Blog-Beiträge - KashmirConnected

The Bedis, 'Naya Kashmir' and Stalin's constitution

3/31/2017

The 1944 'Naya Kashmir' or 'New Kashmir' manifesto - or at least the opening pages which propose a draft constitution for the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir - was based in large part on the constitution Stalin introduced in the Soviet Union in the mid-1930s. B.P.L. Bedi and his English wife Freda Bedi are often credited as the main forces behind the drafting of 'Naya Kashmir' - not least in Sheikh Abdullah's own autobiography. But much of the detail was lifted from the Soviet constitution, which the Bedis' had published in full in the quarterly Contemporary India which they edited in Lahore from 1935 to 1937.

This was explained in a talk that Andrew Whitehead gave this week at the University of Kashmir, with more than a hundred faculty and students present. The talk focussed on 'Freda Bedi in Kashmir' - the Bedis lived in Srinagar from 1947 to 1952 and had an association with the state, and particularly with Sheikh Abdullah's National Conference, from the late 1930s.

The talk has been reported on the Outlook website - here's the link: http://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/sheikh-abdullahs-new-kashmir-manifesto-was-a-cut-and-paste-of-stalins-constituti/298388

Lost Kashmiri History

3/20/2017

Lost Kashmiri History is a relatively new website which reflects the growing interest in Kashmir and its past. The site bears the strapline: 'the struggle of memory against forgetting'.

The site hosts an impressive array of articles, most relating to aspects of the separatist insurgency. 'Lost Kashmiri History is an initiative to memorise the saga of occupation and oppression', the site declares in explaining its mission. '... And to move closer to our dream of a Just Society.'

This is history from an activist perspective - and that's reflected too in the way Lost Kashmiri History uses social media.

One of the most valuable aspects of the site: the texts of seventy or so books about Kashmir which are available in full ... a really useful resource!

http://lostkashmirihistory.com/books-on-kashmir/

'A new nation is ready' - what Farooq Abdullah meant

3/3/2017

A few days ago, Farooq Abdullah - from chief minister, former Indian government minister and still a figure of influence in the National Conference - made a typically maverick, but clearly significant, comment in which he described Kashmir as a nation, a nation which seeks Azaadi and spoke positively of those who were fighting for that goal.

“Our youth are not sacrificing their lives for becoming legislators or ministers but for their rights. This is our land. These youth have chosen a path and they have promised to God. You are the sole giver and taker of lives but we will sacrifice our life for the freedom of this nation… Today, a new nation (Jammu Kashmir) is ready, the nation that does not fear guns, and the nation which is out for Azadi. They are taking up guns for something concrete. We need to look into it and the guns need to fall silent. They (Kashmiri gun-yielding youth) are not enemy of any one, neither them (India) nor they (Pakistan).”

What did he mean, why did he say it, and what is the broader context of these remarks? One of Kashmir's wisest journalists, Shuja'at Bukhari, editor of Rising Kashmir, addresses those issues in this important article:

http://www.risingkashmir.com/article/message-from-farooqs-statement

Farooq Abdullah

Shuja'at Bukhari

'Witness to Paradise'

3/2/2017

At Oxford today, Sanjay Kak and Mirza Waheed lead a seminar on Witness to Paradise, a project which tracks photojournalism in Kashmir over the last thirty years.

More details here: https://www.sant.ox.ac.uk/events/witness-paradise-photojournalism-kashmirs-present-1986-2016

The organisers say about this project: 'Photography in Kashmir has emerged as a powerful witness to its troubled present. Rooted in the everyday of photojournalism, and stretching away from those limits when they can, a remarkable new generation of photographers have steadily illuminated a little understood period of Kashmir’s contemporary life. Over the last three decades their work has also demonstrated the radical part that can be played by photographs in subverting the established views – of Kashmir as a beautiful landscape sans people; or as an innocent paradise; and more recently, of a paradise beset by mindless violence. Witness to Paradise is a curated book project that brings together images by nine photographers from Kashmir, the oldest already a working professional in 1986, and the youngest not yet twenty in 2016. The images are by Meraj Uddin, Javeed Shah, Dar Yasin, Javed Dar, Altaf Qadri, Sumit Dayal, Showkat Nanda, Syed Shahriyar and Azaan Shah. The text has emerged from conversations with documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, and brings out the varied relationships that each one bears to photography, and their commitment to Kashmir, raising quietly profound questions about the place of artistic practice in zones of conflict.'

'The Last Great Silk Route Trader'

2/14/2017

The Indian Memory Project website has just posted a piece about Munshi Aziz Bhat of Kargil, described by his great-grandson as the last Great Silk Route trader. It's a great piece, including a photograph of Bhat taken in Kargil in 1945 with his two sons. Here's the link.

