Colonizing Kashmir: An interview with Hafsa Kanjwal
Joining a new wave of critical scholarship on global decolonization, Hafsa Kanjwal’s 2023 monograph Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press) offers a compelling and provocative account of Indian state-building in Kashmir in the aftermath of the British withdrawal and argues that independent India’s attempts at state-building in Kashmir were fundamentally colonial. In recasting the Indian national project in Kashmir as a colonial enterprise and highlighting the role of Kashmir’s client regimes in this process, Kanjwal lays bare the “politics of life” that was central to bringing Kashmir within the Indian national orbit without the popular consent of its people. Ultimately, this account offers a critique of the liberatory character of narratives around decolonization and offers an alternative lens to understand national consolidation in the aftermath of the second World War.
Mahia Bashir, Harvard University
Mahia Bashir (MB): Could we reflect a bit on your scholarly trajectory and how this project developed?
Hafsa Kanjwal (HK): Firstly, thank you so much for having me. I began my PhD at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2010. At that time, you could say I was very new to South Asian History having done my bachelors in a self-designed major called Regional Studies of the Muslim World at Georgetown University. At Michigan, given my personal background and interest, I knew I wanted to work on Kashmir. As I began to read the literature on Kashmir, I noticed that there was a lot of attention given to the events surrounding the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 as it related to Kashmir and to the armed rebellion and its aftermath in the late 1980s. Much of the literature was constructed through Indian nationalist perspectives. There was not much, at least in terms of history, on the intervening time period. There were political scientists working on these years, but not much history.
In 2013, I went to Kashmir for my fieldwork, and I thought I would work on the entirety of that period. In my interviews with people about Kashmir’s post-1947 history, however, I was really intrigued by the figure of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad (who plays a central role in the book) and some of the contrasting things that people would say about him. A number of people called him a traitor for leading a coup against his predecessor, Sheikh Abdullah, who was the first prime minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir in 1953. He was also blamed for fully entrenching Kashmir into India economically, legally, and politically, thus rendering the plebiscite obsolete. Yet, many people would also acknowledge that he did a lot for the people of the state, particularly Kashmiri Muslims, by providing them employment. The fortunes of many of the people I interviewed had transformed during his rule. The same people were also fiercely critical of him. I was really curious about this paradox. A central question that came up during my fieldwork was: “How did India manage Kashmir at this time especially since there was not popular consent for it to rule, and what exactly were different client regimes trying to do locally?”
MB: Your work departs from extant scholarship on Kashmir and employs ‘colonialism’ as a framework for understanding India’s occupation of Kashmir on the one hand and challenges grand narratives that examine decolonization as an emancipatory project on the other. What does this framework redeem for writing history of Kashmir in this period?
HK: The case of Kashmir allows us to rethink colonialism, post-colonialism, and decolonization. When we think of colonialism, it is often thought of in a number of ways. One is that it is something that happened in the past but still has an impact in terms of its legacies. Second, it is often depicted as something that happens “overseas”—namely that there is a global north that colonizes the global south. What this erases is the power differentials within the global south, and south-to-south colonialisms (India and Kashmir being one of them.)
The reason for that is we do not conceive of the relationship between places that have geographic contiguity as potentially being colonial in nature. India, especially, is hard for many people to see as a colonial power because its anti-colonial movement against the British - with Gandhi, non-violence, and the Indian National Congress - is often valorized. This makes it hard for people to see how India serves as a colonial power. What the case of Kashmir, and other politically liminal sites, can help us think about is that as these new nation states become independent from European nation states, their national projects become engaged in imposing colonialism in regions that did not necessarily fit easily within the national body. Yes, this expansionism is not seen as colonial in nature—it is often depicted as “nation-building” or “centralization.” A number of South Asia scholars, including the Subaltern Studies school, have critiqued Indian nationalists for continuing some of the hierarchies that existed during British colonial rule as they began the task of building their new states. However, one of the things that is missing from this body of work is a critical reflection on how Indian nationalists (and many other anti-colonial nationalists around the world) accepted and adopted European models of sovereignty as well as territorial nationalism, and they reinforced them through their own forms of colonialism. You can see this with how scholars as well as popular narratives often talk about liberation movements within nation-states as “separatist” or “secessionist.” This is what happens in the case of Kashmir too—there is a tendency to adopt and reinscribe the territorial frameworks of the nation. In that way, I think, we really are far away from true decolonization.
MB: One key theme that you have examined in the book is what you refer to as ‘politics of life’. How and why is the Indian state engaging in the politics of life? Who are the key actors negotiating and participating in this project?
The why is interesting, because in the early years of India’s rule in Kashmir, Indian policymakers and the client regimes in Kashmir (including Bakshi’s regime) saw Kashmir as not a political question (i.e., not a question of sovereignty or self-determination) but rather in economic terms and linked to a better standard of living. Kashmiris were depicted as being malleable: that they may have had different political aspirations, but they had the potential to be integrated political subjects as long as they could experience the benefits of Indian rule. Both governments including Bakshi’s regime thought that Kashmiri political sentiments could be managed through state planning. The idea initially was to show Kashmiris the benefits that they could incur through integration with India well beyond what would happen under any other political setup or what was provided to other Indian states. This is where the “politics of life” comes in.
