Any attempt to homogenize Kashmiri society or the politico-cultural discourse on Kashmir is a dangerously flawed exercise. To that end, the chapters in this book address various aspects of the political, cultural, and socioeconomic life in Kashmir. These chapters are interdisciplinary interventions that could potentially bridge ethnic, religiocultural, and political divides in the region. The book is divided into three sections: the first section explores history and memory, offering a critical dialogue between these phenomena and fiction. The chapters in section two offer a critical dialogue between history, politics, and gender, analyzing historical and political discourses to underscore the agential capacities of Kashmiri women, which are, traditionally, subsumed within masculinist discourse. The sole chapter in section three foregrounds the complex relationship between history, trauma, and poetry. Taken together, this book is a nuanced attempt at giving readers the opportunity to engage with multiple subjectivities, historical understandings, and political opinions. It will be of interest to general readers, scholars, and advanced students of Literature, Politics, History, Human Geography and Sociology. This book was originally published as a special issue of the South Asian Review.

In this study, Nyla Ali Khan focuses on the representation of South Asian life in works by four contemporary Anglophone writers: V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai. Concentrating on the intertwined topics of nationalism, transnationalism, and fundamentalism, Khan offers a critical dialogue between these works and the contemporary history they encounter, using history to interrogate fiction and using fiction to think through historical issues. In doing so, Khan argues that in the mixed, heterogeneous space of transnationalism, cultural and linguistic authenticity is a pipe dream. The binary structures created by the colonial encounter undergo a process of dialectical interplay in which each culture or language makes incursions into the other. Some of these structures are as follows: black-white, primitive-savage, self-other, silent-articulate, rational ruler and irrational ruled. These categories generate a dichotomy that creates the perception that a people have of themselves and their political and social relationships. Their recognition of this dialogic interplay of community and place becomes the basis for strategies that enable transnational and postcolonial writers to revise dogmatic categories. Despite all their differences, the works of these authors delineate the asymmetrical relations of colonialism and the aftermath of this phenomenon as it is manifested across the globe in this day and age. Khan shows, for instance, how Naipaul articulates a sensibility created by multilayered identities and the remapping of old imperial landscapes, in the process suggesting a new dynamic of power relations in which politics and selfhood, empire and psychology, prove to be profoundly interrelated; how Rushdie encourages a nationalist self-imagining and a rewriting of history that incorporates significant cultural, religious, and linguistic differences into our sense of identity; how Ghosh is critical of the putative cultural and religious necessity to forge a unified nationalist identity, arguing that no single theory sufficiently frames the multiple inheritances of present diasporic subjectivities; and how Desai seeks to imagine a responsible form of artistic, social, and political agency.

This book offers fresh and exciting new directions of inquiry into the highly contentious issue of conflict resolution in South Asia. By shifting its gaze from a politics of division mired in ethno-nationalisms into a healing and restorative focus, the author moves the dialogue forward into the realm of community, healing, and shared governance. The book analyzes the major constitutional and political missteps that have led to the current situation of violence and distrust in countries such as India and Pakistan, keeping the focus on Jammu and Kashmir. This monograph will appeal to a wide range of audiences including academics, researchers, graduate students interested in South Asian politics, development, trauma studies, and peace and conflict studies.

This book offers fresh and exciting new directions of inquiry into the highly contentious issue of conflict resolution in South Asia. By shifting its gaze from a politics of division mired in ethno-nationalisms into a healing and restorative focus, the author moves the dialogue forward into the realm of community, healing, and shared governance. The book analyzes the major constitutional and political missteps that have led to the current situation of violence and distrust in countries such as India and Pakistan, keeping the focus on Jammu and Kashmir. This monograph will appeal to a wide range of audiences including academics, researchers, graduate students interested in South Asian politics, development, trauma studies, and peace and conflict studies.

This book is a compendium of the speeches and interviews of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who reigned as Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir from 1948 to 1953, and who was a large presence on the political landscape of India for fifty years. The volume is designed to enable a student of South Asian politics, and the politics of Kashmir in particular, to analyze the ways in which experiences have been constructed historically and have changed overtime.

Since 1989, religious fundamentalism and exclusionary nationalism in Jammu and Kashmir have generated political and social turmoil and eroded the ethos and culture of Kashmir. These forces are responsible for the silencing of dissenters, economic deprivation, lack of infrastructure, mass displacements, political anarchy, and the repression of women. Women in Kashmir constantly grapple with both the devastating effects of Indian occupation and Pakistani infiltration and their own complicated histories. Nyla Ali Khan, the granddaughter of the first Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, gives an insider's analysis of the effects of nationalist, militant, and religious discourses and praxes on a gender-based hierarchy. This cross-disciplinary project shows the attempted relegation of Kashmiri women to the archives of memory and reveals the women's powerful and persistent endeavors to rise from the ashes of immolated identities.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Nyla Ali Khan, the granddaughter of the first Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, gives an insider's analysis on the political and social turmoil that has eroded the ethos and fabric of Kasmiri culture. She monitors the effects of nationalist, militant, and religious discourses and praxes on a gender-based hierarchy.

This book is a compendium of the speeches and interviews of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who reigned as Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir from 1948 to 1953, and who was a large presence on the political landscape of India for fifty years. The volume is designed to enable a student of South Asian politics, and the politics of Kashmir in particular, to analyze the ways in which experiences have been constructed historically and have changed overtime.