Basit Gul Parray (LSE) - 2025-26 Students
b.g.parray@lse.ac.uk

The Afterlives of Photographs: Memory and Enforced Disappearance in Kashmir

Under Indian colonisation and occupation, Kashmir has endured decades of militarisation, killings, enforced disappearances and systematic human rights abuses that have shaped everyday life and the conditions of remembering. Amid state enforced erasure, family-held photographs of the disappeared often remain the only material traces of the lives taken away. Preserved in trunks, cupboards and other domestic spaces, these photographs resist erasure even as they haunt those who carry, guard, and inherit them, embodying unresolved absence and prolonged grief. My research examines how such photographs function as fragile counter archives through which Kashmiri families preserve presence of the disappeared, sustain memory, and confront the long afterlives of violence under conditions of violent colonial rule. The research looks at the material, affective and political life of these photographs.

Principal supervisor: Dr Omar Al-Ghazzi