Kashmirs Contested Pasts

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’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 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 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.

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 Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects written by Mridu Rai and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Disputed between India and Pakistan, Kashmir contains a large majority of Muslims subject to the laws of a predominantly Hindu and increasingly "Hinduized" India. How did religion and politics become so enmeshed in defining the protest of Kashmir's Muslims against Hindu rule? This book reaches beyond standard accounts that look to the 1947 partition of India for an explanation. Examining the 100-year period before that landmark event, during which Kashmir was ruled by Hindu Dogra kings under the aegis of the British, Mridu Rai highlights the collusion that shaped a decisively Hindu sovereignty over a subject Muslim populace. Focusing on authority, sovereignty, legitimacy, and community rights, she explains how Kashmir's modern Muslim identity emerged. Rai shows how the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir was formed as the East India Company marched into India beginning in the late eighteenth century. After the 1857 rebellion, outright annexation was abandoned as the British Crown took over and princes were incorporated into the imperial framework as junior partners. But, Rai argues, scholarship on other regions of India has led to misconceptions about colonialism, not least that a "hollowing of the crown" occurred throughout as Brahman came to dominate over King. In Kashmir the Dogra kings maintained firm control. They rode roughshod over the interests of the vast majority of their Kashmiri Muslim subjects, planting the seeds of a political movement that remains in thrall to a religiosity thrust upon it for the past 150 years.