1In a field saturated with security-centered and geopolitical readings of Kashmir, Arshi Javaid’s Kashmiri Nationalism, 1989–2016 asks a different question: what if the story of Kashmir were not first and foremost a border conflict between India and Pakistan, but rather the long and uneven constitution of a political self? Drawing on political science, the book examines the formation of this political subject across successive regimes of domination—from the Dogra state to the contemporary Indian Union—and reconstructs Kashmiri nationalism as a historically layered and contested formation.
2The book’s intervention in Kashmiri studies is best read as a double positioning in that it pushes back against two recurrent reductions: accounts that treat the conflict primarily as a security problem or an interstate rivalry, and culturalist narratives that reify kashmiriyat (Kashmiri cultural identity) as an inherited ethos rather than a political framing. In this respect, it also aligns with a recent scholarly shift, visible for instance in Hafsa Kanjwal’s Colonizing Kashmir (2023), which moves beyond binary framings of the conflict. Javaid’s book also builds on scholarship locating Kashmiri political identity well before 1989, especially Mridu Rai’s and Chitralekha Zutshi’s reconstructions of the Dogra period and its legacies (Rai 2004; Zutshi 2003), and it draws on institution-centered analyses of democratic erosion and “institutional decay” to connect the intensification of nationalist claims to the narrowing of political channels (Ganguly 1996; Bose 2003). This framing also resonates with critiques of kashmiriyat as an “empty signifier” (Aggarwal 2008).
3This Kashmir-specific positioning is paired with a broader conversation involving theories of nationalism. Javaid engages simultaneously with Hans Kohn’s distinction between civic and ethnic forms of nationalism and Anthony D. Smith’s emphasis on the historical depth, myths, and symbolic resources through which national communities are formed, before sharpening her own conceptual framework in Chapter 1. There, she engages with Benedict Anderson’s account of the nation as an imagined community sustained by print capitalism and vernacularization. She also develops a complementary analysis centered on the formation of a Kashmiri political self through successive regimes of domination, exclusion, and imposed forms of othering. In her account, nationalism is not only sustained by infrastructures that make a community imaginable: it is also produced through classification and exclusion, through a self/other dynamic that, under domination, may harden into practices of othering. In this sense, nationalism can be read as a “derivative discourse” in Partha Chatterjee’s formulation, which is marked by colonial hierarchies and the failures of postcolonial democracy, while also being analyzed as a process of political subject-formation in its own right.
4This conceptual framing clarifies the book’s historical argument: rather than treating Kashmiri nationalism as a late, insurgency-driven ideology, Javaid traces the successive social and institutional settings in which a political self is formed, contested, and periodically intensified through exclusion. Under the Dogra regime (1846–1947), exploitative taxation, begar (forced labor), and communal privilege generated resentment among the Muslim majority. Administrative and educational control by Hindu elites produced not merely religious division, but a layered consciousness in which economic oppression, bureaucratic exclusion, and aspirations to civic dignity converged, laying the ground for a proto-national discourse.
5From the 1930s onward, the spread of education and print culture transformed grievance into political language, creating, as Javaid notes, “conducive conditions for developing Kashmiri nationalism” (p. 184). Literacy and newspapers fostered an intelligentsia able to stress their rights to work, opportunity, and representation. These infrastructures enabled what Javaid calls “autonomous ways of political participation” (p. 186), giving rise to organizations such as the Muslim Conference (1931) and the National Conference (1938). Contrary to policy and media narratives that see Kashmiri nationalism as originating in the insurgency of 1989, Javaid emphasizes that “armed militancy was neither sudden nor purely motivated by religion” (p. 88). The idioms of self-rule and autonomy had matured across decades—from Sheikh Abdullah’s National Conference in the late 1930s, through the Plebiscite Front founded in 1955, to the Muslim United Front, which contested the 1987 elections. The rigged elections of 1987 simply accelerated a process through which “the repetitive failure of non-violent mobilization paved the way for the eventual rise of militancy” (p. 186).
6A major contribution of the book is its critique of kashmiriyat—the notion of timeless communal harmony. “Understanding Kashmir through the bracketed ethos of ‘kashmiriyat’,” Javaid writes, “[…] presents an ahistorical picture but also denies any cultural and political specificity to the Kashmiri political space” (p. 78). Power, she shows, was never evenly shared: while Muslims and Pandits coexisted linguistically and culturally, administrative dominance remained with the Hindu minority. Leaders from Nehru to Sheikh Abdullah mobilized kashmiriyat as much for political expediency as for cultural idealism (p. 79). It functioned as an empty signifier, used first to counter the two-nation theory, later to legitimize Indian secularism (p. 80). When Vajpayee and Modi revived the trinity kashmiriyat-insaniyat-jamhuriyat (Kashmiri cultural identity, humanity, democracy) in the 2000s, it became, in Javaid’s words, a formula “of contradictions and avoidance” (p. 81).
