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Chitralekha Zutshi. Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir

Rouf Dar
Bibliographical reference

Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2024. Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 376 pages.

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1As literary devices that unpack the intellectual thinking of political figures of the past, biographies or “life histories” seek to provide significant insight into the politics of a particular place for the present. A new biography titled Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of Kashmir by Chitralekha Zutshi, a prominent historian who has written multiple works on Kashmir (2003, 2014), concerns one such political actor who has come to define modern Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah (1905-1982), founder of the National Conference (NC) party, mobilized the Kashmiri people against the autocratic Dogra regime, eventually leading to its abolition. He went on to become the central negotiator with the Indian political leadership and ended up working out a constitutional arrangement between Kashmir and India. Like earlier works (Para 2019, for example), Zutshi addresses the binaries ascribed to Abdullah (such as traitor or fighter) that have persisted based on the paradoxical choices he made and which continue to have political repercussions on the region.

2While these binaries emerge from the vantage point of the people whom Abdullah claimed to represent, this book adeptly foregrounds the other side of the picture: the perspective of the state with which he so unflinchingly sought to associate himself and his region. Using new archival material sourced from diverse places and people, it enriches our understanding of how the “Lion of Kashmir” was “caged” by the postcolonial anxieties of the Nehruvian nation-state that wished to integrate the princely states no matter what. The analysis presented in the book is lenient with him, refraining from entirely putting the burden of Kashmir politics on “the shoulders of an average man who felt crushed under his people’s expectations” (p. 29).

3The eight chronological chapters sift through archival sources and secondary literature, to create a coherent account of Abdullah’s personal and political life across two themes: prison and sacred spaces. The first looks at Abdullah’s life following 1953, after he was removed as the Prime Minister and arrested, which led to approximately seventeen years of cumulative prison time; the second examines his use of religion for political mobilization, which has been not been widely studied. The book painstakingly demonstrates how Abdullah juggled between the triple identities of Kashmiri, Muslim, and Indian. He did so while spearheading an anti-Dogra movement until 1947, followed by a brief reign of power until 1953 and an extended period of incarceration until 1964 before completing his career with a demoted Chief Ministerial position in 1975. It uncovers the tensions that each one of these identities posed to both his own and the region’s politics. In this sense, the book, which is a culmination of Zutshi’s decade-long project, is noteworthy compared to earlier works on this subject.

4The book portrays the life history of Abdullah as synonymous with the modern history of Kashmir. It studies prominent public figures of the time—such as Prem Nath Bazaz, Munshi Ishaq, Balraj Puri, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mridula Sarabhai, among others—to sketch out Abdullah’s political career. However, among two of his political adversaries, Choudhary Ghulam Abbass, only features a few times, and Abdul Salam Yatu of the Kisan Mazdoor Conference (KMC) does not figure even once. The first shortcoming of both intellectual history and biographies is that, in focusing on a popular political figure, the many political actors who were equally significant are conveniently silenced. It is worth examining lesser-known political figures and pluralizing the region’s political thought in order to undo the hegemonic narratives of a particular figure or idea.

5Nevertheless, if any neat correlation between Abdullah and Kashmir exists, then the book is marked by conspicuous absences. The land reforms in Kashmir that began under Abdullah’s watch in 1948 have repetitively been deemed a revolutionary program that uplifted the landless peasants. While recent political changes have necessitated a rethinking of the question of land, the exalted narratives surrounding it have not gone beyond praising Abdullah and the NC. The author does not pay enough attention to the process of converting a popular movement for political rights and socioeconomic redistribution into an authoritarian regime, although she does note that the NC “did not transition well into the postcolonial period as it went from being an insurgent, anti-establishment political entity to becoming the party in power” (p. xxv). Recent scholarship has called out this change, wherein, riding on wave of anticolonial movements, political parties display a tendency to concentrate political power (Dasgupta 2024).

6In 1945, a group of NC leaders in the countryside who were disillusioned with the land reforms came together to form the KMC. Prem Nath Bazaz also joined it. Built on the backs of rural peasants and workers, the party protested against the inability of land reforms to strike down the prevalent landlordism within the NC itself and thus against the NC’s authoritative claims to represent the entire Kashmir Valley. Like the Muslim Conference, the KMC leadership was imprisoned and sent to exile. A study of their ideas offers the prospects of not only pluralizing the political thought emanating from Kashmir during that time (Dar, Dar, and Dar 2025), but also elucidating the nature of Abdullah’s own political career and his dismissal of opposing ideologies. It is regrettable that the KMC and their ideas were not included in this book.

7Another chink in Abdullah’s armor was the violence against Muslims in Jammu province in 1947, inflicted by the Dogra forces and mobs solicited from outside the state. While this violence was accompanied by mass displacement, it did not strike an empathetic chord with Abdullah. He did little to stop it, instead reminding the survivors in a refugee camp in Jammu that “they had reaped the fruits of their own sins of having followed communal politics” (Puri 1971, p. 2197). By branding the Muslim Conference as communal, he subdued his religious identity and instead exhibited ethnonationalist tendencies in favor of the Kashmir Valley. The book explains his poor handling of the Hindu agitation in Jammu headed by the Praja Parishad party, but makes no mention of the violence in Jammu.

