. Maa Janki Series – Bhakti, “लाईब कश्मीर से दुल्हनिया – #Laib Kashmir Se Dulhaniya – Viswanath Anand का जोरदार भोजपुरी गीत 2019,” August 9, 2019, YouTube, 3:21, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhhjotPesjg&list=RDUhhjotPesjg&start_radio=1.[↑]
92. Adnan Bhat, “‘Kashmir Women are the Biggest Victims of this Inhumane Siege’,” Aljazeera, August 21, 2019, https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2019/8/21/kashmir-women-are-the-biggest-victims-of-this-inhumane-siege.[↑]
93. H D, “बहु कश्मीर की लानी | Article 370 | New Haryanvi Song 2019 |.”[↑]
94. Tanika Sarkar, “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu Rashtra,” Economic and Political Weekly 37, no. 28 (2002), 2872-76.[↑]
95. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 52–4.[↑]
96. Ian Biddle, “Quiet Sounds and Intimate Listening: The Politics of Tiny Seductions,” in Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, ed. Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle ( Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 217-8.[↑]
97. See for example Saurabh Chauhan, “Bhojpuri Songs Talk about Marrying Kashmiri Women, Buying Land in Valley,” Hindustan Times, August 23, 2019. https://www.hindustantimes.com/lucknow/bhojpuri-songs-talk-about-marrying-kashmiri-women-buying-land-in-valley/story-HxSR7vtjrgHwvZoJE2lkzH.html; Sandeep Rajput, “Kasmeer Se Dulhaniya Laibe Ae Maai Re,” August 12, 2019, YouTube, 4:06, video no longer available, accessed July 24, 2020, copy in author’s possession.[↑]
98. Kabir, Territory of Desire, 40-41.[↑]
99. However, this desire has a longer genealogy. It can be traced back to European orientalist writing spanning about three centuries, which harped on romanticized descriptions of Kashmir’s landscape. As just one characteristic example, the evocation of “Vale of Cashmere” as an exotic setting of romance and mystery appears in the work of Irish poet Thomas Moore: see Moore, Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (Leavitt & Allen, 1817). Or, two centuries earlier, French physicist Francois de Bernier’s description of Kashmir as “the terrestrial paradise of the Indies”: see François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668 (Archibald Constable and Company, 1891), 186. These orientalist writings are rife with exoticized accounts of Kashmir’s women. Later, nineteenth-century colonial photography and its focus on the “picturesque” further froze Kashmir into “frames of fantasy;” see Kabir, Territory of Desire, 56. The Indian state’s desire for Kashmir can also be traced back to the construction of Kashmir as a source of Hindu antiquity through archaeology and Indology; see Mridu Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir (Princeton University Press, 2004); Kabir, Territory of Desire.[↑]
100. Rooted in the British colonial cartography, the Hindu right, as Brosius writes, “concurred with the colonial cartography of Greater India” by “identifying it with the borders of an ancient Indian Empire, or Hindu Rashtra.” See Christiane Brosius, Empowering Visions: The Politics of Representation in Hindu Nationalism (Anthem Press, 2004), 152.[↑]
101. Brosius, Empowering Visions, 149.[↑]
102. Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India,” Imago Mundi 53, no. 1 (2001), 97–114.[↑]
103. The Hindu epic Mahabharata, for instance, states, “Just as certain limbs of the body are purer than others, so are certain places on earth more sacred — some on account of their situation, others because of their sparkling waters, and others because of the association or habitation of saintly people.” See Brosius, Empowering Visions, 170.[↑]
104. Diana L. Eck, “The Imagined Landscape: Patterns in the Construction of Hindu Sacred Geography,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 32, no. 2 (1998), 165–188; also see Jackie Assayag, “The Body of India: Geography, Ritual, Nation,” Etnográfica. Revista do Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antropologia 1, no. 1 (1997), 33–56.[↑]
105. Brosius, Empowering Visions; Sankaran Krishna, “Cartographic Anxiety: Mapping the Body Politic in India,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 19, no. 4 (1994), 507–21.[↑]
106. Brosius, Empowering Visions, 169.[↑]
