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::
| whitehead_-_phd_by_published_works_-_sept_2013.docx |
The Kashmir Conflict of 1947:
Testimonies of a Contested History
Andrew Whitehead
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]
‘The Baramulla Tragedy’, Chowkidar [London], 9/4, autumn 2001, pp.73-4
‘Bates and Baramulla’, Biblio [Delhi], November-December 2001 [review of a new edition of H.E. Bates, The Scarlet Sword]
‘When Conflict came to Kashmir’, BBC History Magazine, August 2003, pp.60-61
‘1947 Earth: story as history’, South Asian Cinema, 4 + 5, 2004, pp.103-5
‘Through her eyes’, Biblio [Delhi], January-February 2006 [review of Krishna Mehta, Kashmir 1947: a survivor’s story]
‘Black Day in Paradise’, Financial Times Magazine, 20-21 October 2007
‘The Lashkar, Act 1’, Outlook [Delhi], 5 November 2007
ONLINE ARTICLES
‘Kashmir’s road less travelled’, BBC News website, 4 April 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4352015.stm (accessed 30 December 2012)
‘Sixty bitter years of partition’, BBC News website, 8 August 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6926057.stm (accessed 30 December 2012)
‘How the Kashmir crisis began’, BBC News website, 26 October 2007, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7057694.stm (accessed 30 December 2012)
‘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
‘An Incident in Kashmir’, a half-hour radio documentary broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2003. The audio is available on my personal website - http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/documentaries-and-features.html
PERSONAL WEBSITE
My personal website contains the following pages (in addition to the audio referred to above) relating to Kashmir in 1947:
· the full text of A Mission in Kashmir http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/full-text-a-mission-in-kashmir.html
· a page about the publication and reception of A Mission in Kashmir http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/a-mission-in-kashmir.html
· a page of images of Kashmir in 1947 http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/kashmir-47-images.html
· a page about the representation in fiction of events in Kashmir in 1947 http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/kashmir-47-in-fiction.html
· a full transcript of Father Shanks’s manuscript account of the attack on the Baramulla mission hospital http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/father-shankss-kashmir-diary.html
· a first person account by Krishna Misri, written in 2013, about political events in Kashmir in 1947 and her own enrolment in the Women’s Self-Defence Corps http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/krishna-misri-1947-a-year-of-change.html
· a list of interviews conducted relating to Partition and to Kashmir in 1947 http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/partition-voices.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.
[5] British Library Sound Archive, C1377. A full list of the material deposited is given on my personal website - http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/oral-history-list.html. Audio of several of the BBC radio programmes for which the interviews were conducted is also on my website - http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/documentaries-and-features.html (sites accessed 1 January 2013).
[6] The audio of this series is available at http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/whats-left-of-communism.html (accessed 1 January 2013). The programme about Indian Communism won the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union Prize in 1993.
[7] The audio of these radio documentaries is available at http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/india-a-people-partitioned.html (accessed 2 January 2013). ‘India: a people partitioned’ won a bronze award at the 1998 New York Festival.
[8] SOAS archive, OA3. The deposit was made in three stages, the first two of which are described in this website entry: http://squirrel.soas.ac.uk/dserve/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqCmd=show.tcl&dsqSearch=%28RefNo==%27OA3%20%20%27%29 . A full list of the items, and some of the audio, is posted on my personal website: http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/partition-voices.html (sites accessed 2 January 2013). Manisha Sobhrajani has also conducted interviews in Kashmir, at my initiative, particularly with veterans of the women’s self-defence corps set up in 1947.
[9] Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: the making of India and Pakistan, New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2007
[10] Notably in Jill Didur, Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory, University of Toronto Press, 2006.
[11] ‘An Incident in Kashmir’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in August 2003. The audio is available on my personal website - http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/documentaries-and-features.html (accessed 2 January 2013).
[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
[26] Interventions, 11/1, 2009, pp.131-4
[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.
[30] Dawn, Karachi, 6 December 2007
[31] Andrew Whitehead, ‘Black Day in Paradise’, Financial Times Magazine, London, 20-21 October 2007
[32] India Today, Delhi, 26 November 2007
[33] David Devdas, In Search of a Future: the story of Kashmir, New Delhi: Viking Penguin, 2007
[34] Outlook, Delhi, 3 December 2007
[35] Pioneer, Delhi, 9 December 2007
[36] DNA, Mumbai, 6 January 2008
[37] Frontline, Chennai, 25/15, July 2009
[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
[44] Ibid, p.viii
[45] Nyla Ali Khan, Islam, Women and Violence: between India and Pakistan, New Delhi: Tulika, 2009
[46] Ananya Jahanara Kabir. Territory of Desire: representing the valley of Kashmir, Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 2009
[47] Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s legacies in the modern world, London: Bloomsbury, 2011.
[48] Ibid, p.129
[49] Aparna Rao (ed.), The Valley of Kashmir: the making and unmaking of a composite culture?, New Delhi: Manohar, 2008
[50] Chitralekha Zutshi, ‘Rethinking Kashmir’s History from a Borderlands Perspective’, History Compass, 8/7, 2010, pp.594-608
[51] Ibid, p.605
[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.
[53] Ibid, p.xvii
[54] ‘Independence Day for Kashmir’, Times of India, 17 August 2008 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/sa-aiyar/swaminomics/Independence-Day-for-Kashmir/articleshow/3372132.cms (accessed 29 December 2012).
[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.
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