Love in the time of occupation:

SAIBA VARMA

University of California, San Diego

Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir

ABSTRACT

At a drug rehabilitation clinic in Indian-occupied

Kashmir, patients were subjected to a range of

biomedical and penitentiary techniques. These

techniques included group therapy sessions in which

substance users performed narratives of their

recovery—a practice that made visible their

gratitude to the police, which oversaw the clinic and

which, as an arm of the Indian military, many view

as an illegal occupying force. While patients publicly

pledged to remain sober and technically complied

with the clinic’s demands, they privately

demonstrated ongoing commitments to nasha

(intoxication), which places substance use, romantic

love, and the search for divine unity in Suﬁsm on

the same phenomenological register. Through

nasha, patients deﬁed biomedical injunctions to

forget their pasts and recuperated intoxication as a

worthwhile experience. [addiction, substance abuse

treatment, military humanitarianism, recovery,

reverie, Kashmir]

n a crisp June morning in 2010, the Jammu and Kashmir Police

celebrated the second anniversary of the founding of its Drug

De-addiction Centre (DDC), an inpatient clinic for treating drug

and alcohol users. Since early that morning, the DDC’s staff had

been busy preparing for the arrival of high-level bureaucrats

and dignitaries. The minister of state for home affairs, the chief guest for

the occasion, was taken on a tour of the facility as cameras followed his

every move. Peering into the ward—a large dormitory-style room where

the eight patients lived for the duration of their treatment—the minister

declared, “We have lost one generation to guns, and we are going to lose

another generation to drugs!”

For clinicians at the police-run DDC, the minister’s statement publicly

afﬁrmed the urgency of their efforts, which are nested within Indian coun-

terinsurgency operations to win “hearts and minds” of Kashmiris after

15 years of armed conﬂict.

Since 2008, when the DDC was established,

the police have played an increasingly prominent role in Kashmir’s un-

folding epidemic of substance abuse, which is distinct from but related

to widespread psychological trauma and other conﬂict-related illnesses in

the region (Matloff and Nickelsberg 2009).

About 40 percent of secondary

school and university students in Kashmir have used drugs to cope with

ongoing sociopolitical violence, according to one news report (Te hel ka

magazine, May 22, 2010).

The clinicians at the DDC described the clinic as a “social mission”

or a “social service” to the population at large. The DDC, which offered

subsidized rehabilitation treatment to men, aimed to transform addicts

both physiologically and psychologically using medical-penitentiary tech-

niques that coexisted and overlapped. (At the time of my ﬁeldwork, there

were no substance abuse treatment facilities for women.) They included

conﬁnement and group therapy sessions in which patients were obliged

to tell recovery narratives—narratives in which they chronologically de-

scribed their history of substance abuse, afﬁrmed a commitment to so-

briety, and expressed gratitude toward the DDC staff. Both techniques

were based on a linear model of recovery, in which patients moved from

addiction to abstinence; this meant separating addicts from their trou-

bled pasts and behaviors and requiring them to take full responsibility

for their addiction. During treatment, DDC patients generally adhered

to these medical-penitentiary techniques. But in more private moments,

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 50–62, ISSN 0094-0496, online

ISSN 1548-1425.



DOI: 10.1111/amet.12262

Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir



American Ethnologist

patients, particularly those who identiﬁed as Suﬁs, narrated

reveries of romantic love in which they understood their

drug use and pasts in radically different ways from the

DDC’s clinicians.

In their love reveries, patients drew on Suﬁ and ver-

nacular notions of nasha (intoxication), a Kashmiri and

Urdu term that locates drug use as coterminous with other

intoxicating experiences, such as the search for divine or

worldly love and madness. These ideas come from Suﬁ

Islam, which has been the dominant religious tradition in

Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state,

since the 14th century. Through nasha, patients recuper-

ated intoxication as a valuable experience, maintained tem-

poral and phenomenological links with their past selves and

behaviors, and, in contrast to public recovery narratives,

absolved themselves of responsibility for their addictions.

Through love reveries, however, patients did not resist the

DDC’s medical-penitentiary techniques; rather, they held

on to unapproved desires and experiences while perform-

ing their roles as recovered and grateful subjects.

By attending to reveries and other in-between temporal

states, anthropologists can engage and empathize with our

interlocutors’ conscious and unconscious concerns (Borne-

man 2011). In the case of the DDC, patients remembered

and imagined past love affairs through gotan gatshun,a

Kashmiri phrase that means dipping or submerging one-

self in thought, often about the past. I translate gotan gat-

shun as “reverie,” using Sigmund Freud’s deﬁnition of the

term, rather than “fantasy,” because the latter implies ﬂight.

In contrast, Freudian reveries consist of “wandering back”

into the past (Freud 1958, 48), which is closer to the Kash-

miri term. In reveries, according to Freud, “one consciously

imagines something while fully awake” (46), usually scenes

and events in which the subject can satisfy his or her erotic

wishes and egoistic needs of ambition and power (Freud

1966, 120) In his work with young, urban men in Syria,

John Borneman deﬁnes reveries as “a range of psychological

states, including daydreaming, distraction, self-absorption,

contemplation, meditation, and sexual fantasizing” (2011,

245). This deﬁnition, in which reveries are an imagina-

tive resource that can produce an in-between temporal

state, dovetails with how romantic love in South Asia occurs

“mostly in the imagination or in the interstices of ordinary

life” (Orsini 2006, 37).

Reveries are, however, only partially lodged in the

imagination; they are also in this case intersubjective acts,

coproduced—although unequally—by the ethnographer.

In my case, being a single, non-Kashmiri, female researcher

in an all-male setting shaped both the telling and content

of reveries. Further, my interlocutors and I were conscious

that our contact and friendship within the DDC was limited.

Many patients came for their clinical follow-ups irregularly,

so I rarely saw them after their 30 days of admission. Yet

this tenuous, temporary, and gendered connection—what

sociologists have called a “short-term contract”—might

have provided them the necessary freedom to reveal and

share their reveries with me (Hey 2003). By contrast, pa-

tients did not share their love reveries with clinicians, who

disapproved of the extramarital or premarital relations on

which they were based, whereas my positionality opened

me up to hearing reveries. At the same time, I was not privy

to the more bawdy aspects of male sociality in the clinic.

Based on 20 months of ethnographic ﬁeldwork con-

ducted from 2009 to 2013 in Kashmir, this article con-

tributes to three areas of anthropological concern: violence

and military humanitarianism, the relation between nar-

rative and recovery in mental health and substance abuse

treatment, and the relations among emotion, ethics, and

love in South Asia. The ﬁrst is concerned with the way

in which military-humanitarian intervention is based on

a moral rather than a political principle (Aggarwal 2004;

Aggarwal and Bhan 2009; Bhan 2014; Fassin and Pandolﬁ

2010; Lutz 2002). Less is known, however, about how such

interventions are experienced and negotiated by those peo-

ple who are their objects. In the case of the DDC, clinicians

aim to transform unruly Kashmiri citizens into docile, grate-

ful subjects, and this article shows how patients living in

conditions of chronic violence respond to, inhabit, and qui-

etly subvert the clinic’s structures.

The second area of concern, substance abuse and men-

tal health treatment, has focused on how patients use or

subvert narratives authorized by the medical authorities

to their own ends (Carr 2010; Raikhel and Garriott 2013;

Shohet 2012; Zigon 2013). For example, patients at an addic-

tion program for homeless women in the US Midwest may

“ﬂip the script,” telling treatment staff what patients think

they want to hear (Carr 2010). At the DDC, patients may

ﬂip the script but also go beyond this by drawing on alter-

native scripts, including reverie and nasha, to understand

their drug use. Further, reverie and nasha reveal a different

therapeutic function of language, one that enables patients

to revisit their histories of intoxication and recast them in a

positive light, rather than break with those experiences as a

condition of recovery.

The third area of anthropological concern, with ethics,

emotion, and love in South Asia, has focused on how ro-

mantic love and love marriages disrupt normative conﬁg-

urations of kinship, including gender roles, gift exchange,

reciprocity, and obligation (Das 2010; de Munck 1996;

Marsden 2007; Mody 2008; Orsini 2006; Pinto 2014). Work

on these topics primarily examines the social and politi-

cal effects of romantic love, which is often read as “aber-

rant love,” and mediated and pathologized in psychiatric

spaces, particularly for women. By contrast, the effects of

romantic love for men appear to be quite different. In

particular, “mad,” romantic love and reveries had powerful

and productive effects on men and operated as imaginative

resources that, among other things, can take the sting out

American Ethnologist



Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016

of addiction. Reveries offered an alternative temporality of

recovery, different from linear biomedical substance abuse

treatment: they allowed patients to break the monotony of

incarceration and purify painful memories.