7While Javaid frames Kashmiri nationalism through the dual optics of self and other (p. 14), she presents this distinction as historically produced and relational rather than fixed. Yet in practice, the conceptual pair operates primarily at the level of political discourse rather than lived social relations. The book’s analysis privileges a macro-grammar of opposition—India/Pakistan, Muslim/Hindu—without fully engaging with the internal fractures and cross-cutting affiliations that complicate these boundaries within Kashmiri society. Some Pandit actors, for instance, have historically supported separatist movements, unsettling any stable identification of the “other.” More broadly, Pandits, Muslims, and even state officials often inhabit overlapping cultural and linguistic worlds in which political identities are situationally negotiated rather than fixed. The shared linguistic heritage of Kashmiri (p. 79) thus points to the limits of reading the self/other dynamic as a stable social divide beyond its discursive function.
8The mid-century transition from civic mobilization to armed resistance marks a pivotal moment in Javaid’s historical reconstruction. After the contested accession of 1947 and the partition of the state, the promised plebiscite was never held. Instead, New Delhi backed “unrepresentative governments” and “pumped monetary emoluments to strengthen its limited patronage network” (p. 85). This continuity between Dogra despotism and postcolonial clientelism produced a dual alienation—from the state, which ruled through coercion, and from democratic institutions, which failed to channel dissent.
9The 1987 elections crystallized this crisis. The suppression of the Muslim United Front and the imprisonment of its leaders delegitimized electoral politics, persuading many that coercion had become the only language the ruling elite understood. Militancy thus appeared not as rupture but as a continuation of political struggle by other means.
10The final chapters extend this genealogy outward, showing how Kashmiri nationalism is continually refracted through external and regional forces. Chapter 4 examines Pakistan’s irredentist claim over Kashmir as a projection of its own national identity—a compensatory discourse born from “repressed existential envy and negativity” (p. 149). Nationalisms born of reaction, Javaid argues, are marked by ambivalence: Islamabad’s oscillation between ideological solidarity and strategic opportunism has alternately empowered and constrained Kashmiri political agency. The 1990s sponsorship of jihadist groups linked the local struggle to global militancy, while post-9/11 realignments forced a retreat into diplomatic advocacy.
11Chapter 5 turns to other peripheries of Kashmiri identity. The diaspora—particularly in the United Kingdom—sustains a civic vocabulary of rights and belonging, keeping the issue visible internationally. Within Jammu and Kashmir, regional politics reveal divergent projects of nationalism: Hindu majoritarian narratives in Jammu, autonomy debates in Ladakh, and the fragmentation of the “Kashmiri” field after the 2008 Amarnath agitation and the BJP–PDP coalition. These dynamics constantly redraw the moral geography of Kashmiri nationalism, oscillating between civic and ethnic idioms across shifting territorial and diasporic spaces. Yet one might ask whether this cartography, focused largely on the Valley and the British diaspora, risks underplaying the plural geographies—rural Jammu, Ladakh, or the Gulf networks—where Kashmiri politics are also reimagined.
12Methodologically, Javaid’s approach is ambitious and wide-ranging, drawing on narrative interviews, Urdu-language archives, and documents produced by political organizations (p. 28). Yet the book offers limited reflection on the internal hierarchy of these materials and on how different types of sources are weighted in the analysis. Elite political actors, formal organizations, and moments of institutional rupture occupy a more visible place than grassroots practices, generational socializations, or informal modes of political transmission. Making these asymmetries more explicit would not undermine the argument but rather strengthen the analytical transparency of the study and clarify the relationship between sources and claims.
13At the analytical level, Kashmiri Nationalism, 1989–2016 is marked by a strong conceptual coherence and historical depth, yet it remains oriented toward macro-political narratives. The “self” evoked in the subtitle is therefore primarily a political and discursive subject rather than an embodied or experiential one. Javaid foregrounds institutions, organized movements, and ideological formations, granting less attention to the everyday social practices through which nationalism may be lived, reproduced, or contested by ordinary Kashmiris. This choice is consistent with the book’s disciplinary orientation in the field of political sciences, but it also leaves open the question of how nationalism is negotiated in mundane settings—such as campuses, marketplaces, or families—where political belonging often takes more ambivalent and fragmented forms. As a result, the self/other dynamic, though conceptually framed as relational and evolving, is empirically demonstrated mainly through organized politics and institutional antagonisms.
14Temporally, the stated frame (1989–2016) is both clear and productively exceeded. Javaid frequently reaches back to the Dogra period and gestures forward to post-2016 developments. Her discussion of institutional decay (p. 24) and securitization (p. 37) in fact anticipates the 2019 abrogation of Article 370, which formalized the erosion of autonomy she describes. Yet her cut-off date avoids the question of how new forms of resistance—digital activism, transnational solidarity, and cultural production—have since reconfigured Kashmiri nationalism.
15Arshi Javaid’s Kashmiri Nationalism, 1989–2016 is a major contribution to the study of nationalism and South Asian politics. By recentering analysis on internal contestations rather than external antagonisms, it reframes Kashmir as a site where the postcolonial state’s promises of democracy and equality were both enacted and betrayed. Its lasting insight is that nationalism, in Kashmir as elsewhere, is not a fixed ideology but a practice of endurance: sustained through education, language, and the moral labor of imagining community under constraint. More broadly, Javaid’s work not only reinterprets Kashmir but also invites scholars to reconsider how nationalism operates in other contested regions—such as Palestine or Kurdistan—where state repression, moral vocabularies, and diasporic networks similarly shape the grammar of political belonging. Beneath the language of sovereignty, these struggles also reveal enduring practices of civic imagination and the fragile persistence of collective hope.
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