The Kashmir Conflict of 1947: Testimonies of a Contested History
In 2013, I was awarded a PhD by published works in History at the University of Warwick. The principal published work considered was my book A Mission in Kashmir. I was also required to submit a 10,000 word critical overview and was subject to a viva. I have posted below as a downloadbale file the critical overview and along with it copies of two academic articles which were also submitted towards the PhD, and I have also pasted below the critical overview::
A critical overview submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by published works in History
Supervisor: Professor David Hardiman
University of Warwick, Department of History
May 2013
Table
of Contents
Introduction
1. Context of
the research 5
2. Personal
history 8
3. Research
method and argument 15
4. Original
contribution to knowledge 19
5. Critical
reception 28
6. Subsequent
writing on Kashmir’s modern history 35
Conclusion
44
Appendix: Personal
bibliography relating to Partition and Kashmir in 1947
Introduction
The
published works that I am putting forward for this PhD are as follows:
·
Andrew Whitehead, A Mission in Kashmir, New Delhi: Viking
Penguin, 2007, xii + 244pp, ISBN-13: 978-0-67008-127-1, ISBN-10: 0-67008-127-2
·
Andrew Whitehead,
‘The People’s Militia: Communists and Kashmiri nationalism in the 1940s’, Twentieth Century Communism: a journal of
international history, 2, 2010, pp.141-68
·
Andrew Whitehead, ‘Kashmir’s
Conflicting Identities’ [review essay], History
Workshop Journal, 58, 2004, pp.335-40
This critical overview will
explain how these works came to be written and the methodology of the
underlying research. It will establish that these writings are rigorous and
objective and that they constitute a significant contribution to original
knowledge about an issue of substance, the early stages of a dispute which has
continued to bedevil India and Pakistan since independence in 1947. The
overview will discuss the purpose and value of oral history in Partition and related
studies. It will describe the historiographical context of the published work
and their critical reception, establishing that the research has been
recognised as innovative and important by scholars of repute. The overview also
considers subsequent scholarship about the origins of the Kashmir crisis and
more general informed discussion about Kashmir’s recent history.
This overview concludes, as required, with a
bibliography of my writing (and a list of my radio documentaries) about
Partition in 1947, which created out of the British Raj the independent nations
of India and Pakistan, and about the Kashmir conflict which arose from
Partition and the end of British ‘paramountcy’ over India’s princely
states.
1. Context of the research
My writing about Kashmir in
the late 1940s is a retelling of a deeply contested historical narrative. I use
oral history and first hand testimony to explore the lived experience of a
period of political turbulence and military conflict which saw the eruption of
a continuing crisis about who rules the Kashmir valley. The published works
which you are being asked to consider seek to challenge narrowly geopolitical
accounts of the origins of the Kashmir conflict, which often give little regard
to how Kashmiris and others on the spot experienced, and viewed, the emerging
rivalry between India and Pakistan for control of the princely state. It also
interrogates the established nationalist narratives – Indian, Pakistani and
indeed Kashmiri – of how the conflict began, disputing some of the elements of
these rival versions of history. I seek to develop a more nuanced and complex
account of how this intractable territorial and political dispute arose, and
thus in part to suggest why it has been so difficult to resolve.
Kashmir has tended to stand apart from the
rest of India in the historiography of independence and Partition in 1947, and
the re-examining of the communal violence, sexual aggression and mass
population movements which Partition occasioned. The new writing about
Partition – which is built around first person accounts, often of those
marginalised in conventional historical narratives – pays little regard to
Kashmir.[1] The Kashmir valley’s experience of Partition
was distinct from that of Punjab to the south, which witnessed the most acute
violence and population movement in 1947. In Kashmir, the communal character of
the crisis was less pronounced, it involved both conventional and irregular
military forces rather than unorganised or loosely organised violence, and the
conflict was pursued by states and those acting on their behalf. It is seen as
exceptional. Part of my argument is that it is less exceptional than perceived
by historians, both conventional and revisionist, and is better incorporated
into accounts of Partition than standing on the margins or awkwardly outside.
There has been much innovative scholarship
about Kashmir, but by and large this has avoided directly addressing the events
of 1947. Certainly, recent scholarly writing has not sought to make use of oral
history in narrating how the Kashmir conflict began. The most refreshing aspect
of much of this scholarship is the absence of polemic or of a politicised
undertow. Much of the earlier writing about Kashmir, including well researched accounts
of its history, has been tarnished by partisan comment. Alastair Lamb, for
example, has achieved eminence as a historian of Kashmir, but for him to write
in extenuation of killings by Pakistani tribesmen, the event at the heart of my
book A Mission in Kashmir, that
‘whatever happened in Baramula [sic] that day is as nothing when compared to
what has happened to Kashmiri men, women and children at Indian hands since
1989’[2] is
to diminish his own authority. One of the most profound problems of writing
about Kashmir, where suspicions are so deep rooted and loyalties so deeply
entrenched, is in gaining the attention and confidence of those from different
political, religious and national traditions, and seeking to establish a
narrative which supercedes these often competing identities.
In my own work, I have tried to avoid any
partiality – a task which is difficult when writing about Kashmir, where even
descriptive terms of political geography (Indian-held Kashmir,
Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, Azad Kashmir) are taken as betraying an allegiance.
The sensitivity stems above all, of course, because of the continuing violence
and political instability in Indian-administered Kashmir, where an armed
insurgency erupted (some would say was rekindled) in 1989 prompting a massive,
and continuing, deployment of Indian security forces. The published works
submitted are not about the recent insurgency, but these items would not have
been written but for the renewed and profound violence, nor would they have
received the same attention. All writing about contemporary Kashmir is
inevitably seen through the prism of the long-lasting political and security
crisis there, and in my case, it was that crisis which first took me to
Srinagar. I should explain how I came to know Kashmir, and how I came to be in
a position to write with a claim to academic rigour. As my career has been, for
a PhD candidate, rather unconventional I will explain at some length how I
became involved in gathering oral testimony, and my growing interest in
Kashmir.
2. Personal history
I studied history as an
undergraduate at Oxford University, and was awarded first class honours. While
I took a paper in ‘Imperialism and Nationalism’, my main interest was in
British history, particularly of the nineteenth century. I was influenced by
the ‘history from below’ approach, read E.P. Thompson, and subscribed to the
then recently established History
Workshop Journal. As a postgraduate,
I studied at the Centre for the Study of Social History at the University of
Warwick, which had been founded by E.P. Thompson. I developed a modest
acquaintance with Raphael Samuel and some others in the History Workshop
circle, in part because I invited them to come and speak at the Radical History
Group which I helped to set up at Warwick. I was awarded an M.A. in Social
History, the research component of which concerned tramping artisans,[3]
and then began work on a doctoral thesis at Warwick with the title ‘Popular
Politics and Society in late-Victorian Clerkenwell’. The subject was suggested
to me by Jay Winter and I was supervised by Michael Shepherd and later by
Royden Harrison. This was a study of political activity and occupational and
social structure in an area of inner London which was, at various times, seen
as a heartland of artisan radicalism and of a strand of socialism which
attracted support in part from the semi-skilled and unskilled. My SSRC funding
only allowed two years full-time research towards my doctorate and while I have
continued both to research and write about London radicalism, to my regret, I
never completed this PhD. I have however written articles for peer reviewed and
other journals and entries for reference series based on this work, and copies
of the five chapters of the thesis which were tolerably close to completion
have been deposited in local reference libraries.[4]
My career has been as a news journalist with
the BBC, and principally with the BBC World Service where I am currently the
editor of news and current affairs programmes. Early in my career, I made a
number of radio programmes for which I gathered oral testimony, and this became
a hallmark of my broadcast work. Several of these documentaries were about
aspects of British popular politics, and my audio archive of interviews with
British political activists – sixty-five interviews in all, some conducted on
behalf of the BBC and others out of personal interest – has been deposited with
the British Library Sound Archive.[5]
In 1992, the year after the fall of Soviet
Communism, I made my most ambitious radio documentaries to date, a series of
five programmes entitled ‘What’s Left of Communism?’ The opening programme was
a quick march through the history of international communism, including
material from interviews with onetime British communists, among them E.P.
