| dc.description.abstract | Reading the language of New Kashmir and Sheikh Abdullah in apposition to Jawaharlal Nehru’s “pictures” of his native land illuminates the frontiers of thought that predetermine what an emergent Kashmiri state, always filially related to India, needed to look like. As Ananya Jahanara Kabir aptly reminds us, the fantasy of the integer, the promise of the contained secular republic of parts that Nehru and the Congress harbored required him to “produce a place” in order to “produce a past” and actualize the dream of an Indian Nation. Nehru’s Kashmir carried in it a pregnant nostalgic history from which a modern integrated India could be conceived and nurtured, making the capture of any emergent aesthetic of a New Kashmiri State by ambrosial descriptions of spring, new flowers, and brooks tantamount to the project of Indian State building. I will in this paper return to the preamble and introduction of JKNC’s Naya Kashmir, New Kashmir (of 1944) and to Jawaharlal Nehru’s letters, speeches, and writings on Kashmir, both of which formulate Kashmir’s imaginary of paradise, in order to chart some of the aesthetic terrain upon which the political state of Kashmir and thus Kashmiri political life has been set up. Next to these and to interrupt the valley’s visions of paradise, I will place other, contradictory visions of Kashmir as they figure in peasant life from 1940-1960 and as they appear in the more recent line drawings made by Kashmiri artist Khytul Abyad. What I ultimately hope to attend to and detail through this reading of visions is the dynamics of the antagonism between aesthetic regimes imposed onto a territory and history; done so by dominant political discourses and the aesthetics that emerge otherwise in response to such imposition. | |
