Books On Kashmir
Topics
Understating the conflict
History
Kashmiri Culture
Travel related
Understating the conflict
Winner of the Crossword Prize for non-fiction, ‘“Curfewed Night’” is a passionate and important book – a brave and brilliant report from a conflict the world has chosen to ignore.' Salman Rushdie
Basharat Peer was a teenager when the separatist movement exploded in Kashmir in 1989. Over the following years countless young men, fuelled by feelings of injustice, crossed over the Line of Control to train in Pakistani army camps. Peer was sent off to boarding school in Aligarh to keep out of trouble. He finished college and became a journalist in Delhi. But Kashmir – angrier, more violent, more hopeless – was never far away.
In 2003 Peer, now a young journalist, left his job and returned to his homeland. Drawing a harrowing portrait of Kashmir and her people – a mother forced to watch her son hold an exploding bomb, politicians living in refurbished torture chambers, picturesque villages riddled with landmines – this is above all, a story of what it really means to return home – and the discovery that there may not be any redemption in it.
Paradise at War: A Political History of Kashmir by Paradise at War: A Political History of Kashmir by Radha Kumar
Academic Radha Kumar traces the territory’s political evolution from the late colonial era to the present. Kumar was one of three people appointed by the Indian government back in 2010 to chart a potential road map to fulfil Kashmiri aspirations within an Indian constitutional framework. In this detailed examination of a complex dispute, she spares neither Indian politicians nor Pakistanis for their role in perpetuating Kashmir’s tragedy.
Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir edited by Sanjay Kak
![Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir by [Kak, Sanjay]](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51gHarn4IoL.jpg)
The summer of 2010 was the beginning of non-violent protests in Kashmir. Until My Freedom Has Come, edited by Sanjay Kak describes the 2010 Kashmir “intifada.” It is an anthology of essays, interviews, cartoons, poems, and songs. What makes it stand out is that almost all the contributors are Kashmiris, which was missing in the literature produced before. Here you read the first-hand account of street protests and the growing desire among Kashmiri youth for the Azaadi or freedom from the Indian rule.
It is a gripping account of the past two decades of strategic competition between India and Pakistan, following their tit-for-tat nuclear tests in 1998. It explains the shifting international attitudes towards the countries, with India now seen as emergent superpower, while Pakistan is viewed more warily.
This is a political analysis of the Kashmir conflict that focuses on its domestic and international aspects as two distinct issues: an international one between Pakistan and India, and a domestic one between Kashmiri Muslims and Indians.
The Limits of Influence: America’s Role in Kashmir by Howard B. Schaffer
The Limits of Influence: America’s Role in Kashmir is an important read to understand America’s diplomatic attempts at solving the Kashmir conflict. Schaffer, a retired diplomat living in India, looks at Kashmir from 1948 until Obama’s presidency in 2008. He explains why John F. Kennedy took a different position from his predecessors on the conflict and how it helped America maintain good relations with both India and Pakistan.