Thompson and Denis Healey, and voices from around the world. Subsequent
programmes examined the resilience of the communist movement in Cuba, Italy,
South Africa and India. This last programme occasioned my first visit to India,
and won a prestigious international award.[6]
The following year, my career took a new path
when I became a BBC news correspondent based in Delhi reporting for radio and
television. Within weeks, I made my first reporting trip to Kashmir, where the
separatist insurgency and Indian response to it had led to exceptional levels
of violence and civil unrest. It was a running story throughout my time in
India as a correspondent, and I made a dozen or more visits to Srinagar and
other parts of Jammu and Kashmir, got to know key figures in the dispute
(including Indian government ministers and separatist leaders) and through
Kashmiri journalists in particular, gained some sense of Kashmiri opinion. I
later was able to visit Pakistan Kashmir. Kashmir was the most difficult story
on the foreign correspondent’s South Asia beat – above all, because almost
every detail of every story was contested, in a manner I haven’t otherwise
encountered except in Sri Lanka during its civil war.
At the end of my tour in Delhi, I was commissioned
by the BBC to make a five part radio documentary series on the fiftieth
anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan. This was intended to be
about the lived experience of Partition, not the diplomacy and politics of that
process. Although it occasioned one of the most profound population movements
of the century and huge loss of life, at that time the history of Partition had
been told almost exclusively as a political rather than social story. The
personal accounts of living through violence or being a refugee had been
reflected in fiction and in cinema but not in historical narrative. There had
been until the mid-1990s very little organised oral history about Partition,
and to add urgency to the need to retrieve and give shape to these memories,
those who had lived through Partition as adults were of advanced years. For
this award- winning series ‘India: a people partitioned’, I travelled across
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh recording memories of 1947 – not the high
politics of that year (though a few of those I talked to had a role in that
process), but the upheaval, the trauma and the migration.[7]
The interviews conducted for this series formed the basis of an oral history
collection now held by the archive of the School of Oriental and African
Studies (SOAS) at the University of London.[8]
This has been supplemented by subsequent interviews about Partition and related
events. The deposit now consists in total of 205 interviews and recordings of
which fifty-eight relate to events in Kashmir in 1947. This archive has been
used particularly by Yasmin Khan for her book The Great Partition which draws on twenty or so of these
interviews, none relating to Kashmir.[9]
Several of these interviews were with writers
who captured the Partition experience in their novels and short stories, often
based on their personal experience. I was particularly arrested by interviews
with Amrita Pritam, Krishna Baldev Vaid, Bapsi Sidhwa and Bhisham Sahni, and
also spoke to Khushwant Singh, Shaukat Osman, Qurratulain Hyder and relatives
of Saadat Hasan Manto. My occasional writing about Partition literature has
been cited in more rigorously researched studies of the field.[10]
It was while gathering material for this
radio series that I first visited the Kashmiri town of Baramulla and – as I
relate in the first chapter of A Mission
in Kashmir – chanced across St Joseph’s mission hospital and met
Italian-born Sister Emilia. Her vivid memories of surviving the attack by the
tribal lashkar (the term for an armed raiding party) fifty years earlier
initially struck me as a compelling human story. As I came across others with
memories of that incident, I also came to appreciate just how crucial an event
that was in the first chapter of the Kashmir conflict. The ransacking and
killings at the mission hospital occurred within hours of the maharaja of
Kashmir’s accession to India and the beginning of an airlift to the valley of
Indian troops, the first episode in a military presence that continues to this
day. The accounts I heard gave a powerful human dimension to a moment of
profound geopolitical crisis.
Serendipity also gave me access to the modest
cache of records held by the Mill Hill Missionaries in Kashmir, and a hugely
more valuable treasure trove in their London archives. This included a
remarkable discovery – a hand-written account of a hundred pages reciting the
details of the attack on the Baramulla mission set down by a priest who was
witness to the event. This manuscript account had quite possibly never been
read by anyone but its author until I came across it. Both journalists and
historians relish untouched source material, and you can’t get much better than
this. I had a personal mission now, to retrieve memories from all sides of the
attack on Baramulla, and use these to offer an informed and impartial account
of the initial eruption of the Kashmir conflict and to explain why India ended
1947 in control of the Kashmir valley. This material formed the basis of a
documentary I made for BBC Radio 4 in 2003.[11]
In the autumn of 2003, with my research well
advanced, I had the good fortune to spend what amounted to a sabbatical
semester as a BBC-nominated Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University
of Michigan. By then, I had also been invited to become one of the editors of History Workshop Journal, a peer
reviewed academic journal published twice yearly by Oxford University Press.
This was not a result of my work on Kashmir, but it was a boost to my
confidence as a practitioner of history and strengthened my resolve to write a
book about the attack on Baramulla and what it revealed about the wider
invasion of Kashmir in late 1947. The Ann Arbor campus, as well as having a
talented array of scholars of South Asia, offered a library with excellent
holdings, where I was able to immerse myself in another range of testimony
about Kashmir in 1947 - the contemporary reporting of journalists on the spot.
A
Mission in Kashmir was published late in 2007, and its critical reception
will be discussed later in this essay. I was invited back to the University of
Michigan to give the Hovey lecture in 2008. I have also given papers based on
my research at international conferences at the University of Southampton and
at SOAS, as well as giving more informal talks in Delhi and at several other
venues.
3. Research method and argument
The emphasis of my research
has been on the use of personal stories to illustrate, supplement and challenge
the established accounts of the origins of the Kashmir conflict, and to provide
a sense of how the turmoil of 1947 was experienced by those in Kashmir who
lived through it. There is a powerful feeling in Kashmir that Kashmiris have
been marginalised – in the governance of their state, in the crucial moments of
decision about Kashmir’s future, and in the historical narrative. Part of my
purpose was to collect and collate individual accounts of events in Kashmir in
late 1947, and to place the lived experience of this crucial time in Kashmir’s
history at the centre of the narrative.
My initial goal in gathering oral testimony
was to retrieve accounts of the event at the heart of my study, the attack on
the mission hospital at Baramulla. Over time, I succeeded in securing
interviews with a range of people who were in or close to the mission during
the attack and its immediate aftermath – conversations conducted (on a few
occasions by others on my behalf) on four continents. I also tracked down
several others with direct memories of the attack who declined to be
interviewed – two of whom were willing, however, to set down in writing their
personal recollection of the event as long as they were not named. In my
initial visit to Baramulla, I also talked to two elderly townspeople who had
lived through the tribal army’s entry to the town and provided a vivid account
of that visitation. As my research developed, it broadened out beyond testimony
directly relating to Baramulla into an enquiry into the conflict in the Kashmir
valley in 1947, and the popular response to it.
Conducting oral history in a conflict zone
presents profound problems. The simple issue of safety is one of them. I have
visited the town of Baramulla several times, usually accompanied by the BBC
reporter based in Srinagar, but the security situation has never been
sufficiently calm to allow me to stroll through the centre of the town. While
my initial meeting with Sister Emilia was a matter of chance, most of the other
interviews I have conducted in Baramulla have been arranged by local
journalists on my behalf. There is a deeper problem – in a region as battered
by violence as the Kashmir valley, where at least 1% of the adult population
has died in the past quarter-century of insurgency and instability, there is an
understandable reluctance to share memories which might entail risk, or which
might conflict with the current political or community interests shared by the
interviewee. There is also a carapace that needs to be broken through when
dealing with memories which have been hallowed by frequent repetition, to get
beyond a much stated personal narrative and retrieve memories which have not
been hardened by constant rendition.
My general approach to the retrieval of oral
testimonies has been:
·
to seek the widest possible range of
testimonies, from civilians, missionaries, public figures and combatants on
both sides;
·
where possible when talking to local
residents in particular, to be introduced and accompanied by a local
intermediary;
·
to focus on direct memories of events
and incidents witnessed and experienced rather than a more general, indirectly
remembered, account;
·
to start without preconceived
notions, and be willing to ‘go with the flow’ of an interview, so often
interviewing at some length;
·
to probe and interrogate memories of
particularly noteworthy events, asking for details and personal aspect and
involvement to get beyond the initial recitation.
I was helped by considerable
experience in conducting interviews with the elderly about memories from many
decades earlier. The job of a radio correspondent is in large measure that of a
professional interviewer, and winning the confidence of an interviewee, putting
them at ease, is a required skill in oral history as in radio journalism.
Another key skill of a news reporter – seeking to validate recollections and
memories, searching for corroboration, checking shared memory against other
source material – is also essential to the practise of oral history. While
shared memory of events many years earlier is often unreliable, other more
conventional historical source material – official records, memoirs, reports
and inquiries – are also often partisan and incomplete, and oral history offers
the very considerable advantage of being able to challenge and interrogate the
memories offered.
In the course of my research, I also have
made use of other forms of first-hand testimony. Father Shanks’s manuscript
account of the attack on the Baramulla mission, held in the archive of the Mill
Hill missionaries[12],
is the most revealing such source. There are other briefer accounts,
particularly in British archives as diplomats sought to understand the
circumstances of the killing of British nationals at Baramulla, arrange the
evacuation of the sizeable British community in Srinagar and gain purchase on
the rapidly developing military and political situation in the Kashmir
valley. Some archive holdings of
correspondence have also been of value, particularly the letters of the
American news correspondent, Margaret Parton. That leads me to mention the
other primary source on which I relied – contemporary news reports. Sidney
Smith of the Daily Express was held
hostage at the Baramulla hospital alongside the survivors of the lashkar’s
initial attack. Two other foreign correspondents, Margaret Parton and her
husband-to-be Eric Britter, were also – by chance – in Kashmir as the invasion
force approached. A battalion of Indian and foreign news reporters made their
way to Kashmir as soon as they could find space – officially or otherwise – on
the Indian military airlift. Some of their reports were included in the Indian
government’s White Paper on Jammu &
Kashmir, published in 1948, but this was inevitably a partisan selection.
Otherwise there has previously been no systematic attempt to make use of this
rich source material which, when even the basic chronology of the conflict is
in dispute, is at the least an unfortunate oversight.
4. Original contribution to knowledge
The biggest achievement of A Mission in Kashmir, I would suggest,
has been to reclaim space for lived experience and personal testimony in a
history which is often told in impersonal terms, as a battle between two newly
independent states for territory. It has demonstrated that even with such a
bitter and enduring conflict, and testimony gathered half-a-century or more
after the event, oral history can redefine a historical narrative and reshape
the contours of historical discourse. In support of these assertions, I want to
spend a moment arguing about the value of oral history in the particular
circumstances of telling the story of how the Kashmir conflict arose.
Oral history, in the telling phrase of one of
its leading practitioners in South Asia, has to be more than ‘a seasoning to
enliven documentary evidence’.[13]
Such seasoning has a value in itself. Historians tell stories, just as
journalists do, and to tell them well they need to get as near to the events
they relate as they can, and to retrieve the anecdote and personal detail which
makes a moment or an event memorable. Hearing from those who witnessed the killings
at the Baramulla mission, who were bereaved by those events and whose lives
were thrown out of kilter, is to sense the shock and confusion they lived
through. Those memories have, even when not shared, been rehearsed and
burnished over the decades. They are not entirely reliable, though when there
has been an opportunity to corroborate even incidental details, most direct
memory bears tolerably accurate witness - and those who share recollections are
speaking their own truth, which helps to tease out the different perspectives
to and narratives of an event. Yet the purpose of oral history is not to
illustrate and add piquancy to an already established narrative, but to
interrogate and challenge - and on some occasions to repudiate - that
narrative. The personal testimony I have gathered about the attack on the
Baramulla mission, the organisation and indiscipline of the invading lashkar,
the response to the invasion among Kashmiris, and the steps taken in Srinagar
to save the city from ransack have been the determinants of my narrative –
supported by other source material – rather than ancillary to the fact.
There is another peril in oral history, and
in narratives which focus on personal experience. The use of testimony and
memory, it has been argued in the context of Partition studies, ‘only become[s]
meaningful if they retain some measure of understanding of the broader
developments that have framed the Partition and post-Partition processes’.[14]
My own work has not been a rejection of conventional political history, the
story of nations and wars, but a re-examination of a profoundly important
political moment which gives voice to those who lived through that moment. The
emphasis on personal testimony has not been at the expense of more traditional
sources. The official archives have been scoured, contemporary newspapers
trawled, military and political memoirs imbibed, secondary accounts – the
partisan as well as the scholarly – sought and read. The result is a synthesis, but the element
which is most innovative, within the context of Kashmiri studies, is the
embracing of oral history.
So,
what has this use of first hand testimony, supported by secondary sources,
added precisely to knowledge about the start of the Kashmir crisis? I would
suggest that my work has -
·
established the course of events at
the Baramulla mission, including who the attackers were, how they conducted
themselves, and the level of casualties inflicted, so for the first time
setting down an authoritative account of the most notorious single episode in
the opening stages of the Kashmir conflict;
·
demonstrated the significant initial
local support for the Pakistani tribal force, and the manner in which looting
and attacks on civilians squandered that support;
·
put forward evidence of assistance
from some elements of the new Pakistani state for the invasion, and detailed
for the first time the remedial actions taken by Pakistan’s leadership to
address indiscipline in the lashkar;
·
offered fresh evidence that the delay
in the lashkar’s advance as a result of indiscipline may have been crucial in
frustrating their ambition to take control of Srinagar;
·
established the extent of the popular
mobilisation in the Kashmiri capital against princely rule and the manner in
which this was transformed into a popular force to protect the city from the
tribal army;
·
discussed the evidence of abduction
and sexual violence in the Kashmir valley in 1947, with the arresting, if
tentative, suggestion that a number of non-Muslim Kashmiri women were abducted
locally and may well have lived out their lives close to their area of
upbringing but with a new name and religion.
While A
Mission in Kashmir did not set out to add to the substantial corpus of
writing about the details of Kashmir’s accession to India, it presents the most
forceful and best evidenced argument to date that the maharaja signed the
accession document a few hours after (not a few hours before, as Indian
official accounts insist) the start of India’s military airlift to Kashmir which
eventually succeeded in repulsing the invasion force.[15]
All this amounts to an important addition to
an understanding of the modern history of Kashmir and of South Asia, based on
rigorous research and on the use of original source material, much of it never
before used as a basis for scholarship.
A
Mission in Kashmir is limited in its scope, as its title suggests. It is
not an attempt to redefine Kashmir’s place in the wider narrative of Partition.
Yet it is worth pausing for a moment to consider whether Kashmiri
exceptionalism – the supposition that Kashmir moved to a different rhythm to
the rest of South Asia – is justified. Talbot and Singh have put forward five
defining elements of what they describe as the ‘communal’ violence of Partition
which mark a break with earlier, ‘traditional’ forms of violence. These are:
·
a desire to ethnically cleanse
minority populations;
·
violence within the end of empire
political context of the contest for power and territory;
·
violence that was more intense and
sadistic than anything that had preceded it;
·
violence that invaded the private
sphere;
·
with evidence of a high degree of
preparation and organisation by para-military groups.[16]
All these defining features
were evident in the Kashmir valley in the closing weeks of 1947. The invasion
of Kashmir in October 1947 led eventually to war between India and Pakistan,
and the Kashmir issue has a particular standing as a causus belli, but the
events on the ground in the aftermath of Partition fit (not perfectly, but
tolerably well) the pattern evident more widely across the sub-continent. More
than that, the mobilising of the lashkar that entered Kashmir, and the nature
of its actions there, were shaped by Partition – not simply by the desire to
forestall Kashmir’s accession to India, but by religious or communal grievance
about a Hindu prince ruling a largely Muslim populace, and a desire for
vengeance against the Sikh communities in Muzaffarabad and Baramulla in
response to anti-Muslim pogroms in Punjab. The nature of the violence in the
Kashmir valley in October and November 1947 cannot be understood other than as
part of the upheaval of Partition.
My work on Kashmir has also used documentary
evidence and personal testimony to look at the way in which myths have been
developed and enshrined in support of a particular narrative – so touching on
the increasing academic focus on testimony as texts which enlighten an
understanding of how events are remembered and re-remembered to serve a
personal, community or political purpose. A conflict which has produced so many
martyrs, and where the level of contestation has been so intense, is fruitful
ground for studying layers of memory, the meaning attached to shared
recollection and the making and remaking of myths. Alessandro Portelli, a
leading practitioner of how memory and myth become entwined, has studied
accounts of valour among the Italian Resistance to Nazi occupation which have
close analogies to the stories developed in Baramulla just a few years later.
His argument that ‘public memory manipulates the events into contrasting
morality tales about guilt, responsibility and innocence, and into political
apologues on the meaning and morality of Resistance’ could apply with equal
force to Kashmir’s martyrs of 1947.[17]
The work of Shahid Amin on the memories of the violence in Chauri Chaura in
1922, and the manner in which oral accounts even almost seventy years later can
retrieve a subaltern viewpoint of the nationalist movement inspired (but not
entirely shaped) by Gandhi, is another powerful reference point for the use of
distant memories of an exceptional and traumatic moment.[18]
My research treads, albeit less expertly, on similar ground in looking at the
propagation of stories and myths (by which I mean not that they are invented,
but their most familiar telling has been moulded for a particular purpose) of
valour.
The violence in Baramulla in 1947 produced
two ‘martyrs’ in particular whose memory has been kept alive, and shaped, to
support a particular goal or interest. Take the various accounts of the death
at the hands of the invading force of Spanish-born Mother Teresalina and of her
dying words. Father Shanks, who was present at her death at the mission
hospital, recorded that she ‘slowly sank into unconsciousness’ and made no
mention of any last words. Within a few years, her dying words were widely
cited within the Roman Catholic church as ‘I offer myself as a victim for the
conversion of Kashmir’. More recently, in a climate where seeking converts in
Muslim areas is seen as hazardous, these words have been revised, rather
crudely in some clerical publications, to suggest her concern was ‘the people’
rather than the conversion of Kashmir. This is a story which has at its root a
personal tragedy and perhaps an element of heroism, which has been retold with
the goal of valorising the church’s missionary activity in Kashmir.
The myth of Maqbool Sherwani, a member of the
pro-India National Conference militia who was killed (crucified would be the
word used by some) by the Pakistani invaders, is an even more powerfully
cultivated and contested narrative. His story has been told and retold by the
likes of Gandhi, Margaret Bourke-White and Mulk Raj Anand, who have depicted
him as a martyr to a tolerant and secular (and so, Indian) vision of Kashmir’s
future. That myth has been so energetically propagated over the years – made
use of in Indian official statements and, for example, in the naming of buildings
– that many Kashmiris have developed a countervailing viewpoint, that Sherwani
was a traitorous agent of Indian aggression. [19]
After the publication of A Mission in Kashmir, I continued to pursue research into the
origins of the Kashmir dispute, which has led to a further publication – an
article in a peer reviewed journal[20] –
again drawing on the testimony I gathered from those who lived through the
violence in Kashmir in late 1947. It is the first rigorous discussion of
communist influence within the mainstream Kashmiri nationalist movement in the
1940s. The influence of a small number of communists within Sheikh Abdullah’s
National Conference has often been asserted, usually by political critics of
Abdullah, but never before examined in any depth. The radical ‘Naya Kashmir’
manifesto adopted by the National Conference in 1944, a quite exceptional
document endorsing land redistribution, constitutional reform and gender
equality, was drafted by communists. In the turbulent weeks of October and November
1947, with the maharaja absent and an invading force approaching, communists
led in mobilising a popular militia to enhance security in the capital, and to
assist Indian troops in repulsing the raiders from Pakistan.
The article also discusses the remarkable
initiative of the raising of a women’s self-defence force in Srinagar, which
drilled and was trained in the use of rifles, in response to the peril in which
the city was placed. In the highly politicised climate of present day Kashmir,
the forming of an armed volunteer force in support of Indian rule has been
blotted out of the popular memory.
Retrieving the role of communists within Kashmiri nationalism, and
particularly in this volunteer force, again challenges the over-simple
narrative propagated by those with a claim to Kashmir.[21]
Also
submitted for consideration is a review essay in a peer reviewed journal[22]
discussing four titles about Kashmir’s modern history. This is put forward to
demonstrate my sustained scholarly interest in Kashmir. The review identified
an increased scholarly focus, and rigour of research and argument, on Kashmir
during and after Dogra princely rule. The article asserts:
There’s an enormous literature
about Kashmir, much of it deeply partisan, densely written and ill researched.
The corpus of informed and tolerably unbiased historical writing about Kashmir
is slender. That makes the volumes reviewed here all the more welcome.
Together, they appear to augur a new, and enormously more promising, chapter in
Kashmir studies. Almost a coming of age.
That assessment remains valid
and the review essay has been cited by other scholars of modern Kashmir[23]
and widely consulted[24].
5. Critical reception
A
Mission in Kashmir was fortunate in attracting
attention in the news media, including reviews by leading scholars and
journalists, and in prompting considered discussion in scholarly journals. The
book was generally recognised as well researched and innovative in its
approach, clearly argued and expressed, and a considerable addition to the
literature on Kashmir’s (and so the region’s) modern history. Some of these
reviews challenge aspects of the argument and suggest shortcomings – but there
has been, as far as I am aware, no hostile review of the book.
The most substantial academic consideration
of A Mission in Kashmir is by
Chitralekha Zutshi, a distinguished historian of Kashmir, in the course of a
review essay looking at a spate of recent literature on Kashmir. [25] Zutshi devotes a substantial section of her
article to the book, asserting that its account of the violence in the Kashmir
Valley in 1947 ‘adds a significant chapter to the historiography of the
independence of India, from which Kashmir is usually absent’. She endorses the
value of the accounts of survivors and others with first-hand memories of
Kashmir in 1947, but challenges two incidental aspects of the book’s argument.
These are the link suggested between events in October 1947 and the more recent
crisis in Kashmir and the argued longstanding affinity of Afghans for Kashmir
which is evidenced as part of the explanation for the invasion by a tribal
force from close to the border with Afghanistan. Zutshi goes on to state:
The
importance of the book lies not in drawing a connection between the tribal
incursion in 1947 and the current crisis in Kashmir, but rather in its
detailed, meticulous, and objective discussion of the events of 1947, which
adds much to our knowledge about the causes and mechanics of the tribal
invasion and serves to remove some of the confusion surrounding the political
situation in Kashmir in 1947.
‘The fact that the book
explains the situation using the stories and memories of people who experienced
this attack’, Zutshi states, ‘makes it all the more compelling.’
In the journal Interventions, Gowhar Fazili describes A Mission in Kashmir as ‘an attempt at a new way of writing on
Kashmir’. He says that ‘it critically examines sources and tries to use new
discoveries to contest mainstream ideas on the accession, the raiders and the
role of Pakistani regulars in the debacle.’[26]
Fazili argues that the focus on the attack on the Baramulla mission, which
necessarily relies heavily on the voices of non-Kashmiris, is however not the
ideal starting point for a wider consideration of how Kashmiris experienced the
events of 1947:
its attempt to try to
understand Kashmir through this event … is half-hearted. [Whitehead] might have
done better by including more narratives from ordinary local people whose lives
were permanently shaped by the circumstances that spiralled out of control.