The Chinese Uyghur exodus to Kashmir

10/30/2016

In the late 1940s, about 11,500 Chinese Uyghurs trekked across the mountains to Kashmir. The story is told in an article on the Uyghur diaspora by Radio Free Asia - here's the link: http://www.rfa.org/english/news/special/pathtofreedom/

Most of these refugees, the article explains, moved on to Turkey, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and the United States ... but a few chose to stay in Kashmir.

Here's a brief extract:

Speaking from his home in New York, 86-year-old Ghulamiddin Pahta told RFA’s Uyghur Service that thousands of ethnic Uyghur and Kazakh minorities were forced to leave their homeland when soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) arrived in Xinjiang at the end of 1949, following the communist takeover of China.

Pahta said that the refugees braved severe conditions during the winter months as they trekked through the Himalaya Mountains on their way to India’s Kashmir region.

“I joined thousands of Uyghurs from [the Xinjiang capital] Urumqi, Kashgar, Hotan and other regions of the Uyghur homeland in crossing the Himalaya Mountains during the hardest winter months, enduring tremendous difficulties before arriving in Kashmir’s Srinagar city in India,” Pahta said.

“Kashmir was full of Uyghur and Kazakh refugees at the time. Large numbers of individuals traveling with us died in the Himalayas because of the cold,” he said. “When I arrived in Kashmir, I heard from my uncle Ebeydullah, who was president of the East Turkestan Refugee Association, that 11,500 refugees had traveled to the region and more than 400 had died on the way.”

The article includes the photo below - I wonder if it was take at Nedou's Hotel? - which carries the caption: 'A group of Uyghurs who succeeded in escaping at the time of the communist Chinese invasion and who took refuge in Kashmir, India. (Summer, 1950)' And underneath, taken at the same time is a photo of Uughur leaders meeting Sheikh Abdullah.

Kashmir's Instrument of Accession

10/27/2016

The Wire news website has posted on its website what rather breathlessly describes as an exclusive - the Instrument of Accession of October 1947 by which Maharaja Hari Singh consigned the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir to Indian rule.

The document has been published before, and was for some years available on the Ministry of Home Affairs website. But the article by Venkatesh Nayak is well researched, and he has managed to achieve what (as far as we know) no other scholar has succeeded in doing - he has consulted the original of the Instrument of Accession in the National Archive of India.

At the same time, the BBC Hindi website has a piece by Andrew Whitehead (who also happens to be the moderator of the KashmirConnected website) on the circumstances in which the accession was signed. He believes that while the document was dated 26 October 1947 it was actually signed the following day.

And in case you are wondering what the document itself looks life, it's posted below:

Salman Rushdie, 'The Prophet's Hair'

9/23/2016

The London Review of Books has just reposted on its website a short story that Salman Rushdie wrote for the Review in 1981.

Entitled 'The Prophet's Hair', it is clearly loosely based on the mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the relic - a hair of the Prophet - kept at Hazratbal in Srinagar (whose white cupola you can see above). The relic went missing in December 1963 and was retrieved about two weeks later.

'Who has not heard of the vale of Cashmere?'

9/10/2016

A wonderful article has just been posted on scroll.in - it's by Nirupama Rao, a scholar and onetime foreign secretary of India, and is about exotic imaginings of Kashmir in the west. She looks particularly at Thomas Moore's epic poem 'Lalla Rookh' - about a Mughal princess's journey for marriage through the Himalayan foothills and to (and beyond) Kashmir.

The poem was published 200 years ago; the author had never been to, or near, Kashmir; in an age where there was a great taste for Byronic epic poetry, 'Lalla Rookh' was a huge commercial success. Nirupama Rao discusses how the poem was recreated in later decades on the stage and in song, how it has shaped a western image of Kashmir, and how it plays into other somewhat orientalist takes on the valley, right down to Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir' (at the time that number was written in the early 1970s, none of the band members had ever been to Kashmir, and it was based on a journey into the Sahara!)

And with the permission of both the author and scroll.in, the article is now reposted elsewhere on the KashmirConnected site.

Kashmiris in the UK and their role in separatism

8/15/2016

The respected journal Foreign Affairs has published an excellent article by Fahad Shah entitled 'How the Clash in Kashmir Moved Abroad'. It looks at the early history of the JKLF in the UK - and particularly the leading roles of Amanullah Khan and Nazir ul Haq - and the abduction and killing of the Indian diplomat Ravindra Mhatra in 1984 and its consequences.

The article also looks at the heyday of JKLF actvity in Britain in the early 1990s, its subsequent decline, and signs that it is once again regrouping. There are now six MPs of Kashmiri origin (though Shah doesnt mention this, none are apparently from the Kashmir Valley tracing their roots to Pakistan Kashmir). Shah's conclusion is that young Kashmiris in Britain are less connected with and involved in separatism than a generation ago.

Here's the link to Fahad Shah's article https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/kashmir/2016-08-03/how-clash-kashmir-moved-abroad - and you can see a list of recent articles in Foreign Affairs about Kashmir here https://www.foreignaffairs.com/regions/kashmir