Kashmirs Contested Past

Download or read book Kashmir’s Contested Pasts written by Chitralekha Zutshi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-09 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering and comprehensive study of the historical imagination in Kashmir, this book explores the conversations between the ideas of Kashmir and the ideas of history taking place within Kashmir’s multilingual historical tradition. Analysing the deep linkages among Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri narratives, Kashmir’s Contested Pasts contends that these traditions drew on and influenced each other to imagine Kashmir as far more than simply an unsettled territory or a tourist paradise. By offering a historically grounded reflection on the memories, narrative practices, and institutional contexts that have informed, and continue to inform, imaginings of Kashmir and its past, the book suggests new ways of understanding the debates over history, territory, identity, and sovereignty that shape contemporary South Asia.

Download or read book Kashmir's Contested Past written by Chitralekha Zutshi and published by Oxford India Paperbacks. This book was released on 2018-02-22 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kashmir's Contested Pasts is a long history of the historical imagination in Kashmir. It explores the articulation, within Kashmir's multilingual historical tradition, of the idea of Kashmir and the idea of history in conversation with each other. Contrary to the notion that the Indian Subcontinent did not produce histories, the book uncovers the production, circulation, and consumption of a vibrant regional tradition of historical composition in its textual, oral, and performance forms from the late sixteenth century to the present. It reveals the deep linkages amongst Sanskrit, Persian, and Kashmiri narratives as they drew on and informed each other to define Kashmir as a sacred landscape and polity. It argues that within this interconnected narrative tradition, Kashmir was, and continues to be, imagined as far more than simply an embattled territory or a tourist paradise. History and history writing too, the book further illustrates, were defined in multiple ways-as tradition, facts, memories, stories, common sense, and spiritual practice. The book thus offers a historically grounded reflection on the historical memories, narrative practices, and institutional contexts that have informed imaginings of Kashmir and its past, and explores the challenges posed to these ideas in Kashmiri political culture today.

Download or read book Kashmir written by Chitralekha Zutshi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-11 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 1947-48, when India and Pakistan fought their first war over Kashmir, it has been reduced to an endlessly disputed territory. As a result, the people of this region and its rich history are often forgotten. This short introduction untangles the complex issue of Kashmir to help readers understand not just its past, present, and future, but also the sources of the existing misconceptions about it. In lucidly written prose, the author presents a range of ways in which Kashmir has been imagined by its inhabitants and outsiders over the centuries—a sacred space, homeland, nation, secular symbol, and a zone of conflict. Kashmir thus emerges in this account as a geographic entity as well as a composite of multiple ideas and shifting boundaries that were produced in specific historical and political contexts.

Download or read book Kashmir, Contested Identity written by Ashok K. Kaul and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the social history of Kashmir, tracing the origins of Kashmir's contemporary culture, its rupture, as well as its loss of national identity through a history of subjugations. The Quit Kashmir Movement, prompted by the National Movement, was an assertion to regain identity after centuries as part of a secular, democratic India. Since independence came with the fragmentation of culture, it turned into a binary hostility with Pakistan. The Cold War polemics mystified Kashmir and did not allow institutions to take root. The by-product of this development produced a new rich class, which sought legitimacy in power and a share in the resources through disempowering others. Prompted by the process of excessive democratization, it set its agenda on confessional referent. And, with the demise of the Cold War, Kashmir got linked with the Counter World Order Project, bringing enormous loss of human lives, exodus of minority communities, and further fragmentation of its society. In the post-September 11 world order, the disillusionment in the flawed leadership have brought alienation to its society. The book treats the Kashmir condition beyond the politics of identity and the political dispute between India and Pakistan. Kashmir's estrangement is historical in nature and needs a cultural resurgence through empowerment of politics in a holistic paradigm.

Download or read book Kashmir written by Sumantra Bose and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2002, nuclear-armed adversaries India and Pakistan mobilized for war over the long-disputed territory of Kashmir, sparking panic around the world. Drawing on extensive firsthand experience in the contested region, Sumantra Bose reveals how the conflict became a grave threat to South Asia and the world and suggests feasible steps toward peace. Though the roots of conflict lie in the end of empire and the partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the contemporary problem owes more to subsequent developments, particularly the severe authoritarianism of Indian rule. Deadly dimensions have been added since 1990 with the rise of a Kashmiri independence movement and guerrilla war waged by Islamist groups. Bose explains the intricate mix of regional, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and caste communities that populate Kashmir, and emphasizes that a viable framework for peace must take into account the sovereignty concerns of India and Pakistan and popular aspirations to self-rule as well as conflicting loyalties within Kashmir. He calls for the establishment of inclusive, representative political structures in Indian Kashmir, and cross-border links between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir. Bose also invokes compelling comparisons to other cases, particularly the peace-building framework in Northern Ireland, which offers important lessons for a settlement in Kashmir. The Western world has not fully appreciated the desperate tragedy of Kashmir: between 1989 and 2003 violence claimed up to 80,000 lives. Informative, balanced, and accessible, Kashmir is vital reading for anyone wishing to understand one of the world's most dangerous conflicts.

Download or read book Resisting Occupation in Kashmir written by Haley Duschinski and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-04-20 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resisting Occupation in Kashmir considers the social and legal dimensions of India's occupation of Kashmir and the ways in which Kashmiri youth are drawing on the region's history of armed rebellion to reimagine the freedom struggle in the twenty-first century.

Download or read book Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition written by Shahla Hussain and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-10 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kashmir remains one of the world's most militarized areas of dispute, having been in the grips of an armed insurgency against India since the late 1980s. In existing scholarship, ideas of territoriality, state sovereignty, and national security have dominated the discourses on the Kashmir conflict. This book, in contrast, places Kashmir and Kashmiris at the center of historical debate and investigates a broad range of sources to illuminate a century of political players and social structures on both sides of divided Kashmir and in the wider Kashmiri diaspora. In the process, it broadens the contours of Kashmir's postcolonial and resistance history, complicates the meaning of Kashmiri identity, and reveals Kashmiris' myriad imaginings of freedom. It asserts that 'Kashmir' has emerged as a political imaginary in postcolonial era, a vision that grounds Kashmiris in their negotiations for rights not only in India and Pakistan, but also in global political spaces.