Fazili is right to suggest
that more testimony from non-elite Kashmiris would have strengthened the
narrative. As for the hazards of privileging the attack on the Baramulla
convent and hospital, the argument is well made – but it is exactly the
heightened attention on an incident involving Europeans which has allowed this
incident to be retrieved, through official and clerical records as well as the
memories of those directly affected. Alongside these pertinent observations,
Fazili argues that the emphasis apparent in A
Mission in Kashmir on retrieving the lived experience of Kashmiris and
those outsiders who had a stake in events there can be of wider scholarly
value. His review concludes: ‘Perhaps Whitehead’s narrative will open up
possibilities for paying more heed to Kashmiri voices through the study of
other institutions and events in Kashmir in which Kashmiris are central, and
reopen questions assumed to be settled, through comparable scholarship.’
The testimony recited in A Mission in Kashmir, and the arguments advanced, have received
considerable attention in expert and scholarly writing. Owen Bennett Jones, in
the latest edition of his account of Pakistan’s modern history, draws on the
book for his account of the Kashmir accession crisis and Jinnah’s response to it.[27]
Srinath Raghavan and David M. Malone make reference to the book in their
accounts of Indian foreign policy[28],
and there are also citations in several articles in academic journals.[29]
A Mission in Kashmir,
no doubt because written by a journalist and published by a mainstream imprint,
was widely noticed in the news media. It was fortunate in attracting more than
twenty reviews, author interviews or substantial mentions in the Indian press
and being the subject of two half-hour TV discussion and interview programmes,
one featuring a panel of the author and two distinguished historians,
Ramchandra Guha and Urvashi Butalia. It was also mentioned favourably in
Pakistan’s leading English language daily newspaper, Dawn – ‘a seminal book about the complex skein of politics,
nationalist fervour and communal zealotry laced with a wider global dimension
of the brewing mess, which dogged the early days of the Kashmir dispute’,
commented columnist Jawed Naqvi[30].
Ahead of publication, a substantial feature by the author ran in a prominent
British broadsheet daily.[31]
Several of the reviews in the Indian press
were written by experts in Kashmir studies. Amitabh Mattoo, at the time the
vice-chancellor of the University of Jammu, stated: ‘The account is brilliant
and moving, and is first-rate by the standards of both a journalist and a
social historian.’[32]
Considering both A Mission in Kashmir
and another title focussing on Kashmir[33],
Mattoo argued:
Ordinary stories that have
remained unrecorded can often reveal much more than official documents and UN
resolutions. The recovery of these accounts may not only contribute to
generating a richer social history of the land and its people that does not
privilege just a few, but may eventually also help in the resolution of
Kashmir’s problems.
A review by Sheikh Abdullah’s
grandson and the third generation of the dynasty to serve as chief minister of
Indian Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, also argued for the need to ‘learn from past
mistakes’.[34]
Another important political figure in Jammu and Kashmir, Ved Marwah, offered
appreciative comment:
The author is a natural
storyteller. But to say this is not to devalue his scholarly work based on
painstaking research, writings and personal interviews of those directly
involved in the tragic events. The author narrates the story of this tragedy
with sensitivity, but without bias.[35]
Dilip Menon, who at the time
taught history at Delhi University and was editor of The Indian Economic and Social History Review, commented that
‘Whitehead writes in the best tradition of popular history combining archival depth
with investigative zeal’.[36]
In the left-leaning Frontline, A.G.
Noorani, asserted: ‘Integrity is … the hallmark of Andrew Whitehead’s work’.[37]
The most substantial review in the Indian
press, by the writer and commentator Manoj Joshi for the literary journal Biblio, also offered the most considered
criticism.[38]
While describing the book as ‘a succinct account of a many-layered happening’
which has ‘generated an invaluable archive of oral history himself through
interviews with surviving contemporaries on all sides of the divide’ and its
assessments as ‘carefully weighed’ and ‘balanced’, he disputes the authorial
position as neutral between Indian and Pakistani claims:
Whitehead is somewhat
circumspect on this score and chooses to place the official British attitude as
that of neutrals. … he does not quite explore that British officialdom may have
played in encouraging the Pakistani venture. … his book does not seem to be
informed by … detailed revelations of how British officers manipulated the
situation to serve their own national interests; or, how British officers in
the Indian and Pakistani army coordinated their efforts to check Indian forces
from recapturing that sliver of land that is today called Azad [that is,
Pakistan-administered] Kashmir.
A
Mission in Kashmir explicitly avoided seeking to
disentangle the detailed diplomacy surrounding and underlying the early stages
of Kashmir dispute, which has been the subject of a great deal of contested
scholarship. Manoj Joshi’s argument, however, is arresting. On a couple of
occasions in the aftermath of the book’s publication, leading scholars of South
Asia commented informally that only someone other than an Indian or Pakistani
(or by implication a Kashmiri) would have been able to have access to the range
of testimony achieved. That is a sad but probably accurate reflection on the
persistent politicisation of the study of Kashmir’s modern history. Yet when
Britain is held by some parties to the conflict to be at least partly culpable
for the failure to resolve Kashmir’s future status as the British Raj ended in
August 1947, it is perhaps understandable, if unwarranted, that a British
national whose familiarity with Kashmir sprang from working for a British
government funded news organisation is seen as pulling punches over Britain’s
involvement in the inception of the Kashmir conflict.
6. Subsequent writing on Kashmir’s modern history
In seeking the opinion of a
leading scholar of Kashmir about work conducted since A Mission in Kashmir’s publication into related themes, she
advised: ‘Unfortunately,
there is so little writing on Kashmir in the 1940s, especially since the
publication of your book. … There is
simply no other work that deals with the actual experiences of people on the
ground in Kashmir in and around 1947 apart from your book that I can think of.’[39]
The
most substantial recent writing about the origins of the Kashmir conflict is by
the Australian scholar Christopher Snedden[40].
In the first section of his book The
Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir (‘azad’ means ‘free’, and Azad
Kashmir is the name given to part of the former princely state of Jammu and
Kashmir now under Pakistan’s administration), Snedden seeks to develop ‘a new
perspective about who started the dispute about the international status of
Jammu and Kashmir’. He argues that an uprising in Poonch in the west of Jammu
province in the summer of 1947 was the start of the armed revolt against
Kashmir’s maharaja, predating and encouraging the tribal invasion. He sees this
as demonstrating that the armed campaign against the maharaja, and indirectly
against Kashmir’s prospective accession to India, was instigated by citizens of
the princely state, and not by outsiders. This challenges the Indian account
that the invading force of Pukhtoon ‘raiders’ from Pakistan started the
fighting.
While Snedden’s argument is not entirely
original, and is based on no new source material, its emphasis on the actions
of the people of Jammu province in 1947 is a useful corrective to established
accounts of the origins of the Kashmir conflict. The Poonch revolt has,
however, been discussed in some detail elsewhere – indeed it features in my own
writing[41] –
and while it certainly erupted ahead of the tribal invasion, it was nothing
like so potent a military threat. While the insurgents in western Jammu
province quickly gained control over rural areas, they failed to take Poonch
town, never threatened the city of Jammu and were of little consequence as far
as control over the heartland of the princely state, the Kashmir valley, was
concerned. Snedden’s book does not occasion a fundamental rethink of the
origins of the Kashmir conflict and so is not as revisionist as he suggests.
Another argument that he addresses is more successfully made – pointing out the
‘inherent disunity’ of Jammu and Kashmir which made it close to impossible for
the princely state to remain undivided through the processes unleashed by
India’s Partition.