Winning Kashmiri hearts and minds

The DDC represents a new phase of military governance

in Indian-controlled Kashmir. In 1988, after decades of

frustration with Indian rule, the Kashmir valley erupted

with massive protests and demonstrations calling for in-

dependence (azaadi) (Kaul 2011).

There began an armed

movement, which the Indian state viewed as a Pakistan-

sponsored insurgency rather than an indigenous claim for

self-determination; it responded aggressively, imposing a

state of emergency and passing draconian laws that granted

the Indian military impunity in the region (Duschinski

2009).

By the early 2000s, after India and Pakistan fought

their third war over Kashmir, and in light of growing con-

cerns about widespread human rights violations commit-

ted by Indian military and paramilitary forces, the Indian

military reworked its rhetoric and practices of occupation.

An army general, Y. N. Bammi, emphasized that the In-

dian army maintained a zero tolerance policy for human

rights violations, which would be strictly punished (Bammi

2007, 259).

The military refrained from dismissing human

rights reports as a form of “antinational” propaganda, as it

had done previously, and began emphasizing care of the

people as at the heart of its counterinsurgency operations

(Bhan 2014).

For the Indian military, winning Kashmiris’ hearts and

minds was crucial in a region where Indian rule lacks—or

has entirely lost—popular legitimacy (Junaid 2013). Today,

many Kashmiris have personally experienced the violence

of an intrusive security state, and most of them regard the

Indian state as “uncaring, even murderous” (Kaul 2011,

195). It is these strong sentiments that the hearts and

minds campaign seeks to rectify. The police’s campaign

has focused mainly on combating substance abuse, and it

has pursued this by establishing multiple treatment centers

across the state, a process that fuses military, medical, and

humanitarian aims. As one DDC clinician told me, “The

charasi [hashish smoker] and the sharabi [alcoholic] are

outcasts in our society—no one respects them. But here,

we take them in and restore their dignity.”

Clinicians also contrasted the DDC with private treat-

ment centers in Kashmir, which could cost families up to

30,000 rupees a month, whereas the DDC charged an af-

fordable 3,000 rupees for food, with the rest of the expenses

subsidized by the police. Many family members told me

that the ﬁnancial incentives to seek treatment at the DDC

overrode their concerns about placing their loved ones in

the hands of the police. Indeed, the low cost of treatment

meant that the eight beds were always occupied, with a

waiting list of over 200 patients at any given time. As of

December 31, 2009, 2,500 substance users had visited the

center, and 175 had been treated as inpatients. Most were

treated for addictions to prescription opioids and benzodi-

azepines (e.g., Valium and Xanax in the United States), al-

though many also combined opioids with cannabis.

As a subject-making project, hearts and minds cam-

paigns such as the police’s substance-abuse effort involve

a “long drawn-out, sustained strategy” to ensure “a steady

positive trajectory of transformation” in the population, in

the words of Rahul Bhonsle (2009, 11), a former Indian mili-

tary commander. Psychological initiatives like the DDC, ac-

cording to Bhonsle, “play a major role” in its strategy:

The planned management of information and other

measures are important to inﬂuence the opinion, emo-

tions, attitude and behavior of hostile, neutral or

friendly groups in support of current policies and aims.

Themes for psychological initiatives should be chosen

objectively, taking into account the perceptions of the

selected target audience. (2009, 27)

In short, the DDC’s medical and penitentiary tech-

niques were designed to psychologically transform and win

the hearts and minds of substance users.

Medical-penitentiary techniques

The DDC is located in the heart of the Jammu and

Kashmir Police headquarters, in a large, highly securitized

compound known as the Police Control Room. While clin-

icians told me they wanted to carve out an independent,

neutral biomedical space, they were undercut by the DDC’s

dependence on the police for its daily functioning and by

everyday clinical practices that reinforced the clinic’s links

to the structures of military rule. As many patients qui-

etly reminded me, somewhere in the control room, young

protesters were being interrogated and tortured.

For visitors like myself, entering and leaving the

compound required going through multiple security

checkpoints, a cumbersome and intimidating process. Two

uniformed policemen guarded the DDC 24 hours a day,

monitoring patient behavior and providing disciplinary

reinforcement. Young men at the DDC, some of whom

had histories of throwing stones (pathrav) and agitating

against Indian security forces, now found themselves in the

custody of those whom they saw as perpetuating an illegal

military occupation (Kak 2011). Though most patients did

not describe themselves as political prisoners, they saw the

DDC as an extension of a violent, repressive, and corrupt

military and state structure.

These feelings of mistrust permeated the clinic. Al-

though clinicians assured patients that their ﬁles were

conﬁdential, many patients believed that their medical his-

tories were being shared with the police administration and

Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir



American Ethnologist

that they would be arrested for past crimes or recruited as

informers for the Indian state. Such fears did not result from

paranoid thinking. Journalists estimate that up to 150,000

secret informers are on the payroll of different agencies of

the Indian state in Kashmir, creating a “pervasive public

culture of suspicion, distrust and fear” (Kaul 2011, 195).

Further, many patients were aware that the Jammu and

Kashmir Police is one of the most corrupt institutions

in the state, which has the ignominious distinction of

being the second most corrupt state in India, according

to Transparency International (CMS and TII 2008). During

interviews, many patients questioned the police’s efforts

to combat substance abuse, since they felt the police’s own

corruption and lax enforcement of existing drug laws were

at least partly responsible for the region’s drug epidemic.

They said this out of the clinicians’ earshot. If the clinicians

heard these comments, they would likely be read as a form

of resistance to treatment and result in the patients’ being

either punished or forced to stay longer.

Because the DDC focuses on psychological and po-

litically motivated care within the hearts and minds cam-

paign, it is a unique institution, since most biomedical

substance abuse treatment in South Asia takes place in large

psychiatric hospitals and consists of detoxiﬁcation treat-

ment only (Charles, Nair, and Britto 1999, 19). In contrast,

patients at the DDC received a combination of biomed-

ical care and custodial treatment designed to temporally

and physically separate them from their trigger-ﬁlled ex-

ternal environments. They experienced time in the DDC,

however, as akin to that of incarceration—there was always

too much time as they waited for their treatment to end. In

this context, patients had several strategies of doing what

they called “timepass.” The television was helpful; it was

perpetually on. Patients highly valued cigarette breaks for

timepass, although many of them found it ironic that they

were being weaned off drugs while being allowed or encour-

aged to smoke tobacco. “Even if I wasn’t a smoker before

coming here,” one patient joked, “the center would have

made me one.” There was also a lot of horsing around, jok-

ing, and teasing that punctuated the monotony of DDC life.

Most patients ranged in age from 18 to 45. The older

patients were generally treated respectfully by the younger

patients and often asked to take on leadership roles. At the

same time, patients did not consider the center an appro-

priate place to make lasting friendships. They described

the DDC as a space cohabited by people who were rebel-

lious (shararat), untrustworthy (baiman), and mad (pagal).

One patient, who was very protective of his wife, who had

come to visit him at the DDC, explained, “The men are

not right here. They are capable of inappropriate things.”

When I asked those who were friendly if they would stay

in touch after being discharged, many were noncommit-

tal or outright refused. They said associating with others

from the clinic would arouse suspicion; if they were seen

together in public, the secret of their addiction could be re-

vealed. Thus friendships at the DDC were also a form of

timepass, not a means to long-lasting or meaningful rela-

tionships. Cigarette breaks, quarrels, chitchats, naps, and

television watching—activities that broke the monotony of

the schedule—were forms of provisioning (jugar), bringing

together diverse practices or technologies to cope in the

meantime (Jeffrey 2010). Timepass relations were forged

out of circumstance rather than choice. In many cases, pa-

tients felt frustrated and constrained by the social context of

inpatient treatment because they strongly believed that ad-

diction was a shameful condition that must be kept private.

Within the DDC, all practitioners—social workers,

clinical psychologists, and psychiatrists—had their own

domain of expertise, but they coordinated treatment in a

single plan that focused on psychologically transforming

patients.

