Monitoring Desk: A Book “Colonizing Kashmir” written by Hafsa Kanjwal will available in the market in July 2023. This 336-page book explains that the Indian government has made Indian Occupied Jammu and Kashmir the world’s most militarized zone. Hafsa Kanjwal is an Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Lafayette College Pennsylvania United States.
Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences Indian policy. She reveals how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to integrate Kashmir’s Muslims while also showing how these policies were marked by inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression.
Challenging the binaries of colonial and postcolonial, Kanjwal historicizes India’s occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, she urges us to question triumphalist narratives of India’s state formation, as well as the sovereignty claims of the modern nation-state.