Another book largely about Kashmir in 1947
offers much detailed argument, but much less in the way of fresh
interpretation. Shabir Choudhry, a founder member of the secular nationalist
and pro-independence Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, seeks to demonstrate
that legally Kashmir became an independent sovereign state with the end of
British paramountcy over princely states on 15th August 1947. He
also repeats a much-stated argument that the viceroy, Lord Mountbatten,
intervened to ensure that the Radcliffe boundary commission awarded most of
Muslim-majority Gurdaspur to India rather than Pakistan, so strengthening
India’s claim to Kashmir.[42]
Neither case is convincing. The book focuses almost entirely on politics and
diplomacy, and doesn’t discuss the tribal army’s invasion in October 1947 and
the Kashmiri response to it.
The absence of any rigorous biography of the
key Kashmir figures of the 1940s has constrained a full understanding of the
personal alliances and rivalries which were such an important factor in the
1947 accession drama. This was mitigated in part by the publication in 2008 of
Ajit Bhattacharjea’s study of Sheikh Abdullah, by far the most commanding
Kashmiri political figure of the last century.[43]
Bhattarcharjea, one of India’s most respected journalists, met Sheikh Abdullah
both in his prime and towards the end of his life and he offers a balanced and
authoritative account, though marred by a muted discussion of his political
motivation, and the conspicuous absence of any consideration of personality and
personal life. Akbar Jehan, Abdullah’s politically influential wife, is
mentioned only three times in the book’s index. This is in part because
Bhattacharjea had only limited access to important archives – he laments in his
introduction that he ‘continued to be denied permission to see the crucial
correspondence between Nehru and the Sheikh’[44] –
and apparently no access to any Abdullah family papers. Sheikh Abdullah still
awaits the biography he deserves, and that historians of Kashmir require.
Sheikh Abdullah’s granddaughter is the author
of one of the more interesting recent works about Kashmir. Nyla Ali Khan is an
academic in the United States. Her study of the gender aspect of the Kashmir
conflict is enriched by interviews with participants in Kashmiri politics and
civil society, and is the first recent book length study of the subject.[45]
The book is dedicated to the author’s grandparents – enough, in a Kashmiri
context, to raise issues about political impartiality – and is diminished by an
at times deeply emotive style of writing. While the focus of Nyla Ali Khan’s
work is contemporary Kashmir, her book contains a useful consideration of
attitudes to gender in the National Conference (Sheikh Abdullah’s political
party) in the 1940s – including an account of the militia raised in 1947 to
protect Srinagar, and in particular of its women’s wing.
The representation of Kashmir in literature
and popular culture, and the means by which it came to be a ‘territory of
desire’ in competing nationalist discourses, is the theme of a particularly
innovative study by Ananya Jahanara Kabir.[46]
This discusses cultural expressions of and about Kashmir ranging from the poem
‘Country without a Post Office’ by the Kashmiri writer Agha Shahid Ali to the
Bollywood action movie ‘Mission Kashmir’, both in different ways examining
Kashmiri national identity.
The Conservative Member of Parliament Kwasi
Kwarteng selects Kashmir as one of six post-Imperial areas of tension or
conflict which he examines as aspects of an ‘improvised’ and so flawed approach
to the accrual and administration of Britain’s Empire.[47]
He offers a well informed account of the career and eccentricities of Kashmir’s
last maharaja, and while he is less convincing about Britain’s culpability for
the enduring Kashmir crisis and has little new to say about the events of 1947,
he offers a shrewd account of those months and their broader significance:
By the end of 1947, both
Pakistan and India felt that it made sense for the Kashmiris themselves to
decide to which country they should belong. The fact that no plebiscite ever
took place to resolve the Kashmir dispute belies some of the wilder claims that
democracy was the British Raj’s unique legacy to the Indian subcontinent; the
Kashmir dispute was a direct consequence of princely rule, and no democratic
resolution to the conflict has ever been sought.[48]
A further sign of the vitality
of Kashmir studies has been the publication of a volume of seventeen academic
papers about aspects of Kashmiri literature, culture, religious practice and
history involving scholars from around the world, including two who teach at
the University of Kashmir as well as academics at Indian, American, British,
German, Dutch and Swiss universities (though not from Pakistani institutions).[49]
Looking more broadly at recent academic
literature, the most arresting development in Kashmir studies has been the
suggestion by Chitralekha Zutshi that Kashmir can usefully be theorised as a
borderland[50],
a concept developed in the context of North American history and now more
widely applied. She suggests that Kashmir’s position on the edge of several
Empires (Mughal, Afghan, Sikh, Russian, British), and the cultural and
commercial currents that have arisen from that along with the formally or
informally negotiated political accommodations, has promoted a syncretic
identity typical of borderlands. In recent decades, Zutshi argues, the
introduction of more rigid borders and ceasefire lines has constrained that
sense of Kashmir as ‘a middle ground’:
So one can argue that it is in
fact Kashmir’s geographical location that has allowed it to participate in
several different cultural milieus at once and it is precisely because it is
now partitioned between several states that no longer allow for an interchange
of ideas, goods and people that it is at the centre of an acute political
crisis. As a result, greater cross-border exchanges, legitimized by the
political entities on all sides, are a crucial element of any foreseeable
settlement to this seemingly intractable problem.[51]
Once again, a key concern of
expert writing on Kashmir is the continuing territorial dispute, and the human
agony and cultural disruption that has accompanied it for more than sixty
years.
The concept of Kashmir as a borderland has
also been used by the Canadian scholar Cabeiri deBergh Robinson, who offers ‘an
anthropological analysis of the social production of jihad among refugees who
occupy a transnational space in the borderlands between Pakistan and India’.[52]
Her extensive fieldwork has been conducted largely among Kashmiri communities
in Pakistan (including Azad Kashmir), and is informed by her understanding of
the commencement and development of the dispute over Kashmir. Her own
description of the early stages of what Kashmiris style as ‘the Kashmir
problem’ is based largely on secondary sources, though her brief account of the
massacre of Muslims in Jammu in late 1947 draws on a wider range of source
material. She makes the distinction between Partition refugees, whose move was
seen as irrevocable, and Kashmiri refugees, who were and are notionally
expected to return and resume ownership of their property. Robinson emphasises
the large numbers displaced by the conflict – in 1949 almost a fifth of those
who had been subjects of the princely state had been displaced. Many of those
from Jammu province moved across the international border into Pakistan while
many from Kashmir province remained within the bounds of the princely state but
found themselves on the other side of the ceasefire line, in many ways a more
impermeable border.
Robinson’s account of her decision to pursue
anthropology as a career is particularly arresting. In 1995-6, she worked in
Indian Kashmir on a humanitarian mission - but, she adds:
I decided to complete my training
as an anthropologist rather than become a professional humanitarian worker
because my observations in the detention centers [in Indian Kashmir] convinced
me that peacemaking in the Kashmir region would eventually have to grapple with
the ways that experiences of violence have been incorporated into the political
cultures of the regions that are a part of the Kashmir Dispute.[53]
Although not a historian,
Robinson is particularly adept in examining how the past has shaped Kashmiri
culture and attitudes to militancy.
The phases of the Kashmir conflict have
influenced the rhythm of public discussion of Kashmir, above all in India. In
the last few years, an organised insurgency has largely given way to mass
street protests, what many Kashmiri activists term an ‘intifada’, which has
provoked an at times brutal response from police and the Indian military. While
the Indian security apparatus would argue that this represents the eclipse of
Pakistan-based militant groups, among Indian intellectuals the emergence of
mass demonstrations, and the sight of stone throwing crowds of young Kashmiris
confronting heavily armed security forces, has prompted a reassessment of the
generally held view that Kashmiri rebelliousness was simply the creation of a
malevolent Pakistan.