In most large, outpatient psychiatric clinics,

in South Asia and elsewhere, the professional orientation

of care is, as Renu Addlakha notes, “more or less exclu-

sively dominated by the medical model, [reducing] other

members of the team to the status of paraprofessionals”

(2008, 3–4; see also Chua 2013, 345). Moreover, psychiatric

practitioners emphasize pharmacological treatment over

diagnosis or explanation, and patients and their fami-

lies prefer biological interventions to psychological ones

(Addlakha 2008; Chua 2014; Jain and Jadhav 2009; Marrow

and Luhrmann 2012; Nunley 1996). In these settings, there

is generally little time or inclination for “talk therapy,”

and patients may struggle to ﬁnd their voices or make

themselves heard in psychiatric encounters (Jain and

Jadhav 2009; Pinto 2014; Wilce 1995). For example, in their

ethnography of a community mental health program in

North India, Sumeet Jain and Sushrut Jadhav analyze how

the use of English, as well as moral narratives (based on

geographical, educational, and class differences), diminish

patients’ authority in clinical encounters—separating “irre-

sponsible” patients from “responsible” doctors (2009, 71).

But we ought to expand our understandings of psychiatric

expertise and patient-practitioner relations in settings be-

yond large, outpatient clinical settings, where practitioners

may see hundreds of patients in a single day and where

pharmacological treatments dominate.

Because the DDC was an inpatient program with only

eight patients, and because of its unique positioning within

a larger military-humanitarian apparatus, clinicians prior-

itized social and psychological interventions over pharma-

cological ones. This led them to focus intensively on pa-

tients’ words and narratives, as well as on establishing a new

form of sociality in which former addicts were expected and

encouraged to share their stories with each other in group

therapy. Although DDC patients followed a heavy phar-

macological regimen of antipsychotics, painkillers, and

sedatives, this was only for the ﬁrst week. Then the psychi-

atrist’s interventions tapered off, and other team members

American Ethnologist



Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016

began intensive psychosocial interventions such as individ-

ual, group, and family therapy. According to this treatment

trajectory, pharmacological treatment could reduce with-

drawal symptoms, such as shivering, nausea, mood swings,

insomnia, and headaches, but external and internal

psychological and social cues could provoke cravings and

induce relapse. To prevent this, most treatment consisted of

psychological counseling and therapy that reconﬁgured pa-

tients’ associations with their past behaviors and emotions,

including external or environmental events and relation-

ships, such as with former accomplices, and reworked

how they dealt with internal states like fatigue, hunger,

and moods. In addition, because clinicians believed that

patients suffered from denial and used language to manip-

ulate others in order to further their addiction, patients had

to tell public recovery narratives to demonstrate that they

had gained “insight” into their disease. Like the substance

abuse clinicians Carr analyzes, DDC clinicians focused

on the patients’ narratives to reconﬁgure their “relation-

ships with language rather than simply, or even primarily,

reconﬁguring their relationship to drugs” (Carr 2010, 3).

Further, having patients perform recovery narratives

was a key way for the police to demonstrate the efﬁcacy

of their hearts and minds campaign. In addition to prop-

erly telling their stories, patients had to demonstrate proper

affect, namely gratitude to the staff and to the police es-

tablishment at large. Clinicians elicited recovery narratives

during group therapy sessions, which occurred three times

a week in the afternoons. During the sessions, the eight in-

patients, clinicians, and visitors sat in a large circle on red

plastic chairs, in the center’s main consultation room. The

clinical psychologist, Dr. Ashraf, asked Feroze, a former pa-

tient, to tell his story “from the beginning.”

Dr. Ashraf told

Feroze he could speak in Kashmiri, Urdu, or English. Below

is an excerpt of Feroze’s narrative, told in Kashmiri:

My name is Feroze, and I am from Shopian [a town in

south Kashmir]. My parents sent me to Srinagar [the

summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir] to study when

I was in the ﬁfth grade. There was a boy who was us-

ing [correction] ﬂuid in my class. He would pour the

liquid into a plastic bag and inhale it. I asked him for

some, and we did it together. I enjoyed it—I had a re-

ally good time. I used ﬂuid for a couple of years, but

my family learned that I was using, and they sent me

away from the city. When I went back to Shopian, I

met some older guys who introduced me to alcohol and

charas [cannabis]. I really enjoyed charas the ﬁrst time;

I laughed hysterically for an hour straight. After that, I

wanted it again, and I began buying it, ﬁrst 50 rupees

at a time, then 100 rupees a day. Eventually, I started

buying more and more, 200 to 2,000 rupees at a time.

This caused a lot of ﬁghts and problems at home. I’d

ﬁnish the money quickly and I would be tense think-

ing about how to get charas again. Sometimes I would

get thoughts of murdering someone. I was totally out of

control and felt like I was losing my mind.

My family put more and more pressure on me to stop

using. I would try, but the next morning, I’d again feel

the need and start using again. Then we learned that

one of my cousins—someone I had done ﬂuid with

earlier—had been admitted here at the De-addiction

Center. My kin heard that he had been cured, and they

wanted to bring me here. I refused. I thought I would

end up in the mental asylum, where I would be beaten

up. But my family brought me here, and I stayed for

21days....

I’m sorted now. I’m absolutely ﬁne. I’d rather be

here at the De-addiction Center than at home with

my family—that’s how much I love this place. I owe so

much to the doctors. I’m grateful to them for becoming

well [unki mehrbani se mai theek hoon]. If they hadn’t

helpedme,Iwouldhavediedorgonecrazy.

Feroze’s narrative exempliﬁes the typical structure of

recovery narratives, which usually began with the patient

introducing himself, describing which drugs he used and

how much (often with a focus on how much it cost), and

referring to speciﬁc triggers (in Feroze’s case, his peers).

In addition to verbal expressions of gratitude, clinicians

judged patients for giving nonverbal cues of respect, such

as speaking with tones of deference, lowering or avert-

ing their eyes when addressing doctors, and other bodily

postures of dependence common throughout South Asia

(Appadurai 1985, 237). When patients deviated from this

form, the clinical psychologist or social worker would

prompt them to return to it.

Feroze’s narrative served a dual purpose: it showed

other patients what they needed to do to be discharged,

and it indexed Feroze’s own psychological and physiologi-

cal transformation as complete. In other words, by listen-

ing to one another’s recovery narratives, patients learned to

perform the clinical roles assigned to them (Dyson 2010,

494). After Feroze ﬁnished his narrative, Dr. Ashraf asked

him several questions about his present behaviors, includ-

ing his sleeping and eating habits, as well as his plans

for employment. These questions gauged whether Feroze

had recovered from the physiological effects of addiction

and demonstrated that he had fully transformed himself.

Feroze described how he had successfully cut himself off

from relapse-inducing triggers, including past behaviors

and friends. The narrative suggested that he was no longer

his past self: instead of recklessly spending money on drugs

and ﬁghting with his family, he had become a productive

member of the family’s orchard business; instead of resist-

ing treatment, he advocated for the DDC.

Feroze concluded his narrative by expressing gratitude

and indebtedness to the DDC and its clinicians, including

the (hyperbolic) statement that he felt more at home at the

DDC than with his own family. Feroze used the Kashmiri

Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir



American Ethnologist

and Urdu term mehrbani to thank the staff, a term that

suggests indebtedness and ongoing relationality and placed

Feroze, as the indebted one, in a position of inferiority vis-

a-vis the clinicians and structure of the DDC. We should,

however, read Feroze’s gratitude not as a transparent out-

pouring of his inner feelings but as a public act that he per-

formed to meet clinicians’ expectations. This is suggested

in the work of medical anthropologists on South Asia, who

have found that rather than the model of the autonomous

patient, patient-doctor encounters in the region are bet-

ter understood through the guru-chela (teacher-disciple)

model, since these encounters foster dependency and well-

being in line with dominant cultural values (Addlakha 2008;

Nunley 1996; von Schm

adel and Hochkirchen 2001).