The politics of life refers to how the Indian government and the client regimes propagated development and progress to secure the well-being of Kashmir’s population and also to normalize the occupation for multiple audiences. This meant foregrounding concerns of employment, food, education, and provision of basic services. It also entailed suppressing demands for self-determination. What is interesting is that Nehru, India’s first prime minister, is purported to have told Sheikh Abdullah, the first Prime Minister of Kashmir, that India would bind Kashmir in “golden chains.” The government meant to ensure that with an improved standard of living and greater prosperity Kashmiri Muslim sentiments would shift in favor of India.
I think why the politics of life is significant is that when we think about these sites of colonization or settler colonization, the idea is that these are places of immense violence, war, dispossession, and marginalization. Many times, they are and that has been the story of Kashmir as well, but seeing colonization only through manifest violence obscures our understanding of colonization and the other ways through which it can operate. This is what I argue defined the early years of India’s rule in Kashmir.
In terms of the actors, a whole range of actors played a role in this from ministries in the Indian government to local client regimes to the Kashmiri bureaucracy, and even the Indian film industry and tourism operators.
MB: What is the Naya Kashmir Manifesto? How did it inform the policies implemented in Kashmir during Bakshi’s term as deputy Prime Minister?
HK: The Naya Kashmir Manifesto was released in 1944 by the National Conference, which was one of the main parties opposing Dogra rule in the princely state. It was very heavily influenced by prominent leftists in the subcontinent including B.P.L Bedi, Frida Bedi, and K.M. Ashraf. It called for a secular and democratic state influenced heavily from Soviet style models of governance and planned economy. Other scholars have argued that the manifesto came at a time when the National Conference was losing its popularity because of its perceived close relationship with the Indian National Congress as well as the revival of its rival, the Muslim Conference.
Bakshi was part of the National Conference and his ideas about the need for modernization, development and progress were very much shaped by his experience as a worker for the National Conference during Dogra rule. When Bakshi was deputy prime minister, Sheikh Abdullah implemented one of the primary aims of the manifesto—land reforms—although my book explores how there were limitations around that as well. Later when Bakshi was prime minister some of his policies were informed by the Naya Kashmir manifesto but in many ways, he also had to depart from the manifesto because the political context and the compulsions under Indian rule were different. For example, the manifesto called for Kashmir to be self-sufficient. Yet, during Bakshi’s tenure, in order to implement some of the state-building projects that he wanted, he had to heavily use funds from the Indian state and that increased Kashmir’s dependence on the Indian state. I am also examining how these client regimes attempted to fulfil, many times unsuccessfully, the aims of educational, economic, and cultural transformation, and some of the tensions inherent in many of the demands of the manifesto.
MB: I found your examination of Bakshi quite interesting and original. In popular discourse, he has been subjected to what E.P. Thompson called the ‘condescension of posterity’, yet you present a more well-rounded analysis of the man and his politics. Could you tell us more about that?
HK: As I mentioned before, I became interested in this period because of the things I would hear about Bakshi in my interviews. He is known for being a traitor, bringing immense amounts of corruption to Kashmir as well as securing Kashmir’s contested accession to India. I wanted to push away from seeing his regime simply as a puppet regime because I saw in the archives how state-building policies were shaped in Kashmir by the local government which was trying to respond to local concerns and needs. People were, to a certain extent, participating in the state building project. I think here it is important to distinguish between authority and legitimacy. Bakshi’s government did not have legitimacy, but it did have bureaucratic authority. People realized their participation in the state-building project would grant them particular benefits. I wanted to highlight how Bakshi developed his own theory of the political relying on the politics of life to procure some benefits for Kashmiris, yet these dynamics clashed with the imperatives of India’s colonial occupation and ensured that his practices would remain insufficient and ultimately become counterproductive.
MB: What might we expect in terms of future projects?
HK: I am working on two book projects. One is tentatively called A People’s History of Kashmir. It brings together some of the recent interventions in critical Kashmir studies to provide a decolonial and anti-occupation history of modern Kashmir, starting from Dogra princely rule to the present. It is geared more towards a general audience that is interested in learning about Kashmir’s freedom struggle and recent developments. The second book project is called Islam, Decolonization, and the Question of Kashmir. It is interested in contestations over what decolonization entails amongst Kashmiri thinkers, as well as forms of solidarity that seek to move beyond liberal and secular frameworks. Part of what I hope to do with this project is engage with Kashmiri political thinkers and their ideas on Islam, nationalism, secularism, and anti-colonialism.
Mahia Bashir is an Editor at Large for the Toynbee Prize Foundation and is a doctoral candidate in History at Harvard University.
Hafsa Kanjwal is the author of "Colonizing Kashmir: State building under Indian occupation" (Stanford University Press 2023) and is an associate professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania.