Mehfil 7 - Presenting Kashmir, Anew

Amrita Ghosh talks to Kashmiri scholar and academic Hafsa Kanjwal her new book Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (2023). The episode presents Kashmir and its long conflict in a new narrative. Kanjwal resets the usual ways of understanding Kashmir’s past and looks at the immediate postcolonial years of 1950s and 1960s in which Kashmir was slowly integrated into India with various nation-building strategies. Kanjwal questions binary terms like colonial and postcolonial, and offers a way of rethinking the Partition as the dominant trope for understanding the conflict in Kashmir. She talks about the ways through which an idea of Kashmir was presented within frameworks of statist integration politics through film, tourism, pamphlets, the use of emotionality and affect, and through racial connotations of a Kashmiri identity. Ghosh and Kanjwal discuss the representation of Kashmir within contemporary cultural productions and the recent slew of Bollywood films and online series that are once again deploying Kashmir to erase and reframe conflict in specific ways.

Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023)

Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in South Asian literature at the University of Central Florida. She is the co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Reenvisioning (Brill 2022) and Subaltern Vision: A Study in Postcolonial Indian English Text (Cambridge Scholars 2012). Her book Kashmir’s Necropolis: New Literature and Visual Texts is forthcoming with Lexington Books. She is the co-founding editor of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary journal.