South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2023. xiii, 366 pp. US$32.00, paper; US$95.00, cloth. ISBN 9781503636033.
Kashmir is at the heart of the ongoing international conflict between India and Pakistan in South Asia. The secessionist/irredentist insurgency in the state, dating back to the late 1980s, has been viewed by most observers as an aberration from India’s otherwise successful postcolonial state/nation-building project. Hafsa Kanjwal, who is a historian working in the critical studies tradition, challenges this dominant narrative in Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation. The book combines rich empirical detail, carefully reasoned causal analysis, and sophisticated analytical theorization to provide an important, and very necessary, academic intervention in the existing area-studies literature on Kashmir and the theoretical literature on state-building in postcolonial societies.
Kanjwal rejects the traditional statist “methodological nationalist framing” of Kashmir as being a “naturally integral” part of India (26–27). She argues that this “ahistorical” premise parochially conditions traditional academic accounts to emphasize how the Kashmiri population became alienated from the Indian state due to distorted centre-state relations and to focus on how the Indian state can accommodate Kashmiris within its existing constitutional framework. In contrast, Kanjwal raises a differing set of underlying questions—that is, how was Kashmir made “integral” to India through both purposeful state-sponsored assimilation and the Kashmiri people’s discursive “emotional integration” into India (27)? This relationship is subjected to critical examination, and not simply assumed as “natural.” It is from this starting point, and set of underlying assumptions/questions, that Kanjwal begins her impressive academic analysis.
The temporal focus of Kanjwal’s book is on the decade-long tenure of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad as the “prime minister” of Kashmir from 1953 to 1964. Bakshi assumed this position after the traditional Kashmiri Muslim leader Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah was jailed by the central Indian government under Jawaharlal Nehru for demanding a plebiscite to determine the future of Kashmir. According to Kanjwal, it was during Bakshi’s tenure as a “client regime” for the central Indian state that Kashmir become increasingly “colonized” and “integrated” into the Indian Union without the popular consent of its majority Muslim population.
Kanjwal uses the concept of “politics of life” as the primary conceptual variable to describe and explain how Bakshi’s “client regime” implemented the centre’s carefully designed strategies to emotionally, financially, and politically integrate Kashmir into India, and erode the prospects of plebiscite and self-determination. As Kanjwal writes, “The Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes propagated development, empowerment, and progress to secure the well-being of Kashmir’s population and normalize the occupation” (9). Furthermore, “the politics of life entailed foregrounding the day-to-day concerns of employment, food, education, and the provision of basic services” (9), whereas more fundamental questions of self-determination and Kashmir’s political future were made tangential in the prevailing political discourse. As such, according to Kanjwal, even the Nehruvian version of Indian “secularism” served as a proxy for Hindu majoritarianism by denying the right of self-determination to Kashmiris, while binding them in “chains of gold” through government development programs.
The empirical core of Kanjwal’s book consists of five chapters in which she uses a variety of sources—including official government documents and communications, pamphlets, letters, personal interviews, and other archival materials—to demonstrate how various aspects of the “politics of life” were used to “integrate” Kashmir into the Indian Union. Chapter 2 discusses how Bakshi utilized the media and controlled the flow of information to disseminate propaganda to build legitimacy for the regime both domestically and in the international arena. Chapter 3 is a particularly fascinating one in which Kanjwal examines how tourism guides, advertisements, and popular film were employed to “territorialize” India’s “colonial occupation” of Kashmir by portraying Kashmiris as requiring India’s help to properly “modernize,” and emphasizing Hindu religious shrines and pilgrimages in the region. Chapter 4 examines how five-year plans and extensive budget allocations were used as perverse forms of “developmentalism” to improve the living standards of Kashmiris to build legitimacy, while ironically also increasing their dependency on the central state. Chapter 5 analyzes how the state’s educational policies were designed to incorporate the Kashmiri Muslim population into Indian social life and the country’s political body. Finally, chapter 6 examines the government’s use of poems, short stories, novels, and cultural journals to develop a composite Kashmiri culture more commensurate with an overarching postcolonial “Indian identity,” but devoid of its historically significant Muslim roots. The concluding chapter draws lessons from Kashmir to better understand the dynamics of “settler colonialism” within a comparative empirical and theoretical context.
In conclusion, a particular strength of Kanjwal’s book is the rigorous interrogation of the underlying empirical, conceptual, and methodological assumptions used by traditional scholars to describe and explain the conflict in Kashmir. There is, however, one important question that remains somewhat unresolved in Kanjwal’s otherwise masterful analysis. This question is whether it is or is not possible to build dual but truly complementary regional and national identities in multi-ethnic/national democracies, or must these identities always remain bifurcated or, at minimum, subject to comparative power asymmetries between the state and minority groups? Kanjwal implies that these comparative power asymmetries privilege state-sponsored identities over those preferred by “colonized” subjects, but this is likely true in all multi-ethnic/national democracies. This somewhat unresolved question aside, Kanjwal’s thesis that state-building and “settler colonialism” in postcolonial countries involve a strategic mix of brute power/force combined with various strategies of emotional integration and empowerment is a compelling one. Her plea that “the case of Kashmir forces us to rethink our categories of colonialism and (post)colonialism, secularism, and democracy” is one that should resonate with any serious scholar of Kashmir and postcolonial state/nation-building. To ignore these questions is to ignore the central issue of competing sovereignties and visions of “self” at the heart of such conflicts, which Kanjwal elucidates with impressive and original analysis in this vitally important book.
Jugdep Singh Chima
Hiram College, Hiram