This relation of indebtedness and gratitude has partic-

ular political signiﬁcance in the context of the hearts and

mind campaign, given that producing gratitude was also

visible in other public spaces in militarized Kashmir. For ex-

ample, the paramilitary Central Reserve Police Force pub-

licized its humanitarian mission with billboards along the

Jammu-Srinagar highway, the main link from the Kashmir

valley to the Indian plains. One billboard showed an el-

derly Kashmiri man bowing and cupping his hands to ac-

cept water from the ﬂask of a young Indian soldier. The

image strikingly reversed age hierarchies in South Asia, as

the elderly Kashmiri man is shown in a posture of depen-

dence, while the young soldier is positioned as the bene-

factor. Such images—along with expressions of gratitude

in the clinic—reinscribed the idea of a robust, benevo-

lent Indian nation-state saving an enfeebled Kashmiri body

politic. Thus, patients’ performances of recovery narratives

at the DDC dovetailed with politics outside the clinic, where

the Indian military was remaking how the Indian state and

Kashmiri subject-citizens related to each other, changing

an idiom of national security to one of humanitarianism.

Both idioms reinforce Kashmir’s dependence on the Indian

state for survival, a dependence that grates against politi-

cal agitation for independence in the region (Bhan 2014, 12;

Ferguson 2013).

At the same time, Feroze and the other patients

were acutely aware—and skeptical—of the larger military-

humanitarian context of which the DDC was a part. In this

sense, Feroze’s performance might be productively thought

of as a moment of “ﬂipping the script” (Carr 2010, 191).

Although it is methodologically difﬁcult, if not impossible,

to determine to what extent Feroze’s recovery narrative ex-

pressed his inner thoughts and feelings, we do know that

patients used more than one script in the clinic. In more

private moments, they expressed ambivalence toward the

police’s “social mission” and clinical mandates of absti-

nence from drugs and alcohol. As we will see, in contrast

to public recovery narrative performances, they engaged in

love reveries through which they reclaimed—and puriﬁed—

experiences of intoxication.

Reclaiming intoxication

Patients and clinicians had radically different understand-

ings of intoxication. According to clinicians, all forms of

nasha were harmful and needed to be avoided for patients

to live “straight” or “proper” (seedhi) lives. They were par-

ticularly critical of Suﬁ and vernacular understandings of

nasha and spoke derisively of cultural and historical links

between Suﬁsm and cannabis use.

During my ﬁeldwork, I

heard many doctors argue that, in addition to the conﬂict in

Kashmir, traditional healers (pirs) were responsible for the

ongoing drug epidemic because they lured devotees with

cannabis. At the DDC, I heard the clinical psychologist, Dr.

Ashraf, explain the drug epidemic in Kashmir through the

following vignette:

I knew a boy once who used to hang out in a park with

his friends. One day, they met a pir in the park who

promised them heaven [jannat]. The pir took them on

a long trek through the mountains until they reached

a cave. For three days straight, the pir provided the

boys with cannabis, and they smoked continuously.

They smoked so much that they believed they had

actually seen heaven. They returned to the city, the

pir’s promise fulﬁlled. But the boy was not satisﬁed: he

wanted to experience heaven again. He began looking

for the pir all over the city. Finally, he found him. When

the pir saw the boy, he laughed knowingly. The boy had

become an addict.

This apocryphal narrative mocked the journey to

divine love—often analogized to nasha in poetry and

literature—that is central to Suﬁ thought. Unlike Dr. Ashraf’s

narrative, in which a Suﬁ spiritual journey turns into ad-

diction, patient reveries did not entirely dismiss nasha as a

negative experience. Rather, for patients, intoxication was a

valuable, valid experience, and it was possible precisely be-

cause it is seen in Suﬁsm as the pathway to divine or worldly

love. In the Suﬁ ideology of love, a hierarchy extends upward

from the interpersonal love of the phenomenal world to the

transpersonal connection with the Divine (Behl 2012, 66,

68–70). In this scheme, human love can mirror divine love.

Since many patients’ histories of drug use were intimately

tied to romantic love and heartbreak, the concept of nasha

imbued their own experiences of intoxication with spiritual

signiﬁcance.

The love reveries that patients engaged in drew on cul-

tural expressions of love and madness that are prevalent in

Hindi and Urdu literature, cinema, and everyday life, ex-

pressions that have roots in premodern Suﬁ poetry (Anjaria

and Anjaria 2008; Marsden 2007, 98; Orsini 2006). For exam-

ple, the masnavi, a romantic narrative genre that ﬂourished

in Persian courtly circles from the 11th century onward, of-

ten explicitly addressed the theme of mad love. One of the

most famous masnavis of all time, still well known today,

American Ethnologist



Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016

tells the story of Layla and Majnun. Because of his excessive

love for Layla, Majnun (the “crazed”) forgets all his religious

and social obligations, including his promise of secrecy to

his beloved, leading to the lovers’ destruction. The para-

ble of Layla and Majnun is about how excessive, uncontrol-

lable love can lead to the “loss of self-awareness” (fanaa). A

2006 Bollywood blockbuster called Fanaa similarly focuses

on “mad” or doomed love leading to the lovers’ destruc-

tion. As Magnus Marsden (2007) has argued, young men

and women in Muslim societies in South Asia are inspired

by long-standing Persianate Suﬁc literary and poetic gen-

res, but they also draw on modern forms of romantic love,

such as those in Hindi-language cinema. Thus, contempo-

rary Kashmiri ideas of romantic love synthesize “older and

newer conceptions” (2007, 104).

From clinicians’ perspectives, love affairs were poten-

tial “triggers” for relapse and disrupted normative kin re-

lations. In contrast, Patients were encouraged to end love

affairs as part of the recovery process, yet romantic love oc-

cupied an ambiguous place within the DDC because clini-

cians could not enforce this recommendation as part of the

therapeutic regimen, which focused on patients’ maintain-

ing sobriety and telling recovery narratives. Yet since pa-

tients knew clinicians disapproved of these love affairs, they

tried to be discreet about them. This was a strategic choice,

which enabled them to move through the DDC quickly, rel-

atively unencumbered, without facing accusations or the

censure of noncompliance or disobedience. Thus, though

patients viewed love as a form of nasha, they continued per-

forming their public roles as recovered, grateful addicts. As

an emotion, love-as-intoxication was both nonconformist

and socially acceptable: it allowed patients to remain intox-

icated and drug free at the same time.

Two reveries

The following love reveries use vernacular understandings

of love-as-intoxication, drug use, madness, and a spiritual

journey, and in doing so offer alternative explanations of

how a person succumbs to—and recovers from—addiction.

Not all patients I interviewed identiﬁed love as their main

trigger of addiction; some were victims of state violence,

for example. Both romantic love and the specter of violence

ﬁgured signiﬁcantly in most of their reveries. Yet clinicians

did not see love as a legitimate cause of addiction, nor did

they note the resources that patients could marshal through

reverie and nasha.

I. Arif

When Arif was admitted to the DDC, he was 35 years old

but looked much older. His frame was skeletal, many of

his teeth had fallen out, and he had lost most of his hair.

He was married, had one daughter, and was the oldest

of the center’s eight patients, often taking on the role of

spokesman. In one of our interviews, Arif said, “These boys

are young. They go into drugs but they don’t have real

problems—they do it for fun, on a whim [shawk]. I feel like I

have lived for 100 years.” Arif, like other patients who iden-

tiﬁed as Suﬁ, loved listening to devotional music (qawwali)

and avidly read Urdu poetry. Arif came from an illustri-

ous and well-respected family. His father had served as a

member of the state Legislative Assembly and had spear-

headed the revival of kani, an indigenous practice of weav-

ing shawls. In 2001, Arif’s father died, which gave him a very

big “jolt.” He felt unprepared to handle the responsibilities

thrust on his shoulders. But it was not his father’s death

that Arif blamed for his codeine and cannabis use. Rather,

he started using in 1992–93, he said, after “a train ride

changed my life.”

One afternoon, after all the patients had eaten lunch, I

asked Arif if I could interview him. We sat alone in the DDC’s

front room, where guests and kin were received. One of the

other patients drew a curtain to give us privacy. Arif nar-

rated his reverie to me in English with sprinklings of Urdu

and Hindi phrases. This was clearly a deliberate choice, to

keep his reverie obscure to the other patients, who were not

ﬂuent in English, and private between us; in other words, it

kept both his past love affair and the telling of the reverie out

of clinical and public view. I asked Arif how he had started

using codeine and cannabis. He responded:

I was traveling with my father by train. There was a girl

sitting across from us, in the same compartment. She

wrote a note and threw it to me. The note read, “My

name is Anjali. I’m from Mysore [a city in the south-

ern Indian state of Karnataka]. What’s your name and

where are you from?” I responded to the note. My fa-

ther and I were supposed to get off the train at Ban-

galore, but when my father saw what was happening

between us, he told me to continue on to Mysore with

Anjali. My father had had a love marriage, and so he had

never limited anyone’s marriage choice.

