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Rethinking Kashmir’s History from a Borderlands Perspective
Author(s) -
Zutshi Chitralekha
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
history compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.121
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1478-0542
DOI - 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2010.00692.x
Subject(s) - scholarship , perspective (graphical) , indigenous , negotiation , politics , competition (biology) , political science , gender studies , sociology , history , ethnology , anthropology , social science , law , art , visual arts , biology , ecology
Although borders haunt its historical and recent past as well as its contemporary political situation, Kashmir has rarely been theorized as a borderland. This article examines the perspective of borderlands as conceptualized in North American, Asian and African borderlands scholarship. It argues that the application of this perspective – in which borderlands are defined as middle grounds where imperial competition and negotiations among a variety of imperial and indigenous actors led to the production of distinct political cultures – to rethinking Kashmir’s history has the potential to liberate the region from the imperatives of national borders that misread its history, while also reinvigorating South Asian borderlands scholarship.