Author: Chitralekha Zutshi
Publisher: Permanent Black
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 360
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8178240602
Description
Despite its centrality to the political life of India and Pakistan, Kashmir has met with rather perfunctory treatment from historians of South Asia. The few works of history and politics that have appeared on this region, moreover, insist on defining Kashmiri culture, history and identity in terms of the historical concept of Kashmiriyat, or a uniquely Kashmiri cultural identity.
This book, in contrast, questions the notion of any transcendent cultural uniqueness and Kashmiriyat by returning Kashmir to the mainstream of South Asian historiography. It examines the hundred-year impact of indirect colonial rule on Kashmir's class formation. It looks at the responses of Kashmir's society to social and economic restructuring. It studies the uses made of Kashmir's political elit4es by the state. It analyses the effect of Islamic discourse on Kashmir's political culture. It shows that while all these historical changes had a profound impact on the political culture of the Kashmir Valley, there is nothing either every inevitable or quite definite about the 'political regionalism' and 'Islamic particularism' of this area.
To read this book is to see the changing relationship between, on the one hand, the actual needs and demands of Kashmiris, and;, on the other, their religious affiliations and regional identities. The emergence of a political discourse among the region's Muslims - by which they now define and locate a coherent Kashmiri Muslim community within the larger framework of Islam, Kashmir, India and Pakistan - has never been made clearer.
Using local language sources and every important archive, this work is a major history of the formation of Kashmir as we know it today. It shows us precisely how the Kashmir Valley was transformed over a hundred years and assumed the position it has come to occupy in contemporary South Asia.
COMMENTS:
Languages of Belonging is a quantum leap forward in Kashmir studies and will make one of the best histories of "regional" identities and economies in India yet produced. The work brings forward a great deal of new and important material and provides a new framework for understanding regional identities in South Asia.
- C A Bayly, Cambridge University
This is an outstanding book. Based on massive archival research in Delhi, Jammu and Srinagar and the unearthing of rare Kashmiri literary sources, it skilfully uncovers the religious sensibilties that underlay the formation of Kashmir's regional identity in the late-ninetyeenth and early-twentieth century. Languages of Belonging will light up new ways of understanding the formation of identities in South Asia's regions.
- Sugata Bose, Harvard University
Rarely thas Kashmir received sustained scholarly attention that goes beyond the issues of rival territorial claims and policy studies. Drawing on a rich vein of sources, this book breaks new ground. A monograph of exceptional rigour and insight, a must for specialist and lay persons alike.
- Mahesh Rangarajan, Visiting Assistant Professor at Cornell University.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Glossary
INTRODUCTION
Kashmir: Land and Geography / Sources and Contents
CHAPTER ONE
Mulk-I-Kashmir: History, Memory, and Representation
CHAPTER TWO:
Political Economy and Class Formation in Kashmir
CHAPTER THREE:
Contes