The novelist and activist Arundhati Roy has
been the most high profile of Indian advocates of allowing Kashmiris the right
to determine their own future. In recent years, other prominent Indian voices
have also echoed this view. The influential columnist Swaminathan Aiyar,
writing in the Times of India in
2008, contrasted the (almost) India-wide celebration of independence day with
protests on that same day in Kashmir against what was perceived there as
‘Indian colonialism in the Valley’. He asserted that ‘India seeks to integrate with
Kashmir, not rule it colonially. Yet, the parallels between British rule in
India and Indian rule in Kashmir have become too close for my comfort.’[54] A
small number of senior journalists and public intellectuals chimed in, and
wrote of the futility of holding by force a territory where the populace
appeared to want to break away from Indian rule. This allowed space for a wider
debate, which has also found expression in several books intended for a general
readership consisting of articles – research, reportage, polemic – which have
encouraged a more critical look at India’s policy towards Kashmir and a greater
appreciation of Kashmiri history and culture.[55]
Alongside these new expressions of informed
interest in Kashmir, encouraging this process and also nurtured by it, have
been the first writings by Kashmiri Muslims about the last twenty years of the conflict
to reach a significant global audience. The reportage of Basharat Peer and the
fiction of Mirza Waheed have arguably done more to alert international
attention to the continuing instability in Kashmir and the grave violations of
human rights than any number of acts of violence.[56]
By the quality and humanity of their writing, they have helped to establish a
sense of the complexity of Kashmir issue.
The established nationalist narratives about
Kashmir are slowly being challenged and chipped away. Yet the geopolitical
faultline Sister Emilia and her fellow missionaries in Baramulla saw taking
shape around them in October and November 1947 remains unbreached. The nature
of the conflict has changed greatly over the intervening decades, but it has
never gone away – and is unlikely to until there is a broader understanding of
the underlying issues, including how the conflict began.
Conclusion
The particular achievement of A Mission in Kashmir has been to
establish an account of the origins of the conflict which weaves in the
personal, including the Kashmiri experience of that time, with an account of a
moment of political crisis and military confrontation. It uses the voices of
those often excluded from historical narrative to develop a more complete
account of a complex historical moment. It challenges the established Indian
narrative of the crisis by confounding the official account of Kashmir’s
accession, demonstrating an initial undertow of support for the Pakistani
tribal army, and documenting the new Indian government’s insistence that it
would only rule Kashmir with the consent of its people; it contradicts the official
Pakistani account by rehearsing the evidence of the complicity of sections of
the country’s military and political leadership in the tribal army’s advance
into Kashmir, establishing the extent of the indiscipline of this force and the
actions taken to redress that, and providing an account of the active volunteer
mobilisation in Srinagar to keep the invaders at bay; it disputes what might be
described as the Kashmiri nationalist approach to the events of 1947, and in
particular the princely state’s accession to India, by demonstrating the vigour
with which Sheikh Abdullah and his supporters, who were opponents of princely
rule, endorsed the decision to accede to India. My work also looks on the
effective end of princely rule in the Kashmir valley not simply as India’s
acquisition of the state, but as a moment of profound change involving a mass
political mobilisation, when for the first time in almost four centuries a
Kashmiri Muslim achieved political authority in Srinagar.
The use of neutral language, absence of
political partiality, and care taken to embrace the voices, accounts and
perspectives of all who had a stake in Kashmir’s future has achieved the signal
success that A Mission in Kashmir has
not been repudiated by any significant body of opinion. This doesn’t mean that
there is now an agreed narrative on how the Kashmir conflict first took hold,
but it is a step towards that goal. Neither journalists nor historians should
set out with the aim of being peace makers, and their writing should not be
shaped by a desire to promote any particular political or diplomatic outcome,
but I hope a more informed discussion of how Kashmir succumbed to conflict in
1947 might in some measure help more purposeful discussion towards a
settlement.
Appendix: Personal
bibliography relating to India’s partition and to Kashmir in 1947
BOOKS
A
Mission in Kashmir, New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 2007;
translated into Tamil (by
B.R. Mahadevan) as Kashmir: Mudhal Yudham,
Chennai: New Horizon, 2011
CONTRIBUTIONS TO BOOKS
‘Refugees from Partition’ in
Parasuraman S. and Unnikrishnan P.V. (eds), India
Disasters Report: towards a policy initiative, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2000, pp.273-5
‘Massacre at Baramulla’ in
Tony Grant (ed), More From Our Own Correspondent,
London: Profile, 2008, pp.294-7
ARTICLES AND REVIEWS IN
ACADEMIC JOURNALS
‘Women at the Borders’, History Workshop Journal, 47, 1999,
pp.308-12 [review essay discussing Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: voices from the partition of India and
Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and
Boundaries: women in India’s partition]
‘History On the Line: Bapsi
Sidhwa and Urvashi Butalia discuss the Partition of India’, History Workshop Journal, 50, 2000,
pp.230-8 [transcript of a moderated discussion with introduction]
‘Kashmir’s Conflicting
Identities’, History Workshop Journal,
58, 2004, pp.335-40 [review essay discussing Sumantra Bose, Kashmir: roots of conflict, paths to peace,
Prem Shankar Jha, The Origins of a
Dispute: Kashmir 1947, Mridu Rai, Hindu
Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, rights and the history of Kashmir, and
Chitralekha Zutshi, Languages of
Belonging: Islam, regional identity and the making of Kashmir]
‘The People’s Militia:
Communists and Kashmiri nationalism in the 1940s’, Twentieth Century Communism: a journal of international history, 2,
2010, pp.141-68
‘Entrails of Empire’, History Workshop Journal, 75, 2013,
pp.247-51 [review essay discussing Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: resistance, repression and revolt, Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon,
Imperial Endgame: Britain’s dirty wars
and the end of Empire and Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s legacies in the modern world]
ARTICLES AND REVIEWS IN
POPULAR JOURNALS AND NEWSPAPERS
‘Cross channel’, Biblio [Delhi], November 1996 [review of
Jyotirmoyee Devi, The River Churning: a
partition novel]
‘Count with a touch of class:
remembering Mr Jinnah’, Indian Express,
24 March 1997
‘The present shapes the past:
recalling Baramulla, October 1947’, Indian
Express, 8 April 1997
‘A line drawn across history’,
Biblio [Delhi], May 1997 [review of
Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided
Nation: India’s Muslims since Independence]
‘Noakhali’s darkest hour: the
Mahatma’s greatest peace mission’, Indian
Express, 20 May 1997
‘The butchers of Calcutta:
duty does not permit repentance’, Indian
Express, 1 July 1997
‘Brutalised and humiliated:
women victims of partition’, Indian
Express, 1 August 1997
‘Piercing the silence’, Biblio [Delhi], January-February 1998
[review of Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders
and Boundaries: women in India’s partition]
‘Blood in the Moonlight’, Biblio [Delhi], March-April 1998 [review of Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: an eye-witness account of
the Partition of India]
‘Hovey Lecture 2008’, http://www.mjfellows.org/news/hovey2008.html (accessed 2
January 2013) – abridged version of the Hovey lecture at the University of
Michigan on the origins of the Kashmir conflict
RADIO DOCUMENTARIES
‘India: a people partitioned’,
five half-hour radio documentaries broadcast on the BBC World Service in 1997,
the final programme deals in part with Kashmir. The series was repeated in
2000, and the final programme was substantially revised. The audio of all six
programmes is available on my personal website - http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/india-a-people-partitioned.html
Word count: 9,970
words excluding footnotes and bibliography
[1]
For instance, Urvashi Butalia, The Other
Side of Silence: voices from the Partition of India, New Delhi: Viking
Penguin, 1998
[2]
Alastair Lamb, Incomplete Partition: the
genesis of the Kashmir dispute, 1947-1948, Hertingfordbury: Roxford, 1997, p.187
[3]
‘The decline of tramping in two trade unions
(the Amalgamated Union of Cabinet Makers and the Typographical Association)
1840-1914’, M.A. dissertation, University of Warwick, 1978. This research also
led to the publication of J.W. Rounsfell, On
the Road: journeys of a tramping printer, Horsham: Caliban, 1982, a
first-hand account of the life of a tramping artisan originally published in
the journal of the Typographical Association, which I edited as well as
providing an introduction and postscript.