8Both of these instances concern the internal politics of the state in which Abdullah ruled without any challenges to his authority. Herein lies the agency of twentieth century Kashmir’s most decisive political actor. Zutshi explains that he governed with absolute power within this limited sphere of action, most often because he was simply allowed to. But no matter how much agency the structure allowed him (Abdullah’s agency versus Indian state’s structure), the latter always triumphed because of its extensive power. The question to ask here is did a political actor of his stature not anticipate this outcome? Was he so naïve to “view sovereignty in terms of personalities and personal relationships, and not institutions of the state” (p. 132)? Interestingly, he dismissed a similar question in the Kashmir Constituent Assembly by pinning all his hopes on Indian leadership and the Indian public. The book marginally touches upon an explanation of this: the author notes that, coming from a modest family, “Abdullah suffered from a deep sense of insecurity and inferiority throughout his life” (p. xxii). Yet the psychological aspects of Abdullah aspiring to become India’s biggest Muslim leader have been little studied.

9The book explains at length the machinations hatched and executed by Nehru in his desire to integrate Kashmir. The rifts between Abdullah, Beg, and their cohorts and Bakshi, Sadiq, and Masoodi in 1953 and later between Bakshi and Sadiq imply that a broader game was being played out by the structure, in which the agency of few politicians did not matter. Do all these political figures therefore represent a continuum of leaders who all bowed down just because of their hunger for political power? Just as “Abdullah had outlived his usefulness” (p. 132), his successors also met a similar fate. This came at the behest of the trampling of democratic credentials: “From the Indian government’s perspective, it was preferable to compromise on democratic principles and maintain a quisling government in the state that accepted its sovereignty without question” (p. 137).

10Abdullah had pertinently left the question of accession open for the State Constituent Assembly to decide for the declared aim of resolving it through a popular vote. There may have been more than one reason for such a deference though, as it allowed him to process the upheaval occurring within both the state and India and which did not appear conducive for the nascent relationship between the two regions. Faced with the Praja Parishad agitation in the state and the pressures of the Hindu Right on Nehru in the Indian Parliament, Abdullah found himself at a crossroads. Putting all his hopes on his friendship with Nehru, he tried to salvage whatever autonomy he could, but in vain. Nehru prioritized the state-building project, which came at the cost of Abdullah’s political career. In prison, he flirted with a number of ideas, from advocating for accession based on autonomy to demanding plebiscite. The middle ground that he fought for had long been buried with his removal and arrest in 1953.

11The book ends the way it begins. The making of Abdullah as a “puppet,” who began as “the symbol of the state’s identity and its people’s sole representative regardless” and was eliminated when he did not “toe the line,” was partly due to Abdullah himself. He “played no small part in this” by fighting as well as compromising and by resorting to both religious and secular overtones (p. 263). However, I would argue that without a proper critique of the choices that he made, the framing of the battle between a solitary political actor against a powerful nation-state might appear to be conceptually stretched out. The fact that “he could not resolve the essential differences between his vision for his region-nation and the demands of Indian nationalism” augments the claim that his “was also a deeply twentieth-century Indian public life” (p. xx), in which it was structurally impossible to found and sustain federalism amidst unitarian tendencies.

12The question of flailing federalism leads to the inadequacy of the “centre-state” framework (used in this book as in most of the scholarship on Kashmir) as a convenient way of analyzing the politics of Kashmir. It implies an asymmetry and denies Kashmir the sovereign power/authority that its leaders intended to use to negotiate an autonomous relationship with the Indian state (Dar and Tillin 2025). The fact that the “lion” was “caged” and his cubs catapulted to the throne as and when it was deemed feasible does not indicate the characteristics of a centre-state relationship. Rather, it has all the hallmarks of a quest for complete control over another region using conceit and coercion all along the way. This holds true despite the complexities and intricacies of Abdullah’s life and politics.

13In conclusion, the book makes for an interesting read for students and scholars of both modern Kashmir and postcolonial India. Its strong point is the analysis of Abdullah’s political life and Kashmir’s political history based on a fresh and diverse pool of archival sources. Even though it does not radically alter popular perspectives about Abdullah, it definitely puts most of them into perspective for the consumption of a wider academic audience. In that sense, it brings public discourse and academic scholarship together, offering explanations for what appears to be obvious facts about Kashmiri history.

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Bibliography

Dar, Shiraz Ahmad, Rouf Ahmad Dar, and Javid Ahmad Dar. 2025. “Political Imaginaries of Peasants and Workers in Kashmir: A Study of the Kisan Mazdoor Conference.” Economic & Political Weekly 60(21):62–8.

Dar, Rouf and Louise Tillin. 2025. “An Incomplete Bargain: Reading Indian Federalism through the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly.” Asian Survey 65(3):403–28.

Dasgupta, Sandipto. 2024. Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Para, Altaf Hussain. 2019. The Making of Modern Kashmir: Sheikh Abdullah and the Politics of the State. New York: Routledge.

Puri, Balraj. 1971. “Ham Handed in Kashmir.” Economic & Political Weekly 6(42-43):2195–200.

Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2003. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. London: Hurst & Co.

Zutshi, Chitralekha. 2014. Kashmir’s Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

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References

Electronic reference

Rouf Dar, Chitralekha Zutshi. Sheikh Abdullah: The Caged Lion of KashmirSouth Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal [Online], 34 | 2025, Online since 19 November 2025, connection on 21 January 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/samaj/10567; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15afo

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About the author

Rouf Dar

Assistant Professor, Political Science, GITAM University, Bengaluru

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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