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A compelling biography of Sheikh Abdullah, the charismatic, combative, and controversial Kashmiri politician

Caught between two feuding countries, neither of which has truly incorporated Kashmir into its nationalist imagination or institutional structures, Kashmiris have developed their own nationalist narrative to assert their distinctiveness and desire for freedom.

Janaki Nair, Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region under Princely Rule, New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2012, pp. 372. Aya Ikegame, Princely India Re-imagined: A Historical Anthropology of Mysore from 1799 to the Present, India: Routledge, 2013, pp. 232.

Kalhana's Rajatarangini and its Sanskrit continuations are usually regarded as sui generis—unique historical compositions in a landscape otherwise barren of historical production in Kashmir and South Asia. As a result, the Persian tarikhs that followed them are dismissed as unhistorical imitations of these texts. This article approaches the Persian historical tradition in Kashmir from the perspective of the multilayered engagement between Persian tarikhs and their Sanskrit predecessors. Through an examination of three Persian tarikhs composed in seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century Kashmir, it argues that far from blindly translating the Rajatarangini narratives, the tarikhs were in active dialogue with the Sanskrit texts as they articulated their own ideas about the meaning and purpose of historical narration. By placing themselves within a long tradition of historical composition in Kashmir, the Persian narratives not only acquired legitimacy, but also redefined the tradition itself.

AbstractThis paper explores the current state of the field of Kashmir Studies and argues that, whilst scholarship on Kashmir has come a long way since the decades after Indian independence and partition, the political situation in the region continues to cast a long shadow over writings on Kashmir. Nevertheless, and despite the continued difficulties associated with research within Kashmir, a new generation of scholars has emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century, whose writings transcend geographical and political determinism as well as the discourse of Kashmiri exceptionalism, to present Kashmir as a complex, but not unique, entity, that has been shaped by multiple influences. In addition, this scholarship explores the ideas that have given Kashmir a particular shape in our imaginations, through analysis of a variety of sources, including poetry, art, film, and oral histories. A lot remains to be done, however, particularly in the field of Kashmir's medieval and pre-modern history, and in the application of theoretical approaches such as borderlands to the region's past and present.

This article reviews several key works within the scholarship on princely states produced in the past decade, in order to highlight their engagement with larger conversations in South Asian historiography. It argues that princely state scholarship no longer operates on the margins; rather, it has the potential to, and does, contribute to issues such as the idea of the feudal formation, the nature of modernity and the modern state, the articulation of religious and ethnic identities, women's status in Islam, and indigenous agency and resistance in colonial knowledge production, to name a few, that animate South Asian history while also transcending its narrow confines. Rather than analysing princely states in opposition to British India, these works approach them as distinct entities where particular social, economic and political conditions, combined with an interaction with external ideas and movements, produced certain outcomes in the realms of state, society and collective identity. Moreover, by combining archival research with ethnographic studies, these works have allowed access to the oral histories, memories, and vernacular literary traditions of several marginalised social groups in South Asia. More remains to be done, however, as we continue to decolonise these realms in popular memory and scholarly analysis, and the article suggests some directions princely state scholarship can take in this age of global historiographies.

Zutshi reviews KASHMIRI SEPARATISTS: Origins, Competing Ideologies and Prospects for Resolution of the Conflict by Kaia Leather.