Hafsa Kanjwal /// Kashmir Against the Grain of Normalcy

This conversation between Shivangi Mariam Raj and Hafsa Kanjwal focuses on the affect and mythologies deployed by India to condense Kashmir into a landscape of desire, into a territory of control, on slow and invisibilized forms of violence embedded in infrastructures of assimilation, and on the complex forms of statecrafting under successive client regimes that have contributed to the strengthening of India’s settler-colonial project in Kashmir today. We also discuss methods of resistance practiced by the peoples of Jammu and Kashmir and how they help us think about liberation in the global landscape of postcolonial colonialism.

Hafsa Kanjwal is an assistant professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where she teaches courses on the history of the modern world, South Asian history, and Islam in the Modern World. As a historian of modern Kashmir, she is the author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023), which examines how the Indian and Kashmir governments utilized state-building to entrench India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition. Colonizing Kashmir historicizes India’s occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. Her second book project examines questions of Muslim political sovereignty and the secular, liberal international order in the context of 20th and 21st century Kashmir.