107. Goldie Osuri has unpacked the commonalities between the Indian liberal and Hindutva nationalist “preoccupation with territory through the technology of the map.” For instance, the first Bharat Mata Temple (Mother India Temple) — which, instead of statues of gods and goddesses, houses a map of Greater India — was inaugurated by MK Gandhi in 1936; Goldie Osuri, “Combat Memories of an ‘Undivided India’: Kashmir and Bharat Mata,” keynote lecture, South Asian Studies Association Symposium, Newcastle, Australia, 2022.[↑]
108. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Unity of India Collected Writings 1937-1940 (Lindsay Drummond, 1941), 221-223.[↑]
109. For instance, Nehru described Kashmir as a wonderland of dreams and as a “supremely beautiful woman” (Nehru, The Unity of India, 221– 3).[↑]
110. Perry Anderson, The Indian Ideology (Three Essays Collective, 2012), 69.[↑]
111. Hafsa Kanjwal, Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building under Indian Occupation, South Asia in Motion (Stanford University Press, 2023), 113.[↑]
112. Kanjwal, Colonizing Kashmir, 113.[↑]
113. Mona Bhan, “Infrastructures of Occupation: Mobility, Immobility, and the Politics of Integration in Kashmir,” in Kashmir and the Future of South Asia, 1st edn, ed. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal (Routledge, 2020), 81.[↑]
114. Three days after this statement, the Indian government conceded that the widespread protests in Soura did indeed take place; however, the Indian media had already been clamoring and amplifying the narrative of denial and fabrication. Pooja Chaudhuri and Pratik Sinha, “Did BBC, Al Jazeera, Reuters Fabricate Reports of Unrest in Kashmir?” Alt News, August 13, 2019, https://www.altnews.in/did-bbc-al-jazeera-reuters-fabricate-reports-of-unrest-in-kashmir/.[↑]
115. “PM Modi’s Speech Had Calming Effect, J&K Situation Peaceful: Satya Pal Malik,” India Today, August 9, 2019, 11:36 p.m. IST, https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/kashmir-news-live-updates-jammu-modi-pakistan-mea-1578963-2019-08-09; Press Trust of India, “No Major Incident of Law and Order Violation in Kashmir: Officials,” NDTV, August 20, 2019, https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/no-major-incident-of-law-and-order-violation-in-kashmir-life-returning-to-normal-officials-2087415; Rebecca Ratcliffe, “Five Civilians Killed in Kashmir since Crackdown, Says Army,” The Guardian, September 4, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/04/civilians-killed-kashmir-crackdown-army-india.[↑]
116. BBC, “Inside the World’s Most Dangerous Prison,” BBC News, October 15, 2020, video, 4:41, https://www.bbc.com/news/inside-the-worlds-most-dangerous-prison (at 1:50–55).[↑]
117. Jim Sykes, “Ontologies of Acoustic Endurance: Rethinking Wartime Sound and Listening,” Sound Studies 4, no. 1 (2018), 35–60.[↑]
118. Azaan Javaid, “J&K Police Now Deploys Drones to Map Srinagar and Conduct ‘Surveillance’ in Valley,” The Print, January 20, 2020, https://theprint.in/india/jk-police-now-deploys-drones-to-map-srinagar-and-conduct-surveillance-in-valley/352248/.[↑]
119. Junaid Kathju, “Summoned, Raided, Censored: Crackdown on Journalists Is the New Normal in Kashmir,” The Wire, September 22, 2021, https://thewire.in/media/summoned-raided-censored-crackdown-on-journalists-is-the-new-normal-in-kashmir.[↑]
120. Haris Zargar and Goldie Osuri, “The Distinct Dispossessions of Indian Settler Colonialism in Kashmir: Land, Narrative and Indigeneity,” Development and Change 54, no. 6 (2023), 1399–424.[↑]
121. Zargar and Osuri, “Distinct Dispossessions.”[↑]
122. Banaji, “Vigilante Publics.”[↑]
123. Sahana Udupa, “Enterprise Hindutva and Social Media in Urban India,” Contemporary South Asia 26, no. 4 (2018), 453–67.[↑]
124. Udupa, “Enterprise Hindutva.”[↑]
125. Sakunia, “A Hindu Rashtra OST.”[↑]
126. Kunal Purohit, Tavishi, and Hamaad Meer, Profiting from Hate Music: The Role of YouTube, Meta, Spotify and Apple Music in Hosting and Monetizing India’s Hate Music Industry (Center for the Study of Organized Hate, June 15, 2026). See also Pooja Chaudhuri and Yong Xiong, “YouTube Hosts Hindutva Pop Videos That Violate Its Hate Policies, Auto-Generates More,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 8, 2023, https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/youtube-allows-hindutva-pop-videos-that-violate-its-hate-policies-auto-generates-more.php.[↑]
127. Kunal Purohit, H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (HarperCollins, 2023).[↑]
128. Purohit, H-Pop.[↑]