Kanjwal, H. (July 2023) Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building under Indian Occupation. Series: South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hardback ($95.00), 384 pp. 9781503635388
On the 8 August 2019, a mere three days after de-operationalising Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and revoking the special semi-autonomous status of the Indian-occupied former State of Jammu and Kashmir, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi (2019) took the opportunity to bask in his government’s “historic decision” by addressing the Indian nation. He proudly declared that this “new Jammu and Kashmir” would be characterised by “economic development” and “prosperity”, since, according to him, “Article 370 and 35A have given nothing but secessionism, terrorism, nepotism, and widespread corruption on a large scale to Jammu-Kashmir”. He boldly promised that under the new juridical regime, “there will be enhanced opportunity of earning livelihood and the life of our brothers and sisters of Jammu and Kashmir will become easier”.
Commentators, both those in favour of India’s occupying presence in Jammu and Kashmir 1 and those against it, were quick to publish articles, op-eds, and even books discussing this new reality; many discussed how it signalled the beginning of a new colonial project. Historian Hafsa Kanjwal’s excellent new book, Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building under Indian Occupation, takes a different approach. In it, she problematises this commentariat’s invocation of newness in reference to the Indian colonial project. Readers of Kanjwal’s book will note that Modi’s address was littered with tropes that, far from being novel, in fact date back to the very inception of India’s attempt to forcibly integrate Kashmir into its national borders. Recalling the Naya Kashmir Manifesto, a document drafted in 1944 by the National Conference to “counter decades of oppression and poverty under the Dogras” (2023: 41), Kanjwal astutely highlights what she calls the deliberate irony of Modi’s references to a “new Jammu and Kashmir”, for example.
Kanjwal’s objective in Colonizing Kashmir is clearly stated early in the book’s introduction: to “historicize India’s colonial occupation through processes of integration, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of India’s ‘decolonization’ from British colonial rule” (2023: 2). To do this, she offers a close examination of how a “politics of life” was implemented primarily by Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, Kashmir’s controversial second prime minister, during his decade of rule over the territory between 1953 and 1963. Refreshingly, she also begins the book by identifying and pushing back against two fallacies that characterise a significant proportion of scholarship on Kashmir, especially within India and among the Indian diaspora. First, that “Kashmiris were emotionally integrated into the Indian nation-state from which they would somehow become ‘alienated’”, and second, that “‘conflict’ was a result of misguided center-state relations and not India’s denial of self-determination and an imposition of a colonial occupation” (2023: 3).
In response to these assumptions, Kanjwal asks two questions whose importance cannot be overstated: “why are we compelled to examine Kashmir as a ‘region’ and India as a ‘nation’?” and, “more importantly, why does Kashmir have to be accommodated within India?” (p. 26). By asking these questions, she takes aim at the epistemic support offered by scholars who argue that we currently live in a postcolonial or decolonial moment. She builds upon this criticism by arguing that “it is precisely in spaces like Kashmir where postcolonial studies, in its ‘ambiguous spatio-temporality’, confronts its limitations, especially given ongoing forms of colonialism” since Colonizing Kashmir “attempts to understand the forms colonialism takes today within (post)colonial nation-states” (2023: 14). In this sense, Kanjwal states that “Colonizing Kashmir builds upon a body of Kashmir scholarship that poses a much-needed corrective to studies of ‘postcolonial’ South Asia, or subaltern studies” (2023: 25).
Beyond the fact that in-depth studies of Bakshi’s rule, a long and significant period in the history of India’s seventy-five-year-long colonisation of Kashmir, are in and of themselves a rarity, Kanjwal’s application of Neve Gordon’s concept of “politics of life” to understand how “the Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes propagated development, empowerment, and progress to secure the well-being of Kashmir’s population and to normalize the occupation for multiple audiences” offers a novel and powerful way of understanding of the significant but oft-overlooked differences between prosperity and dignity, and between comfort and freedom (Kanjwal 2023: 9) both within and beyond the Kashmiri context.
While Colonizing Kashmir is intensely rigorous in its methodology, it is significant to note that its main limitations are a product of the same colonial occupation that the book critiques. Kanjwal explains her methodology as being built upon archival fieldwork in Kashmir that took place over several visits between 2011 and 2018, where she accessed the Jammu and Kashmir State Archives in Srinagar and conducted twenty-five interviews with former students and bureaucrats who remember Bakshi’s rule. She also accessed the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Library in New Delhi, as well as published memoirs and literary works by Kashmiri writers, crucially centring Kashmiri voices in her study. She describes her visits to the National Archives of India as being of limited benefit, however, because access to many files on the Bakshi period was restricted. Recognising this as a limitation of her study, Kanjwal rightly argues that this inaccessibility is “indicative of the multiple ways in which the Indian state seeks to restrict access to information and knowledge-production on Kashmir” (2023: 31). To that effect, the book itself becomes a living document and something of a crucial primary source itself for anybody who may seek to one day study knowledge production on the nature of Bakshi’s rule in particular and on the early decades of India’s occupation of Kashmir in general.