I asked Anjali where she lived, since I knew Mysore

quitewell.Shegavemeanaddress.Itwasaplace

where a lot of dhobis [washermen] lived. At that time,

I thought to myself, even if she’s the daughter of a

dhobi, I’ll marry her. It turned out that her father was

not a dhobi but an industrialist. I later learned that her

mother was American and that her parents had also

had a love marriage. When I got back to Kashmir af-

ter meeting her in Mysore, my mother had a letter from

Anjali already waiting for me. She had also sent me a

little Hanuman [Hindu deity] statue for protection.

Anjali spoke no Hindi, so we would exchange let-

ters in English. Our relationship blossomed, and I was

completely intoxicated by her [main nasha mein tha]. I

went to Mysore regularly to meet her for the next two to

three years. The last time I saw her, she said something

that scared me. I told her I was coming to Mysore. She

came to meet me on her Kinetic Honda scooter, and

Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir



American Ethnologist

we went to a park. Then she told me, “I don’t want to

waste my time. I can’t marry you.” I asked her why she

had proposed to me [to have a relationship] in the ﬁrst

place. I told her, “You should have told me straight.” I

caught the train back to Bangalore and cried profusely.

I came down to earth from the sky.

Arif’s reverie contains certain themes that can be read

within a frame of postcolonial desire, yet his reverie also

exceeds this frame. Arif is enticed by Anjali because of,not

in spite of, her difference from him: she is Hindu, half-

American, from a southern corner of India, while Arif is

Muslim, Kashmiri, from the northern corner. This structure

of opposites—Hindu/Muslim and north/south—and a love

affair that culminates in tragedy (or a miraculous overcom-

ing) is a dominant theme in Hindi-language cinema.

Arif’s reverie captures his desire to momentarily es-

cape the strictures and expectations of bourgeois masculin-

ity thrust on him, namely the expectations that he will

expand his father’s business and carry on the family name

as the eldest son. The tryst with Anjali, the “fantasy se-

quence,” if you will, is a digression from his assumed life

trajectory. Signiﬁcantly, Arif does not embark on the affair

as a form of teenage rebellion but rather receives his fa-

ther’s consent to pursue Anjali. In describing his father’s

tolerant attitude toward his premarital love affair, Arif

demonstrates his family’s status as modern and forward

thinking (Najmabadi 2005). Through the reverie, Arif re-

works and reimagines his past, particularly his relations

with his father, which were strained by Arif’s drug use. From

what I knew of Arif’s family, many of them were deeply dis-

appointed that Arif failed to carry out his familial responsi-

bilities. Yet in his reverie, this burden is lifted from him as he

seeks out “true” maddening love with his father’s blessing.

In this South Asian ideology of romantic love, as schol-

ars have argued, love “just happens to people” and, “like

other types of emotions, ‘befalls’ or ‘is felt’ by people”

(Ahearn 2003, 110). This is not only how people experience

love but also how men like Arif want to, or imagine, ex-

periencing it. As Laura Ahearn points out, the abdication

of agency involved in “falling” in love links to “a sense of

agency in other realms” (2003, 113). In Arif’s reverie, sur-

rendering to love, rather than being in control, is in a sense

an act of rebellious agency, representing a break from his

life as a highly educated, upper-class Kashmiri man ex-

pected to secure his family. Instead, in Arif’s reverie, he is

shaped and transformed by Anjali rather than having to act

on her. Anjali both initiates the affair and ends it. As the

recipient of her desire, Arif structurally occupies the role

of a female in the reverie, while Anjali occupies the male

role of the Beloved or God. This structure mirrors Suﬁ de-

scriptions of union with God as a “marriage” between a

devotee (structurally female) and God (structurally male)

(Ewing 1984, 362).

Arif’s reverie enables him to recast painful memories—

intoxication in the form of excessive love and drug use,

among them. Through the reverie, Arif remembers the plea-

sures of intoxication without confronting the negative af-

fects and effects of his past drug use. In contrast to the

model of taking responsibility that the clinic and public re-

covery narratives advocated, Arif absolved himself of both

agency and responsibility for his intoxication through his

reverie. This was crucial for enabling him to reinhabit the

structures of normative kinship to which he would return

after treatment. In other words, reverie not only expunged

Arif’s painful past but also helped him imagine a more

pleasant domestic future with his wife and daughter.

II. Rouf

Rouf, 21, was fashionable, shufﬂing around the DDC in

skinny jeans, Converse sneakers, and printed T-shirts. He

used to drive a commercial minibus in the city and enjoyed

telling stories about his reckless driving and the road acci-

dents he caused while high on cannabis and opiates. Like

Arif, Rouf drew on Suﬁ tropes of intoxication to describe

both his drug use and his tumultuous relationships with

women. Unlike Arif, whose reverie ﬂowed chronologically

and had a clear beginning and end, Rouf told me his rever-

ies in fragments, and they were full of contradictions. The

ﬁrst time he mentioned his love affair, we had been casually

talking about something else.

“I have replaced drugs with tears. Now I just cry for

her,” Rouf said abruptly.

“Who is she?” I asked him.

“Her family is poor and my family is rich. My father is

completely against the marriage.” I noted, but did not com-

ment on, his description of his family as “rich,” even though

he drove a minibus for a living.

“Does she know about your treatment here?” I asked.

“She knows that I am getting some kind of treat-

ment [eilaj], but she thinks it is for stomach problems and

back pain.”

On another day, Rouf told me how, once when he had

been intoxicated (nash

e mein tha), he told her to stop study-

ing after she completed her 10th-grade exams. When I asked

him why, he said, “Well, I was scared that she would go to

college, and then other boys might see her ...” His voice

trailed off and he bowed his head in shame. He described

his jealousy and feelings of possessiveness as madness (pa-

galpan), aggravated by his love and substance use. In his

mind, Rouf was ready to battle both his own family and his

girlfriend’s to win their approval for marriage.

Rouf also told me that he used to sneak into his girl-

friend’s room at night, stay until the morning call to prayer

(azaan), then duck out of her window. They almost got

caught once; they heard a knock on the door, but she

quickly said a cat had jumped in through the window. The

American Ethnologist



Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016

sexual undertones of this reverie were scandalous in Kash-

mir and also very different from Arif’s more modest reverie.

“She is my Khuda [God],” Rouf said. Like Arif, Rouf too un-

derstood himself as structurally female in his love relations

and his girlfriend as structurally male (Allah/Khuda). De-

spite this proclamation, Rouf, unlike Arif, was not exclusive

with his ladylove. He often spoke about other women with

whom he had affairs. Also unlike Arif, whose love was in

the past, Rouf experienced nasha during his treatment. Be-

cause of the affair’s turbulence, Rouf’s moods would change

quickly. In a single day, he could be exhilarated, exhausted,

and morose. Clinicians chalked up his emotional turmoil to

withdrawal—the absence of intoxication. I argue, however,

that these moods were actually the effects of Rouf’s contin-

ued nasha.

One day when I found Rouf in a melancholic mood,

I asked him what was wrong. He said, “All I ask of her is

that she speak to her mother [about their relationship]. But

she faints at the smallest sign of stress. For hours, she just

lies there unconscious. She has become a heart patient be-

cause of me.” Rouf said his girlfriend had also threatened

to kill herself if Rouf got engaged to someone else. Evok-

ing the Suﬁ idea of losing self-awareness (fanaa), she told

him that she would rather die than let another man touch

her. While at the DDC, Rouf was frequently on the phone,

either talking to his family members about his girlfriend or

trying to appease her. By going to great lengths to attain true

love, even alienating his family in the process, Rouf tried to

demonstrate that he was a “proper lover” (sahi asheqan),

not someone who was just stringing his girlfriend along

(de Munck 1996, 706; Marsden 2007). At the same time, his

statements of devotion—“she is my Khuda [God]”—were

undercut by Rouf’s promiscuity. During one of our conver-

sations, Rouf began asking me leading, ﬂirtatious questions,

and I quickly ended our conversation. The next time we

met, he had seemingly forgotten his transgression, and we

went on as before. This was, however, one of the difﬁcul-

ties in sharing love reveries, particularly with younger pa-

tients like Rouf, who struggled to manage their (multiple)

love intoxications.

