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This article attempts to wrest away the notion of popular political resistance and performativity from the realm of visibility in the 'public' sphere/space and place them within the unperformed acts that remain optically invisible. Taking the example of India-controlled Kashmir, where public spaces remain militarized and performative assemblies criminalized, the article focuses on how popular resistance to Indian rule is regularly embodied within what we call subaltern performativity. Furthermore, the gendered nature of this subaltern performativity is also underlined through ethnographic fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a population is subject to necropolitics, what are the ways in which they resist the exposure to this systematic, deliberately inflicted death? Encompassing the case of India-administered Kashmir region, this article seeks to understand and examine this question. As the Indian state continues to enact insidious and expansive forms of necropolitics in Kashmir, the population has also turned death into a form of counter-conduct--a necroresistance to subvert the state's necropolitics. Exploring this enactment of necroresistance, this article seeks to reveal the forms that it takes in India-administered Kashmir as well as the transformations that it brings to the socio-political milieu. Conversely, it also looks at how necroresistance in Kashmir acquires a contextual sacred dimension. Keywords: critical theory, India, insurgency, Kashmir, martyrdom, necropolitics, necroresistance, The insurgency in India-administered Kashmir has increasingly acquired deeply symbolic characteristics in recent times. While performative symbolism has always been a dominant, associative feature of Kashmir's insurgency against the Indian [...]