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Book Review
Asia
| Mridu Rai. Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 335. Cloth $65.00, paper $22.50.Chitralekha Zutshi. Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir. New York: Oxford University Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 359. $35.00.
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| Ever since the India-Pakistan near war of 2001–2002, we have been subject to an incessant flow of words on the Kashmir conflict. Sadly, this deluge has done little to enhance our knowledge of the subject. Bar changing the odd adjectives, adding a little detail, or inserting the views of the proverbial man on the street, little has been added to Sumit Ganguly's Crisis in Kashmir: Portents of War, Prospects of Peace (1997) or Victoria Schofield's Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan, and the Unending War (2000). Two new histories have been widely applauded for constituting a happy break with this dismal tradition. Little attention has been paid, however, to the considerable theoretical and empirical problems presented by Mridu Rai's and Chitralekha Zutshi's books. |
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Both Rai and Zutshi deal with a critical period in the history of Jammu and Kashmir: the century of Dogra monarchical rule that preceded the independence of India and Pakistan, and the division of the state between the two powers in the course of the war of 1947. It was in this period that the welter of territories that constitute modern Kashmir were welded together under a single power, a consequence of Britain's handing over of the region to Maharaja Gulab Singh, a prince who sided with the empire's war of conquest against the Sikh kingdom of Lahore. Like the other semi-independent states of princely India, Kashmir witnessed a constant struggle for influence between the monarchy and the imperial government. It was to become the site of a number of other contestations: of monarch against democrat; of empire against nationalist; of Hindu against Muslim; of peasant against landlord. |
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Rai sees this century as one in which a "Hindu State" was formed, the consequence of the Dogra monarchy's search for legitimacy. Lacking any real basis for its sovereignty over the peoples whose destinies it now controlled, it responded by inventing a history in which the Dogra dynasty represented both the Hindu faith and Rajput martial tradition. Rai maps this process by carefully documenting the Dogra monarchy's growing control of Hindu religious practice in Kashmir, notably through state-controlled trusts. Since the state was Hindu in character, Rai concludes, "religion and politics became inextricably intertwined in defining and expressing the protest of Kashmiri Muslims against their rulers" (pp. 16–17). |
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Zutshi arrives at similar conclusions, but with considerably more attention to nuance and detail. Her study of the workings of Dogra rule suggests the need for a careful examination of what, if any, meaning the notion of a "Hindu state" may have actually had to contemporaries. There was, Zutshi's narrative suggests, no unilinear project of Hinduization under the Dogras; rather, there were complex and fluid processes of collaboration and conflict among various categories of elites, both Hindu and Muslim. Kashmir's small Brahmin community, the Pandits, whom Rai sees as key collaborators of the Dogra project, emerge at least one point in Zutshi's book as its most bitter opponents. Notions of a homogeneous Kashmiri Muslim identity, Zutshi's analysis suggests, need to be tempered by an understanding of the working of caste, class, and ideology. |
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