Whereas Arif’s love affair with Anjali was not an ob-

ject of clinical intervention or knowledge, clinicians pressed

Rouf to end his affair. They insisted that marriage was not a

viable option, given his youth and lack of steady employ-

ment. Rouf, however, told me he was unable to forget his

girlfriend. There was something that was preventing him

from moving on. “I cannot live without her [main junoon

main hoon],” he told me. In using the word junoon,Rouf

described the feeling of being addicted to his girlfriend. But

before he was discharged, Rouf performed his recovery nar-

rative, saying he had broken from a toxic past and from un-

healthy relationships. He did not, however, adhere to the

clinicians’ recommendations to end his love affair. Instead,

Rouf’s telling statement that he had replaced “drugs with

tears” suggested that, rather than abstain from intoxicants,

he had switched from one to another.

Both Arif and Rouf’s reveries contain references to

fanaa: Rouf’s girlfriend threatened to kill herself if he mar-

ried someone else, while Arif described the loss of his ro-

mantic union as coming down from the sky to the earth. As

Carl Ernst and Bruce Lawrence write, attaining fanaa “re-

quires . . . an overpowering love. It is a love that leads to

annihilation. It leads to what is described as ‘destruction

of the soul’” (2002, 15). Within this frame, annihilating the

self (i.e., losing self-awareness) is necessary to unite with

the Beloved or God. Fanaa thus radically upends biomedical

ideas of death as failure and pathologized notions of code-

pendency. Within a Suﬁ epistemology, the loss of the self

required for union with the Beloved is turbulent but highly

rewarding.

Through their reveries, both Rouf and Arif remained

committed to the loss of self that nasha offered. For Arif,

this commitment was mainly expressed through reverie; for

Rouf, it continued through his unfolding romantic entan-

glements, which were phenomenologically similar to in-

toxication by drugs. In this sense, reveries were radically

different from recovery narratives, which attempted to re-

structure patients’ lives by creating a break between past

and present and by moving patients linearly from addic-

tion to abstinence. By contrast, reveries provided a recur-

sive, rather than linear movement of recovery and elevated

intoxication as something worthwhile.

Toward an anthropology of reverie

As an element of the Indian state’s new constellation of

military-humanitarian efforts, the DDC aims to transform

both the inner and outer lives of Kashmiri men using phar-

macological, psychotherapeutic, and psychiatric tools. Its

emphasis on psychologically transforming addicts is polit-

ically motivated, producing the DDC as a key site where

fraught relations between the Indian state and military

and Kashmiri citizens are being negotiated and remade (cf.

Aggarwal 2004; Bhan 2014; Kaul 2011). Despite the grow-

ing salience of medical humanitarianism in Kashmir,

however, the underlying conditions of militarization and

uninterrupted “state of emergency” that Kashmiris have

been living in since 1989 have not changed. In this sense,

humanitarianism in Kashmir is not a tool of postconﬂict re-

construction, as it has been elsewhere, but a means of re-

shaping an ongoing military occupation (Abramowitz 2014;

James 2009).

But the Indian state is not unique in its use of medical

and psychological techniques in counterinsurgency pro-

grams. In 2015, the central role played by psychologists in

US counterinsurgency efforts was publicized and debated

(Hufﬁngton Post, July 24, 2015), with the publication of the

US Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s report on torture

Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir



American Ethnologist

and the American Psychology Association’s subsequent re-

sponse (Hoffman et al. 2015). The Senate committee report

raised troubling questions about the place of medicine and

psychology within structures of military humanitarianism,

suggesting the need for more scholarly work on this sub-

ject (Johnson, Grasso, and Maslowski 2010). In particular,

ethnography can make visible the microprocesses through

which military humanitarianism operates as a mode of gov-

ernance, albeit an incomplete one. At least in Kashmir, we

see how people survive and struggle within structures of

military humanitarianism in surprising ways—for example,

by ﬁnding moments to think and talk about love.

Love reveries reveal how Kashmiris—and perhaps oth-

ers in conditions of chronic violence—inhabit structures

of military occupation. Kashmiri substance users discreetly

mobilized languages that allowed them to conform to the

expectations of clinicians without absorbing the clinic’s

agenda. Rather than resisting in any straightforward sense

the medical-penitentiary techniques they were subjected

to, patients, for the most part, performed and adhered to

the clinic’s rules so that they could complete treatment

quickly and with minimal friction. In this sense, reveries

allowed patients to fulﬁll their obligations as grateful

citizen-subjects while holding on to unapproved desires

and liaisons. At stake here, then, is a model of resistance that

does not involve direct confrontation but which offered pa-

tients a culturally salient language with which to reinterpret

their pasts while avoiding additional discipline, violence,

or time in treatment. To this end, it was important that

telling reveries hinged on the temporary, limited friend-

ships between me and my interlocutors. My being other in

this setting—as a non-Kashmiri, woman, and nonrelative—

enabled patients to tell me their reveries freely, because they

knew I did not belong to their milieu.

Nasha offered patients a discursive and experiential

capsule through which to express and recast illicit experi-

ences of drug use, love, madness, and jealousy that are thick

with emotion, deeply painful, and otherwise intangible. Its

presence—along with the durability of love reveries—shows

how patients have alternative therapeutic and narrative re-

sources than those that the clinic authorized. While not

all patients marshaled nasha as the cause of their addic-

tion, the contrast between public recovery narratives and

reveries suggests the multiplicity of narrative possibilities

that exist in a single clinical space, and that rather than be-

ing in conﬂict, these genres might exist side by side. Nasha

also troubles biomedical models of substance abuse treat-

ment, which produce a linear trajectory from addiction to

abstinence, demand that addicts take full responsibility for

their past mistakes, and require them to separate their past

and present selves. In contrast to the therapeutic function of

recovery narratives, nasha did not force patients to forget or

completely separate themselves from their histories of in-

toxication. Rather, the Suﬁ language of nasha absorbed the

negative attributions of drug use into a more encompass-

ing, positive frame, allowing patients to revisit their pasts

while avoiding the shame and stigma associated with un-

controlled drug use. In contrast to clinical injunctions that

all intoxications are harmful and that the past should be for-

gotten, patients used reverie to recuperate intoxication as

something pleasurable, dangerous, and worth remember-

ing. In other words, reveries allowed patients to dip back

into their pasts, rework and reinterpret their intoxication

as an outcome of mad, excessive—but socially legible—

love, and thus reaccess intoxication without the taint of

shame or stigma.

Unlike dreams, daydreaming has received very little

anthropological attention (cf. Borneman 2011). Yet there

are good reasons for anthropologists to attend to these in-

between temporal states in our ﬁeldwork and writing. For

both anthropologists and their interlocutors, daydreams

and reveries break the monotony of routine time in ﬁeld-

work or inpatient treatment; they are a mode of traveling

while standing still. For men of a certain age, such as Arif,

they can transport a person to a time before military oc-

cupation, when Kashmiris could easily crisscross the sub-

continent if they had the means; for others, like Rouf, they

are a way of journeying into illicit spaces—such as his girl-

friend’s room—and engage in risky behaviors. Such free

and pleasurable movement across time and space, like acts

of ethnographic writing, create a “to and fro” temporality

between the past and present: they connect the here and

now with the then and there. For substance users, rever-

ies allow histories of intoxication to seep into the present,

without the sense of shame or the weight of responsibil-

ity that usually accompanies addiction. What appear at ﬁrst

glance to be tenuous and ﬂeeting half-thoughts thus offer

clues as to how people reconstruct themselves in the after-

math of serious emotional and existential upheavals, such

as addiction, as well as how they survive in the midst of

political stagnation.

Notes

Acknowledgments. I am most grateful to the clinicians and pa-

tients at the DDC for generously sharing their time and stories

with me. My thanks to Angelique Haugerud and Niko Besnier for

their insightful comments at all stages of revision and for shepherd-

ing this piece to publication. I am also grateful to the anonymous

reviewers who inﬁnitely improved the quality and scope of argu-

mentation. Mara Buchbinder, Jocelyn Chua, Nadia El-Shaarawi,

Lauren Fordyce, Durba Ghosh, G

okc¸e G

unel, Aftab S. Jassal, Suvir

Kaul, Stacey Langwick, Lucinda Ramberg, Annelise Riles, Melissa

Rosario, stef shuster, Nishita Trisal, Chika Watanabe, Andrew

Willford, and Courtney Work provided generous and thoughtful

feedback. Cornell University’s Peace Studies program and the So-

cial Science Research Council provided essential research support.

