Blog Posts - KashmirConnected

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

Amanullah Khan - an obituary

5/30/2016

In Kashmir Narrator, Wajahat Ahmed has written a brief account of the life of Amanullah Khan, founder of the JKLF, who died in April 2016. This is how the article opens:

The life story of Kashmiri nationalist leader Amanullah Khan, who recently passed away, epitomizes the rise of a territorial Kashmiri nationalism that transcended the parochial idea of an ethnic nationalism tied to Kashmiri language. Amanullah Khan’s nationalism drew upon a progressive Kashmiri Muslim cosmopolitanism and a secular internationalism. His life experiences spanning different cultural regions of Kashmir coupled with his international engagement with diverse nationality movements endowed him with a phenomenological awareness of pluri-ethnic and pluri-cultural nature of Kashmiri society. This predisposed him to articulate an inclusive vision for an independent Kashmir.

Here's the link: http://www.kashmirnarrator.com/amanullah-khan-life-history-azadi-ideologue/

Amanullah Khan's funeral in Gilgit: Kashmir Narrator

'When Eqbal Ahmad was shot at in Kashmir'

4/10/2016

This is the title of of a wonderful article by doctoral student Abir Bazaz in Kashmir Narrator - here's the link: http://www.kashmirnarrator.com/eqbal-ahmad-shot-kashmir-2/

Eqbal Ahmad was one of a small group of leftists who fought with the invading Pakistani forces in Kashmir in 1947-48. He was shot - though not by the Indian army but during fighting between rival Pathan contingents of the invading force. Intriguingly, the militia raised to oppose them was formed largely on the initiative of Communists who supported Sheikh Abdullah and Kashmir's accession to India. So there were leftists ranged on both sides of this conflict.

Here's an extract from Abir Bazaz's article:

Eqbal Ahmad had been recruited by the activists of the Muslim League from his college campus in Lahore. This was the Talim-us-Islam College of the Ahmadi sect which had been relocated to Lahore after Partition. The Ahmadis were not only actively involved in the efforts to organize for Kashmir in the Punjab, but also fought in the 1947-48 war. Only five students volunteered to fight in Kashmir when Muslim League activists visited Eqbal Ahmad’s college. At the young age of 15, after about four days of training in small firearms, Eqbal Ahmad was taken by the Muslim League activists to Muzaffarabad where he joined volunteers from the northern areas of Pakistan.

Even though the young Eqbal Ahmad had been brought to Muzaffarabad by the Muslim League, he joined a Communist Party unit led by Latif Afghani. This was his first introduction to Communist politics.

Latif Afghani was a Communist activist and a trade union leader who had also been a member of the All India Students Federation of the Communist Part of India. Latif Afghani was later arrested in 1950 by the Pakistani government for his protests against the pro-US Iranian Shah.
This frustrated attempt to liberate Kashmir with the force of arms by a coalition of ragtag forces took place against the background of genocidal violence in neighboring Punjab which had spilled over into Jammu by the September of 1947.

Later Eqbal Ahmad wrote that the Pathan tribesmen had started fighting each other before they could even enter the city of Srinagar in the last week of October. He reported heavy casualties among the Pakistani fighting units from the northern areas once the first battalion of the better-armed Indian Army was airlifted to Kashmir on 27 October 1947.

Eqbal Ahmad’s stint as a guerilla fighter in Kashmir ended with him being shot, not by the Indian Army, but in the fighting between the rival Pathan factions.

If you want to know more about Eqbal Ahmad, there's a Wikipedia entry on him here - though this doesn't mention his joust in Kashmir.

Sunil Khilnani's radio programme on Sheikh Abdullah

4/5/2016

Sunil Khilnani's radio programme on Sheikh Abdullah, part of the 'Incarnations: India in fifty lives' series, has been broadcast on Radio 4. I am posting here the audio podcast. As well as Khilnani's sparkling script, the fifteen-minute programme features wonderful archive of Sheikh Abdullah speaking in English. The US-based historian Chitralekha Zutshi (who is currently working on a biography of Abdullah) is featured, and there's a touch of the rap of MCKash incorporating the riff from Led Zeppelin's 'Kashmir'.

Several clips of BBC correspondents reporting in the early years of the insurgency are also used - unnamed, but identified here: the first and last clips are of Andrew Whitehead, there's a brief extract of David Loyn reporting from Bijbehara, and you can just make out Elizabeth Blunt's reporting as well. .

Mirza Waheed on Agha Shahid Ali

2/27/2016

As the JNU row, and the illiberalism of the Delhi government, continues to create shockwaves nationally and internationally, the celebrated Kashmiri novelist Mirza Waheed has written about the powerful poetry of fellow Kashmiri, Agha Shahid Ali.

Waheed comes to the defence of Agha Shahid Ali's best known poem 'The Country Without a Post Office' - from those who suggest that as literally that's not true so as literature the poem is flawed. Waheed says:

And so it transpires that Shahid, the eternal witness and martyr, is posthumously booked for sedition. And why not? How dare you write a poem that is, one, political, and two, deploys powerful metaphors to depict the Kashmiri condition and that dark decade – the Nineties –when the Indian state came down on Kashmiris with all its brawn and fury for daring to rise in rebellion against Indian rule. For their audacity to demand political and human rights, for chanting that antinational, seditious, taboo song of freedom – azaadi.

Here's a link to the piece on scroll.in - http://scroll.in/article/804163/how-to-award-a-posthumous-sedition-award-to-a-poet

Nehru's "golden chains" binding Kashmir to India

12/1/2015

Scroll.in has posted a perceptive piece by Nishita Trisal, a doctoral student at Michigan, about India's attempts to use financial packages intended to promote economic development to bind the Kashmir valley to India. Here's the link: http://scroll.in/article/772211/in-kashmir-nehrus-golden-chains-that-he-hoped-would-bind-the-state-to-india-have-lost-their-lustre

And an extract:

Soon after Partition, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru is said to have told then Prime Minister of Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, that India would bind Kashmir in golden chains. Since 1947, economic development programmes have been a central part of the Indian government’s effort to quell unrest in the region. Notwithstanding the efficacy of these projects, the dominant perception across India remains that Kashmir is like a petulant child, ungrateful for the benevolent gifts and privileges the Centre has bestowed upon it.

The story and symbolism of Lal Chowk

8/13/2015

Lal Chowk has been a venue of some of the most critical and turbulent moments in Kashmir's history - and simply its name is a part of the story of Kashmir's transition from princely rule.

In the DailyO, the journalist Gowhar Geelani has written about how Lal Chowk has been an eye-witness to Kashmir's 'wretched history' since 1947 - here's the link. And here's an extract:

Many historians agree that Kashmir's Lal Chowk (Red Square) was named after the renowned Red Square of Moscow by a Sikh leftist intellectual BPL Bedi, the author of Naya Kashmir. Bedi, father of famous Indian film actor Kabir Bedi, was Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah's close confidant. And Naya Kashmir was an important constitutional framework for Jammu and Kashmir under autocratic Dogra Maharaja Hari Singh's rule.

Nehru in Lal Chowk

Lal Chowk in 1983