[4]
‘Notes on
Sources: Labour history and dissolved company records’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 44, 1982,
pp.45-6; ‘Quorum Pars Fui: the
autobiography of H.H. Champion’ [documentary essay], Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 47, 1983,
pp.17-35; ‘”Against the Tyranny of Kings and Princes”: radicalism in Workers in the Dawn’, Gissing Newsletter, 22/4, 1986,
pp.13-28; ‘Dan Chatterton and his “Atheistic Communistic Scorcher”’, History Workshop Journal, 25, 1988,
pp.85-99; ‘Notes on the Labour Press: the New
World and the O’Brienite colony in Kansas’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 53/3,
1988, pp.40-3; ‘Red London: radicals and socialists in late-Victorian
Clerkenwell’, Socialist History, 18,
2000, pp.1-31; ‘Clerkenwell Tales’ [review essay], History Workshop Journal, 68, 2009, pp.247-50; ‘Clerkenwell as hell
– Gissing’s “nether world”’, Gissing
Journal, 46/4, 2010, pp.27-34; ‘George Gissing, The Nether World’ in Andrew
Whitehead and Jerry White (eds), London
Fictions, Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2013; entries in the multi-volume Dictionary of Labour Biography on H.H.
Champion, Daniel Chatterton, Martin Boon and (co-authored with Gary Entz)
Joseph Radford. Chapters towards my uncompleted thesis have been deposited with
the Islington Local History Library and the Marx Memorial Library, both of
which are located in Clerkenwell.
[12]
The order’s archives are now at Freshfield on Merseyside. With the permission
of the archivist, I have posted a full transcript of Father Shanks’s manuscript
on my personal website - http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/father-shankss-kashmir-diary.html
(accessed 4 January 2013).
[13]
The phrase is that of Shahid Amin, ‘They Also Followed Gandhi’, in Saurabh Dube
(ed), Postcolonial Passages: contemporary
history-writing on India, New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2004, pp.132-58.
[14]
Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition
of India, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, p.5.
[15]
The evidence presented that the maharaja signed the instrument of accession to
India in Jammu on 27th October 1947 is, if not conclusive, then very
strong – broadly confirming the supposition advanced by Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the
unfinished war, London: I.B. Tauris, 2000, pp.54-60 and inferred in Stanley
Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan, Delhi:
Oxford UP, 1998 (first published 1984), p.349.
[16]
Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The
Partition of India, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009, p.66.
[17]
Alessandro Portelli, ‘Myth and Morality in the History of the Italian
Resistance: the Hero of Palidoro’, History
Workshop Journal, 74, 2012, pp.211-23.
[18]
Shahid Amin, ‘They Also Followed Gandhi’, in Saurabh Dube (ed), Postcolonial Passages: contemporary
history-writing on India, New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2004, pp.132-58.
[19] I
discuss the myths surrounding Maqbool Sherwani and Mother Teresalina, in part
testing these narratives against the recollections of those who knew both these
‘martyrs’, in a chapter entitled ‘Telling Stories and Making Myths’, A Mission in Kashmir, pp.209-32.
[20] Andrew
Whitehead, ‘The People’s Militia: Communists and Kashmiri nationalism in the
1940s’, Twentieth Century Communism: a
journal of international history, 2, 2010, pp.141-68.
[21]
The article has been commended by Nitasha Kaul, ‘Kashmir: a place of blood and memory’, in Sanjay Kak
(ed.), Until my Freedom has Come: the new
intifada in Kashmir, New Delhi: Penguin, 2011, pp.189-212. It is also cited
in Cabeiri deBergh Robinson, Body of
Victim, Body of Warrior: refugee families and the making of Kashmiri jihadists,
University of California Press, 2013.
[22]
Andrew
Whitehead, ‘Kashmir’s Conflicting Identities’, History Workshop Journal, 58, 2004, pp.335-40.
[23]
For instance in Nyla Ali Khan,
Islam, Women and Violence: between India
and Pakistan, New Delhi: Tulika, 2009
[24]
This review essay is one of the most frequently accessed History Workshop Journal articles via Project Muse, being viewed on
141 occasions in 2012 – ‘History Workshop Journal: Publisher’s Report, March
2013’, an unpublished document prepared by the Oxford Journals department of
Oxford University Press and in the possession of the author.
[25]
Chitralekha Zutshi, ‘Whither Kashmir Studies? A Review’, Modern Asian Studies, 46/4, 2012, pp.1033-48
[27]
Owen Bennett Jones, Pakistan: eye of the
storm, New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2009 (third edition), pp.82-90.
[28]
Srinath Raghavan, War and Peace in Modern
India: a strategic history of the Nehru years, Ranikhet: Permanent Black,
2010. David M. Malone, Does the Elephant
Dance? contemporary Indian foreign policy, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.
[29]
Sumit Ganguly and S. Paul Kapur, ‘The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice: Islamist militancy in South Asia’, Washington Quarterly, 33/1, 2010, pp.47-59; Swati Parashar,
’Gender, Jihad and Jingoism: women as
perpetrators, planners and patrons of militancy in Kashmir’, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 34/4,
2011, pp.295-317; Paul Staniland, ‘Organizing Insurgency: networks, resources
and rebellion in South Asia’, International
Security, 37/1, 2012, pp.142-77’; Fozia Nazir Lone, ‘From Sale to Accession
Deed: scanning the historiography of Kashmir, 1846-1947’, History Compass, 7/6, 2009, pp.1496-1508; Rakesh Ankit, ‘Great
Britain, Cold War and Kashmir 1947-1949’, Ex
Plus Ultra [ejournal], 1, 2009, pp.39-58 - http://explusultra.wun.ac.uk/images/ankit.pdf (accessed 30 December 2012). The review article
‘Kashmir’s Conflicting Identities’ has been cited by Nyla Ali Khan, ‘The Land
of Lalla-Ded: politicization of Kashmir and construction of the Kashmiri
woman’, Journal of International Women’s
Studies, 9/1, 2007, pp.22-41.
[38]Biblio, New Delhi, January-February
2008. British policy towards Kashmir in the late 1940s is discussed in Rakesh
Ankit, ‘1948: the crucial year in the history of Jammu and Kashmir’, Economic and Political Weekly, 45/11,
2010, pp.49-58.
[39]
Personal email communication from Chitralekha Zutshi, 30 September 2012, cited
with Dr Zutshi’s permission.
[40]
Christopher Snedden, The Untold Story of
the People of Azad Kashmir, London: Hurst, 2012
[41] ‘The initial tribal rising against
the maharaja was indigenous and owed very little to tribal involvement. … An
insurgency against the maharaja took root [in Poonch] towards the end of August
1947 … ’ – Whitehead, A Mission in
Kashmir, pp.46ff
[42]
Shabir Choudhry, Kashmir and the
Partition of India: the politicians and the personalities involved in the
partition of India, and legal position of Jammu and Kashmir state on 15th
August 1947, Saarbrucken: VDM Verlag
Dr Muller, 2011. Dr Choudhry’s profile is available on his blog - http://www.blogger.com/profile/03902532450183466577
(accessed 10 February 2013).
[43] Ajit Bhattacharjea, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah: tragic hero of
Kashmir, New Delhi: Roli, 2008
[52]
Cabeiri deBergh Robinson, Body of Victim,
Body of Warrior: refugee families and the making of Kashmiri jihadists,
Berkeley: U. of California Press, 2013, p1.
[55]
Notably Ira Pande (ed), A Tangled Web:
Jammu and Kashmir, New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2011; Sanjay Kak (ed), Until my Freedom has Come: the new intifada
in Kashmir, New Delhi: Penguin, 2011; and Tariq Ali et al, Kashmir: the case for freedom, London:
Verso, 2011.
[56] Basharat Peer, Curfewed Night, New Delhi: Random House, 2008; Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator, New Delhi; Viking
Penguin, 2011. Both books were also published in Europe and North America.