1. Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition: An interview with Shahla Hussain
- Author:
- Mahia Bashir and Shahla Hussain
- Publication Date:
- 09-2023
- Content Type:
- Commentary and Analysis
- Institution:
- The Toynbee Prize Foundation
- Abstract:
- “This dappled dawn injured by the night This is not the dawn we awaited. ” Thus, lamented the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz in his poem ‘Subh-e-Azaadi’ (The Dawn of Freedom) in August 1947 as the two nation-states of India and Pakistan were created unleashing catastrophic violence and bloodshed. The history of the subcontinent’s partition has been a fecund field of inquiry for decades. Often told as the cleaving of the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab, most studies of Partition and its aftermath have not devoted attention to the region of Kashmir. Treated as an exceptional case in official narratives and consequently in histories, Kashmir has been largely absent from accounts of Partition and its ramifications for the lives of millions of its inhabitants, many of whom faced displacement and violence as the erstwhile princely state was prized apart. Shahla Hussain’s Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2021) offers a corrective to this absence by braiding the history of Kashmir into the history of Partition and by introducing a bottom-up approach to this study. Interweaving official sources with meticulously unearthed vernacular sources, Hussain sets herself to the task of foregrounding people’s experiences of Partition and their aspirations of the future. What ensues is a rich interrogation of the multivalent meanings of freedom and self-determination in Kashmir, the limitations of the myopic model of territorial nationalism adopted by India and Pakistan and the Janus-faced nature of state-sponsored development in the region. Hussain deftly retraces international connections and solidarities between the Kashmiri liberation struggle and movements for decolonization in the mid-twentieth century and underlines the failure of institutions of international governance to accommodate movements for liberation. Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition therefore brings germane themes of historical inquiry such as anti-colonialism, nationalism, decolonization and development into dialogue. I had the delight of interviewing Professor Hussain about her book, the challenges that this project entailed, and her future research.
- Topic:
- History, Interview, and Partition
- Political Geography:
- Pakistan, South Asia, India, and Kashmir