Introduction: The Laboratory of Kashmir

Amar Sohal

doi:10.1080/23801883.2025.2478101

Introduction: The Laboratory of Kashmir

Amar Sohal

History

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Abstract

In the mid-twentieth century, Jammu and Kashmir transcended its peripheral status on India’s northern frontier to emerge as a theatre for generalisable political imaginings. This erstwhile princely state transformed the antagonisms of Indian politics to produce novel but intelligible solutions to its problems. Regional specificity engendered originality. But because Kashmir was reminiscent of India’s scale and diversity, its innovations were comprehensible to broader debates. This expansive character of Kashmir’s intellectual history is the subject of this special issue. The Dogra dynasty administered an exploitative, non-representative government which favoured agrarian and Hindu interests. Thus Kashmir was ripe for the Indian refurbishment of progressive ideals, but paradoxically emerged as a site for exclusionary Hindu nationalism too. By inverting India’s religious demographics, Muslim-majority Kashmir was central to the construction of both an ethical Islamic politics applicable to democracy, and a not incompatible secular (and federal) principle for all of India. From 1947, Kashmir was caught in the crossfire of Partition, which only redoubled its well-established significance to Indian political thought. Ever since, variants of religious, secular, and regional nationalism have continued to clash in South Asia, and Kashmir is the exemplary site for defining the ambitions and limits of these disparate national models.

Original language	English
Pages	1-11
Specialist publication	Global Intellectual History
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2025.2478101
Publication status	Published - Mar 2025

Keywords

Kashmir
Indian political thought
monarchy
socialism
religion
partition

UN SDGs

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10.1080/23801883.2025.2478101

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Introduction: The Laboratory of Kashmir

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Keywords

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