1. For ease of reading, I will refer to the Kashmir valley in the

Indian-controlled state of Jammu and Kashmir henceforth simply

as “Kashmir.”

American Ethnologist



Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016

2. The Jammu and Kashmir Police is the primary law en-

forcement agency in the state. The police work closely with the

Indian Army, Central Reserve Police Force, and other paramilitary

organizations in the state on counterinsurgency and other covert

operations. The police in India are two tiered: senior ranks, from

assistant superintendent and higher, are occupied by an elite cadre

called the Indian Police Services (IPS). The IPS is one of three

All-India Services established under Article 312 of the Indian Con-

stitution. Personnel drawn from the secondary, state (provincial)

cadre occupy lower ranks of constable up to the deputy superin-

tendent level. Police personnel from the state cadre—such as those

who staff the DDC and do street-level work—are locals from the

state of Jammu and Kashmir, whereas the higher echelons of the

police (those from the IPS) may come from anywhere in India.

3. While many organizations and substance abuse centers glob-

ally have dropped the term addiction infavorofthepsycholog-

ical language of dependence or the more holistic rehabilitation,

biomedical practitioners in the DDC and across Kashmir pre-

ferred addiction and de-addiction. As Eugene Raikhel and William

Garriott note, “The [global] proliferation of models of substance

abuse treatment means that different models of addiction are

the product of different, highly contingent epistemic trajectories”

(2013, 18). While the term de-addiction prioritizes detoxiﬁcation,

the DDC uniquely emphasized psychological and psychosocial

intervention.

4. Suﬁsm is a mystical tradition in Islam that begins with the

soul’s conversion, or turning toward God. Although “Suﬁsm” is the

modern, English translation of the Arabic tasawwuf,itisnot,asCarl

Ernst has pointed out, an “ism” or a theory, but rather a lived expe-

rience and quest for perfection that comes with union with God

(Ernst 1985). The ﬁrst Suﬁ order to be introduced in Kashmir was

the Suhrawardi, in the 14th century.

5. Borneman argues that reveries can produce “an alternative

sense of reality, in which the anthropologist, at least momentar-

ily, also takes part” (2011, 245). In a session of psychoanalysis,

both analyst and analysand participate (though asymmetri-

cally) in this process, known as the intersubjective analytic third

(Ogden 1997, 109).

6. The former princely state of Kashmir is bifurcated along the

Line of Control (LoC), a de facto international border. Sixty-ﬁve per-

cent of the territory is under Indian control, while Gilgit-Baltistan

and Azad Jammu and Kashmir are currently under Pakistani con-

trol. China controls the northeastern portion known as Aksai Chin

and the Trans-Karakoram Tract.

7. Some 60,000 Kashmiris died in the armed struggle, over

200,000 Kashmiri Hindus (Pandits) were displaced, and about 8,000

men were forcibly disappeared.

8. Many in Kashmir speculate that the military’s strategy from

the mid-1990s on of using state-sponsored counterinsurgency

paramilitary groups—which operated as a secret, illegal army com-

posed of former or “reformed” militants—was an attempt to restore

the Indian army’s tarnished image. In other words, the army in-

creasingly outsourced abuses and human rights violations to unac-

countable forces, which in due time themselves became the targets

of public anger.

9. The very desire to leave before treatment concluded was also

read as a sign of “withdrawal” symptoms—an ongoing mark of

the disease of addiction. Clinicians “motivated” patients to stay by

coercing them emotionally and physically. I witnessed clinicians

sometimes ordering security guards to beat patients who violated

the clinic’s rules, but they more commonly enlisted kin and other

patients to persuade recalcitrant patients to continue treatment.

10. In addition to biomedical treatment, the staff also infor-

mally encouraged patients to read the Koran and pray (namaz) and

frequently invited imams to give lectures on the status of intox-

icants as prohibited (haram) under Islamic law. While clinicians

drew on these resources, cultural or religious practices were not for-

mally part of the therapeutic regime. In other words, patients were

not held accountable or considered “noncompliant” if they did not

use them.

11. I use pseudonyms for all the people I spoke with. Although

all the clinicians were Kashmiri Muslims, the patients were more

diverse. Most were Muslim, but there were patients of other eth-

nic and religious backgrounds present, including Hindus and Sikhs,

though always as a minority. As I point out, however, there were im-

portant differences among Kashmiri Muslims; for example, some

identiﬁed as Suﬁ and others did not.

12. As Mona Bhan (2014) has argued, the experience of the Kargil

conﬂict, fought between India and Pakistan in 1999, spurred the

central government—headed by the nationalist Bharatiya Janata

Party (BJP)—to “humanize” its Kashmir strategy. In Kashmir, the

People’s Democratic Party (PDP) came to power in 2002 on a “heal-

ing touch” policy based on human rights. In March 2003, the PDP-

led government opened investigations into alleged disappearances

and custodial deaths, arguing that healing “moral and historical

wounds” was urgently required to promote a culture of goodwill

and reconciliation in the region and rebuild civil society (Bhan

2014, 12).

13. Historically, practices of intoxication have been associated

with Suﬁ orders such as the Malangs/Malangis or Qalandars, who

smoke hashish to eliminate the lower soul (nafs) and bring the

spirit (ruh) in union with God (Ewing 1984). Using cannabis, along

with other practices associated with Suﬁsm, was heatedly debated

in Kashmir. While some argued that Suﬁsm was indigenous to

Kashmir in a way that some Islamic reformist movements were not,

others questioned Suﬁ practices of venerating saints and visiting

shrines (dargah) as being “proper” to Islam.

14. ‘Umar ibn ‘Al

ı ibn al-F

arid (1181–1235), a Suﬁ poet, distin-

guishes three modes of experience: normal, abnormal, and super-

normal. Normal experience, or sobriety (sahw), is the multiple,

shifting consciousness of ordinary men; abnormal or ecstatic expe-

rience is the loss of that consciousness in ecstasy (sukr); and super-

normal experience is the higher, mystical, uniﬁed consciousness

which may result from ecstasy, known as “the sobriety of union”

(sahwu ‘l-jam’) or the “second sobriety.” This last phenomenolog-

ical state is necessarily preceded by intoxication but does not nec-

essarily follow it. In most cases, the mystic returns to normal con-

sciousness after his or her state of ecstasy is over. On the other

hand, the intoxication can be succeeded by a state of “sobriety” in

which the seer regards himself as united with God. According to Ibn

al-Farid, this is the supreme degree of oneness (ittihad).

15. It was unclear what the causes of his physical deterioration

were, given that these symptoms are not generally associated with

opiate use.

16. Borneman writes that anthropologists, psychoanalysts, and

others who engage in what he calls “interlocution-based ﬁeldwork”

often experience highly charged countertransference. In these en-

counters, they are often asked to serve as “containers” for the de-

sires, anxieties, and fantasies that their interlocutors disclose (2011,

235; see also Bion 2013).

References

Abramowitz, Sharon. 2014. Searching for Normal in the Wake of the

Liberian War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Addlakha, Renu. 2008. Deconstructing Mental Illness: An Ethnogra-

phy of Psychiatry, Women and the Family. New Delhi: Zubaan

Books.

Reveries, longing, and intoxication in Kashmir



American Ethnologist

Aggarwal, Ravina. 2004. Beyond Lines of Conﬂict: Performance and

Politics on the Border of Ladakh, India. Durham, NC: Duke

University Press.

Aggarwal, Ravina, and Mona Bhan. 2009. “Disarming Violence: De-

velopment, Democracy and Security on the Borders of India.”

Journal of Asian Studies 68 (2): 519–42.

Ahearn, Laura. 2003. “Writing Desire in Nepali Love Letters.” Lan-

guage and Communication 23 (2): 107–22.

Anjaria, Jonathan Shapiro, and Ulka Anjaria. 2008. “Text, Genre,

Society: Hindi Youth Films and Postcolonial Desire.” Journal of

South Asian Popular Culture 6 (2): 125–40.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1985. “Gratitude as a Social Mode in South In-

dia.” Ethos 13 (3): 236–45.

