South Asia Studies Council 2014 Senior Essay Prize winner announced!

The South Asian Studies Council is pleased to announce the 2014 Senior Essay Prize winner for the best senior essay. The winner is Marios Falaris, a graduating senior in Ezra Stiles college with a dual degree in Ethnicity, Race & Migration and Political Science. His winning essay is titled “Navigating Identities: Kashmiri Expressions and Enactments of Home”.

“Navigating Identities” is a beautifully written ethnographic essay about how Kashmiris in Indian-administered Kashmir and the Indian capital city of New Delhi experience and express notions of “home”. With a focus on the three domains of language, clothing, and religion, Falaris explores how a wide range of Kashmiris—young and old, male and female—articulate and enact Kashmiri identity in terms that move beyond the polarized political cliches with which Kashmir is often described as a zone of “conflict”. Ultimately, he argues, Kashmiris assert agency—even in the face of conflict and marginalization—by negotiating the boundaries of public and private to define flexible, multivalent identities marked at different moments and locations by linguistic, fashion and spiritual choices.

The three core chapters on “Linguistic Boundaries”, “Donning Outerwear and Identities” and “Religious Origins and Spiritual Connections” show Falaris to be a talented ethnographer, with both methodological and analytical sophistication unusual in undergraduate work. Falaris has managed to conduct revealing research about people’s intimate home lives and personal beliefs in one of South Asia’s most challenging locales, demonstrating a deep sensitivity and empathic capacity for rapport which shines through on each page. His abilities in the Kashmiri language (which he has studied since 2012), provide texture to the narrative, as he presents each of his interlocuter’s perspectives in a nuanced, well-contextualized manner that avoids reading any of their statements as essentialized truths. Instead, he situates each voice in relation to others to establish a broader and more complex framework for understanding how Kashmiri identity and its representation may vary according to age, gender, class, and location. Ultimately, readers come away with a rich sense of what life is like inside the homes of Kashmiris both in Indian-administered Kashmir, and in New Delhi, and how Kashmiris in both locations understand how that private sphere is both connected to and distinct from the broader matrix of local, national and global public spheres within which it is situated.

Falaris also contextualizes these ethnographically-derived insights in relation to carefully chosen secondary sources that enable him to position this essay as a contribution to the relatively sparse field of scholarship on Kashmir. While it certainly stands as such, Falaris appropriately notes the limitations of his study in both the introduction and the conclusion, and points out promising avenues for future research. Towards that end, he has already received both a Fox Fellowship and a Yale CIPE Year-Long Fellowship for post-graduate research in India, where he plans to embark upon a participatory research project with peace-building NGOs in Kashmir.