IN ANY CONFLICT THE WORST AFFECTED ARE ALWAYS THE WOMEN... The narrative around the Jammu-and-Kashmir insurgency continues to be built around the role of freedom fighters insurgents and politicians - all of them not surprisingly men. Yet women have played an extraordinary role in the history of Kashmir in retaining Kashmiriyat - that long-forgotten ideal of mutual co-existence. Equally as mothers,daughters, widows, fighters, martyrs, and mujahids, they have been inseparable from the four-decade-old conflict. In The Land I Dream Of researcher Manisha Sobhrajani documents her encounters with women from disparate backgrounds across the troubled state. A Kashmiri Pandit forced into exile as a child; a mother-figure battling the establishment to give hope to thousands like her whose men have disappeared; an eighty-year-old who trained to fight tribal invaders in 1947 as part of Kashmir''s first women-only militia; and young Muslim women empowering themselves through entrepreneurship - the lives she chronicles bear witness not just to the suffering and apathy Kashmiri women have had Read More...