Bammi, Y. N. 2007. War against Insurgency and Terrorism in Kash-

mir. Dehradun, India: Natraj Publishers.

Behl, Aditya. 2012. Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary

Tradition, 1379–1545. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bhan, Mona. 2014. Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and the Politics

of Identity in India: From Warfare to Welfare? London: Routledge.

Bhonsle, Rahul K. 2009. “Winning Hearts and Minds: Lessons from

Jammu and Kashmir.” Manekshaw paper no. 14, Centre for Land

Welfare Studies, New Delhi.

Bion, Wilfred R. 2013. “Attacks on Linking.” International Journal of

Psychoanalysis 82 (2): 285–300. First published 1959.

Borneman, John. 2011. “Daydreaming, Intimacy, and the Intersub-

jective Third in Fieldwork Encounters in Syria.” American Eth-

nologist 38 (2): 234–48.

Carr, E. Summerson. 2010. Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Ther-

apeutic Talk and American Sobriety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press.

Charles, Molly K., Sadanandan Nair, and Gabriel Britto. 1999. Drug

Culture in India: A Street Ethnographic Study of Heroin Addiction

in Bombay. Jaipur: Rawat Publications.

Chua, Jocelyn. 2013. “‘Reaching Out to the People’: The Cultural

Production of Mental Health Professionalism in the South In-

dian Public Sphere.” Ethos 41 (4): 341–59.

———. 2014. In Pursuit of the Good Life: Aspiration and Suicide in

Globalizing South India. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CMS (Centre for Media Studies) and TII (Transparency Interna-

tional India). 2008. India Corruption Study—2008.NewDelhi:

CMS and TII. Accessed October 10, 2015. http://www.trans

parencyindia.org/resource/survey

study/India%20Corruptino%

20Study%202008.pdf.

Das, Veena. 2010. “Engaging the Life of the Other: Love and Ev-

eryday Life.” In Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and

Action, edited by Michael Lambek, 376–99. New York: Fordham

University Press.

de Munck, Victor C. 1996. “Love and Marriage in a Sri Lankan Mus-

lim Community: Toward a Reevaluation of Dravidian Marriage

Practices.” American Ethnologist 23 (4): 698–716.

Duschinski, Haley. 2009. “Destiny Effects: Militarization, State

Power, and Punitive Containment in Kashmir Valley.” Anthropo-

logical Quarterly 82 (3): 691–717.

Dyson, Jane. 2010. “Friendship in Practice: Girls’ Work in the Indian

Himalayas.” American Ethnologist 37 (3): 482–98.

Ernst, Carl W. 1985. Words of Ecstasy in Suﬁsm. Albany: State Uni-

versity of New York Press.

Ernst, Carl W., and Bruce Lawrence. 2002. Suﬁ Martyrs of Love:

The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond. London: Palgrave

Macmillan.

Ewing, Katharine. 1984. “Malangs of the Punjab: Intoxication or

Adab as the Path to God?” In Moral Conduct and Authority: The

Place of Adab in South Asian Islam, edited by Barbara Daly Met-

calf, 357–73. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fassin, Didier, and Mariella Pandolﬁ. 2010. Contemporary States of

Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interven-

tions. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

Ferguson, James. 2013. “Declarations of Dependence: Labor, Per-

sonhood, and Welfare in Southern Africa.” Journal of the Royal

Anthropological Institute 19 (2): 223–42.

Freud, Sigmund. 1958. “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming.”

In On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology

of Art, Literature, Love and Religion, edited by Benjamin Nelson,

44–54. New York: Harper and Row.

———. 1966. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Translated

and edited by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. First pub-

lished 1933.

Hey, Valerie. 2003. “Horizontal Solidarities and Molten Capitalism:

The Subject, Intersubjectivity, Self and the Other in Late Moder-

nity.” Discourse in the Cultural Politics of Education 23 (3): 227–

41.

Hoffman, David H., Danielle J. Carter, Cara R. Viglucci, Heather L.

Benzmiller, Ava X. Guo, S. Yasir Latiﬁ, and Daniel C. Craig. 2015.

Report to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of the

American Psychological Association. Independent Review Relat-

ing to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations,

and Torture. Washington, DC: Sidley Austin.

Jain, Sumeet, and Sushrut Jadhav. 2009. “Pills That Swallow Policy:

Clinical Ethnography of a Community Mental Health Program in

Northern India.” Transcultural Psychiatry 46 (1): 60–85.

James, Erica Caple. 2009. “Ruptures, Rights and Repair: The Politi-

cal Economy of Trauma in Haiti.” Social Science and Medicine 70

(1): 106–13.

Jeffrey, Craig. 2010. Timepass: Youth, Class, and the Politics of Wait-

ing in India. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Johnson, W. Brad, Jan Grasso, and Kate Maslowski. 2010. “Conﬂicts

between Ethics and Law for Military Mental Health Providers.”

Military Medicine 175 (8): 548–53.

Junaid, Mohamad. 2013. “Death and Life under Occupation: Space,

Violence, and Memory in Kashmir.” In Everyday Occupations:

Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East,

edited by Kamala Visweswaran, 158–90. Philadelphia: University

of Pennsylvania Press.

Kak, Sanjay. 2011. Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada

in Kashmir. New Delhi: Penguin Books.

Kaul, Suvir. 2011. “‘An’ You Will Fight, till the Death of It ....’: Past

and Present in the Challenge of Kashmir.” Social Research 78 (1):

173–202.

Lutz, Catherine. 2002. “Making War at Home in the United States:

Militarization and the Current Crisis.”

American Anthropologist

104 (3): 723–35.

Marrow, Jocelyn, and Tanya M. Luhrmann. 2012. “The Zone of So-

cial Abandonment in Cultural Geography: On the Street in the

United States, inside the Family in India.” Culture, Medicine and

Psychiatry 36 (3): 493–513.

Marsden, Magnus. 2007. “Love and Elopement in Northern Pak-

istan.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (1): 91–

108.

Matloff, Judith, and Robert Nickelsberg. 2009. “Beyond the Break-

ing Point.” Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma website,

April 9. Accessed September 23, 2013. http://dartcenter.org/

content/beyond-breaking-point.

Mody, Perveez. 2008. The Intimate State: Love-Marriage and the

Law in Delhi.Delhi:Routledge.

Najmabadi, Afsaneh. 2005. “Mapping Transformations of Sex, Gen-

der, and Sexuality in Modern Iran.” Social Analysis 49 (2): 54–77.

Nunley, Michael. 1996. “Why Psychiatrists in India Prescribe So

Many Drugs.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 20 (2): 165–97.

American Ethnologist



Volume 43 Number 1 February 2016

Ogden, Thomas. 1997. Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Some-

thing Human. London: Karnac Books.

Orsini, Francesca. 2006. Introduction to Love in South Asia: A

Cultural History, edited by Francesca Orsini, 1–42. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Pinto, Sarah. 2014. Daughters of Parvati: Women and Madness in

Contemporary India. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

Press.

Raikhel, Eugene, and William Garriott. 2013. “Introduction: Tracing

New Paths in the Anthropology of Addiction.” In Addiction Tra-

jectories, edited by Eugene Raikhel and William Garriott, 1–35.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Shohet, Merav. 2012. “Narrating Anorexia: ‘Full’ and ‘Struggling’

Genres of Recovery.” Ethos 35 (3): 344–82.

von Schm

adel, Deeter, and Bernward Hochkirchen. 2001. “The

Results of Analysis Based on a Video of Consultations in Five

Ayurvedia Medical Practices.” In Studies on Indian Medical His-

tory, edited by Gerrit Jan Meulenbelf and Dominik Wujastyk,

207–13. New Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers.

Wilce, Jim. 1995. “‘I Can’t Tell You All My Troubles’: Conﬂict, Resis-

tance, and Metacommunication in Bangladeshi Illness Interac-

tions.” American Ethnologist 22 (4): 927–52.

Zigon, Jarrett. 2013. “On Love: Remaking Moral Subjectivity in

Postrehabilitation Russia.” American Ethnologist 40 (1): 201–15.

Saiba Varma

Department of Anthropology

University of California, San Diego

9500 Gilman Drive

La Jolla, CA 92023

[email protected]