“Kashmir is a constantly shifting idea”
Chitralekha Zutshi, one of India’s premier scholars, believes the politicisation of history is not new. “History has always been political. Every state uses the past for ideological reasons,” says the William and Mary College professor of history, who has authored two books on Kashmir, edited another last year titled
Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation and is currently working on the biography of Sheikh Abdullah.
What do you think of the rewriting of the historical narrative in contemporary India?
As an historian I tend to take a longer perspective and can tell you that history has always been written and rewritten to suit particular political agendas. The contemporary rewriting of the Indian historical narrative is the latest in a long series of appropriations of the past to serve the needs of the present moment. Syncretism, for instance, was part of the secular nationalist narrative, with Kashmiriyat as an extension of that idea, created to make the presence of a Muslimmajority region in India more palatable, by asserting that somehow the Islam practised by Kashmiri Muslims was inflected with Hinduism. It was and remains a way of appropriating Kashmiri Muslims, and I think we need to jettison both Kashmiriyat and Islamisation as terms when we study Kashmir because they distract from the political issues that are at the heart of the situation there. My new edited volume, Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation, moves beyond these terms into exploring the complexities of Kashmir from multiple perspectives.
So how does one study Kashmir?
By examining it beyond the security paradigm and beyond the perspective that pits two religious communities against each other in an unending struggle. The conflict is not the result of a battle between a monolithic Islam and a monolithic Hinduism, although it is often cast in those terms. Much research remains to be done on Kashmir’s past, especially by examining its rich written and oral traditions, but to understand the contemporary situation, one has to examine the nature of political parties, movements, and organisations, such as the Hurriyat Conference, for instance, in terms of class, gender, even caste. Similar research needs to be conducted on the other side of Kashmir to understand the genesis of political organisations, their memberships,
and their ideologies from the perspectives of class, caster and gender. There are changes that have taken place in the society of the Kashmir Valley as a result of the insurgency, especially in the role of women (and not just in terms of them as victims, but of them as heads of households and businesses in the absence of men), and the impact of the long conflict on young people, on education, and on the environment needs to be studied more closely. In terms of my own work, I approach Kashmir not just as a territory, but as a constantly shifting idea.
So what is the reality of the idea of Kashmir?
My second book, Kashmir’s Contested Pasts
(recently released as an Oxford India Paperback), examines multiple ideas of Kashmir and their articulation in its multilingual historical tradition. It is important to note two things in this regard. First, the geographic boundaries of the Kashmir polity have shifted through the millennia depending on the historical moment, and second, Kashmir has attempted to exercise far greater political and cultural sway than its relatively small size warrants. In this, Kashmiris have played a significant role, negotiating a more favourable space for themselves and their land within far larger empires. Defining the idea of Kashmir has been central to this process, with Kashmir’s textual and oral traditions in multiple languages presenting Kashmir as holy land, and the centre of the cosmological universe, whether in the context of Puranic thought or of Islam.
As a Kashmiri Hindu, do you sometimes face criticism for your work?
I have chosen not to be on social media and engage with the vitriolic discourse that one finds there. My primary identity is as a scholar of Kashmir and not as a Kashmiri Pandit. Indeed, I have made a choice to write about Kashmiri Muslims, such as in my first book, Languages of Belonging, because I believe that scholarship needs to move beyond the confines of identity politics, or else we as a country are in deep trouble.