Hafsa Kanjwal’s Colonizing Kashmir: State-Building under Indian Occupation challenges our assumptions both about who counts as a colonizer and what the practice of colonization entails. Many histories of colonization in the Indian subcontinent exclusively focus on the British as colonizers and the Indigenous peoples as the colonized. This is of course necessary, as the colonization of Kashmir by India cannot be understood apart from this history. Hafsa Kanjwal asks, however: What happens when the postcolonial state itself becomes an agent of colonization and not merely one of its victims?
Through extensive archival research on the early years following the partition between India and Pakistan, Kanjwal shows how the nascent Indian government, led by the supposedly tolerant and pluralistic India National Congress, replicated colonial forms of governance in the region of Jammu and Kashmir, a land whose people have their own unique blend of religious, cultural, and political practices. It did so primarily through what Kanjwal, drawing on Neve Gordon, calls “the politics of life.” Through such politics, the “Indian government and Kashmir’s client regimes propagated development, empowerment, and progress to secure the well-being of Kashmir’s population to normalize the occupation for multiple audiences” (9). To focus on such a politics is not to discount the brutal oppression that has come to Kashmiris at various points when they have sought to secure their own self-determination. It is rather to draw our attention to the various, and often less visible, ways in which power is wielded to maintain control over occupied peoples. In examining the rule of Sheikh Abdullah and Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad during the time following the 1948 partition that created the independent states of Pakistan and Indian, Kanjwal demonstrates how power operates in ways that cruder models of domination would otherwise exclude, including via the circulation of media, educational reform, economic aid, and more.
The three contributions to this symposium reflect on different features of “the politics of life” that is central to Kanjwal’s book. Ather Zia draws on her own research to go deeper on the gendered politics of Kashmiri identity. As Zia notes, Kashmiri men are often stereotyped as hypermasculine and militant, while women are depicted as exotic figures of beauty. These stereotypes strip Kashmiris of their humanity and justify the continued Indian occupation. Even feminism, she argues, has been coopted by the Indian government to further cement its domination in the region.
Amen Jaffer, meanwhile, examines the shaping of Kashmiri subjectivity under occupation. In focusing on modes of governing Kashmiris through a politics of life, Jaffer worries that Kanjwal leaves out the agency of Kashmiris who had to balance their desire for self-determination with simple survival. Such an account, he contends, would enrich Kanjwal’s investigation
Matthew Schutzer, finally, draws on his own research among Adivasi, or “schedule tribes,” in India to show how the Indian state, as in Kashmir, developed stereotypes around marginalized communities in order to justify their dispossession. Schutzer suggests that this dispossession reveals the concrete ways that sovereignty operates within the social sphere, which notably extends beyond the “exceptionalist” political theological framework of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben.
When leaders of powerful countries brazenly proclaim that the dispossession of land by those decimated by war will result in their being “thrilled”, we see how the fantasies of empire continue to wreak havoc on the marginalized. Kanjwal shows how claims and actions among current and former colonial powers, while now nearing absurdity, have not been only the purview of right-wing populists, but often their “liberal” political opponents as well. In doing so, she reminds us of the way structures of governmentality often reach across internal partisan lines when it comes to maintain the boundaries of the state.
