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Begin New Search Topic Decolonization Publishing Institution The Toynbee Prize Foundation

1. Colonizing Kashmir: An interview with Hafsa Kanjwal

Author:
Mahia Bashir and Hafsa Kanjwal
Publication Date:
10-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
Joining a new wave of critical scholarship on global decolonization, Hafsa Kanjwal’s 2023 monograph Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation(Stanford University Press) offers a compelling and provocative account of Indian state-building in Kashmir in the aftermath of the British withdrawal and argues that independent India’s attempts at state-building in Kashmir were fundamentally colonial. In recasting the Indian national project in Kashmir as a colonial enterprise and highlighting the role of Kashmir’s client regimes in this process, Kanjwal lays bare the “politics of life” that was central to bringing Kashmir within the Indian national orbit without the popular consent of its people. Ultimately, this account offers a critique of the liberatory character of narratives around decolonization and offers an alternative lens to understand national consolidation in the aftermath of the second World War.
Topic:
History, Decolonization, Interview, and Colonization
Political Geography:
South Asia and Kashmir

2. Decoding South Asia on the 75th Anniversary of Independence and Partition: An Interview with Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose

Author:
Ayesha Jalal, Sugata Bose, and Tathagata Dutta
Publication Date:
02-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
Earlier this year in August the three post-colonial states of South Asia—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—marked the 75th anniversary of the end of the British Raj as well as the partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947. Ayesha Jalal’s The Sole Spokesman first published in 1985 remains one of the foundational texts on partition. The work was instrumental in revising previous historiographical trends that advocated that the 1947 partition was the logical end of religious communalism that had plagued the subcontinent. The work refocused much needed attention to the partition resulting from the failure to devise a suitable power sharing mechanism at a federal level. The decolonization of the subcontinent in 1947 also heralded the end of the age of empires. The British Indian Army not only guarded Britain’s empire in much of Asia and Africa, but also provided critical defense to other European empires in the Indian Ocean arena. The loss of India deprived Britain of this critical instrument of coercion and governance. Sugata Bose in his A Hundred Horizons (2006) explored the structures of power in the Indian Ocean world in an age of global empire as well as the anticolonial solidarities that circulated in this interregional arena. Ayesha Jalal is the Mary Richardson Professor of South Asia and the Muslim World at Tufts University and Sugata Bose is the Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. The 75th anniversary provides a wonderful opportunity to not only revisit these two seminal works together, but also to have a larger conversation regarding the craft of history writing and the emerging trends of the discipline. On behalf of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, I thank them both for giving their valuable time for this interview.
Topic:
History, Decolonization, Interview, and Partition
Political Geography:
Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Asia, and India