Kanjwal impressively demonstrates the importance of a multifaceted examination of the Bakshi period and how it cemented India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir by including chapters looking at the role of the media, tourism, financial integration, foreign policy, and corruption within the project, to name but a few of the facets that she explores. Put together, these chapters make two important points clear to the reader. First, contrary to the majority of periodisations of the so-called “Kashmir Conflict” that use the events of the tumultuous 1980s, especially the allegedly rigged general election of 1987, and the subsequent emergence of the armed Kashmir Intifada as a starting point to understand the Kashmiris’ discontent with Indian rule, Kanjwal’s exploration of Bakshi’s rule offers an alternative periodisation that views the events of the 1980s as being a consequence of decades of India denying Kashmiris the right to self-determine. Second, Kanjwal shows the reader that although India’s attempts to take control of Kashmir has passed through different phases and taken on different forms, moving, as she so eloquently puts it, from the “politics of life” to “the politics of bare life” since the 1980s (2023: 273), many of the tropes, practices, and logics of colonialism, settler colonialism, and occupation had already been central features of the relationship between Kashmir and India from its very establishment.
One of the most striking examples can be seen in Chapter 3 of the book, entitled Producing and Promoting Paradise: Tourism, Cinema, and the Desire for Kashmir. Here, Kanjwal describes the role of tourism in strengthening India’s control over Kashmir. She mentions how many accounts of Bakshi’s rule “referred to tourism as the ‘backbone’ of the state’s economy” (2023: 98) – a fact Kanjwal herself disproves in Chapter 4 of the book, when she points out that agriculture was the “mainstay of the Kashmir economy” because “90 percent of the population depended on it” (2023: 142). Kanjwal highlights how tourism contributed to India creating a spatial imaginary of the land of Kashmir that produced and disseminated “colonial tropes to propagate a particular view of life in Kashmir meant to appeal to the sensibilities of middle-class Indian Hindu citizens” (2023: 99). This bears strong resonances to the post-Article 370 regime’s attempts to do the same, indicated by the arrival of record numbers of Indian tourists to Kashmir in 2022, well beyond the territory’s absorptive capacity (HT Correspondent 2023). Then as now, “tourism and cinema allowed India and Indians to maintain Kashmir as a place of their own” (Kanjwal 2023: 126).
Kanjwal points out in her introduction that “Kashmir is not a unique political entity and nor is it an exception” (2023: 20). To evidence this, she refers to other examples of nations that continue to be colonised today, including the Indigenous communities of North America, Tibetans, Palestinians, Kurds, the Oromo, and the people of Western Sahara, among others. Keeping this in mind, Kanjwal uses Colonizing Kashmir to respond to her own call for the “the creation of a historiography of states that do not exist, have not been allowed to exist, and peoples who have been denied self-determination and the right to exercise their sovereignty” (2023: 20) by adapting theory and concepts drawn from the study of other colonised regions to discern the politics of colonising Kashmir in the 1950s and early 1960s. These include, for example, the concepts of “politics of life” and the separation between “bureaucratic authority” and “state legitimacy”, drawn from studies of the Israeli colonisation of Palestine. Kanjwal also draws parallels with Japanese imperialism in Taiwan and Manchuria when discussing the concept of “spatial imaginaries”. This is a powerful move because it both provides context and credit to the specificities of the Kashmir case that she so comprehensively and comprehensibly examines in the book while also infusing it with value for scholars of other regions and struggles who may benefit from her skilful outlining of such clear and evident parallels.
With the nexus between the politics of life and colonial occupation at its core, Hafsa Kanjwal’s Colonizing Kashmir represents an excellent critical contribution not only to scholarship on Indian state formation and the colonisation of Kashmir, but also to scholarship on the modalities of colonialism in the twentieth century more generally. Crucially, the book carries out an important role in emphasising the indispensability of values such as self-determination, national liberation and collective dignity to colonised populations. This endeavour is aided in large part by Kanjwal’s lucid writing style, which makes the book an easy and engaging read throughout. On a concluding note, as well as strongly encouraging those seeking to learn about Kashmir and colonial occupations more generally to read Colonizing Kashmir, I also strongly encourage readers to visit its accompanying Instagram page, @colonizingkashmir, where the author has kindly uploaded and annotated archival photos pertaining to the events described in the book.