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Kashmir and Neighbors |
Bibliographic NotesSources on Kashmir are abundant if one can find the occasion to visit the printed collections in India, Pakistan and Kashmir and utilize the sources in the outstanding libraries of the world. I had recourse to some of these opportunities. Since this book already made references to some published material on the subject, there is no need to reproduce a long list of books and articles. The reader may consult the bibliographical pages of a number of works, such as Sisir Gupta’s Kashmir, A.R. Desai’s now classic Social Background of Indian Nationalist and its sequel, Recent Trends… as well as Yu. V. Gankovskiy –L.R. Gordon Polonskaia’s Istoriia Pakistani M.T. Stepanyant’s Pakistan and the like. Desai’s two volumes are perhaps the best account by an Indian scholar of the qualitative structural transformation that took place under the impact of British rule. John Garrett’s A Classical Dictionary of India is “illustrative of the mythology, philosophy, literature, antiquities, arts, manners, customs” and the like of the Hindus. It is not difficult to trace political and polemical information about Kashmir Reports on Kashmir are stacked in several rooms in the United Nations Headquarters in New York. The U.N. itself printed documents and arguments, and the Governments of India and Pakistan have published more. For instance, Verinder Grover’s The Story of Kashmir and P.L Lakhanpal’s (ed) Essential Documents and Notes on Kashmir Dispute on the Indian side, as well as The Kashmir Question by Pakistan’s Institute of International Relations and White Paper on the Jammu and Kashmir Dispute by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Islamabad. In addition to the published Jammu and Kashmir Official Reports, Acts and Gazettes, the unpublished primary sources in the National Archives in New Delhi include the “Foreign Department Proceedings” of the government of India. The “Old English Records” of His Highness’ Government may be found in the Jammu and Kashmir State Archives (Jammu). For some selected primary sources, one may see R.K.K Bhatt’s bibliography in his Political and Constitutional Development of the Jammu and Kashmir State (Delhi, Seema, 1984). There are also unpublished private papers, such as the Halifax Collection at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi, or the Private Papers of Lord Minton on microfilm, or the Private Records of Maharaja Pratap Singh. |
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broad category on Kashmir’s history may be based on indigenous
records, foreign chronicles, memoirs of travellers and contemporary
works. There are references to Kashmir in early Greek, Chinese and
Muslim records. The initial Indian chroniclers were poets as well as
historians who utilized Sanskrit, the language for official business.
Perhaps the oldest reliable writer is Kalhana (A.D. 12th century), who
consulted even earlier informants to compose has own Rajatarangini
in eight cantos of Sanskrit verse, translated into Persian (15the
century) and English (1935). Being the history of various dynasties,
Kalhana, not only consulted older works, but also first-hand sources not
hiding the errors of kings in whose time he wrote. Jonaraja brought the
chronicle of events to the reign of Sultan Zain-ul Abidin, his pupil
Srivara adding four more chapters. Prajyabhatta’s Rajavalipataka ends
with the year 1514, his work completed by his pupil Suka following
Emperor Akbar’s conquest of Kashmir. Malik Haider Chaudura wrote a
history of Kashmir in Persian down to his time in 1617. Khwaja Muhammad
Azam Kaul’s Wuquat-e Kashmir (1735-46) was enriched by his son
Muhammad Aslam. Maulvi Ghulam Hasan’s (1832-98) Tawarikh-e Kashmir (3
vols.) is on the geography, political history and the arts of the
country. Pandit Anand Koul’s Geography of Jammu and Kashmir is
in English. Ghulam Mohiud Din Sufi’s Kashir (so spelled by the
local people) deals with the land after the entry of Islam. Some
of the first Europeans to visit Kashmir were Gerone Xavier who
accompanied Akbar to the famine-stricken Valley, Francois Bernier who
described life during the rule of the Moghuls, Desideri who passed to
Ladakh after Srinagar, George Forster who witnessed the harsh Afghan
rule, and Frederick Drew and Sir Walter Lawrence who both gave detailed
accounts of the physical features of the country. The
Cambridge and Oxford histories of India are considered to be relevant
and distinguished. The original Oxford history by V.A. Smith (1848-1920)
has been rewritten by Percival Spear. The new Cambridge history, under
the general editorship of Gordon Johnson, is to cover the centuries from
the Moghul era to the present day in twenty-eight volumes (1988). Unlike
the previous series (1922-53), each volume of the present series deals
with a separate theme, written by a single author. Leonard
Mosley in The Last Days of the British Raj wrote that the
official documents dealing with the transfer of power in India would not
be released until 1999, but that in the interim period his book would
throw some light on events hitherto obscured. The British side of the
story, however, was unfolded soon, and twelve volumes of documents,
under the general editorship of Nicholas Mansergh, entitled Constitutional
Relations between Britain and India: the Transfer of Power, 1942-47 were
published (1970-83). Apart
from Gandhi’s and Nehru’s several books, some prominent witnesses,
inseparable from events, wrote or spoke on crucial developments: Lord
Mountbatten (Time Only to Look Forward), Jinnah (Speeches;
also: Muhammad Anwar’s Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah: a Selected Bibliography), Sheikh Abdullah (Flames of China), Liaquat
Ali Khan (Pakistan), Joseph Korbel (Danger in Kashmir), M.C.
Mahajan (Looking Backward), V.P. Menon (The Story of the
Integration of the India States), Sir Francis Tucker (While
Memory Serves), and the like. Among the biographies, Sir Penderal
Moon’s Wavell: the Viceroy’s Journal contains some almost
day-to-day accounts. Ziegler’s (Mountbatten:an Official Biography) and
Campbell-Johnson’s (Missions with Mountbatten) books throw some
more light on that crucial period (23 march-15 August 1947). Ayub
Khan’s (Friends, Not Masters), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s (The
Myth of Independence), and Benazir Bhutto’s (Daughter of the
East) Chronicles are semi-memoirs. Many
books by researchers contain valuable contain valuable accounts: For
instance, Michael Brecher (Nehru: a Political Biography), Hector
Bolitho (Jinnah: Creator of Pakistan), H.V. Hodson (The Great
Divide), Tara Chand (History of the Freedom Movement, New
Delhi), Mahmud Hussainet at. (A History of the Freedom Movement Karachi), etc. Rasheeduddin Khan’s Bewildered India as a
treatment of “identity, pluralism and discord”, and Prem Shankar
Jha’s India as “a political economy of stagnation” as well as
Chaudri Muhammad Ali’s (a former secretary of the Partition Council
and later Prime Minister of Pakistan: a Withering State? And
Tahir Amin’s Ethno-National Movements of Pakistan, all
authoritative accounts, may be added. |
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Some of the books especially on Kashmir are: Shaheen Akthar (Uprising in India –held Jammu and Kashmir) Prem Nath Bazaz(Asad Kashmir), Lord Birdwood (Two Nations and Kashmir), Pran Chopra (India, Pakistan and the Kashmir Tangle), Vernon Hewitt (Reclaiming the Past? The Search for Political and Cultural Unity in Contemporary Jammu and Kashmir), Prem Shankar Jha (Kashmir 1947: Rival Versions of History), M. Anwar Khan (The Partition of India and the Kashmir Problem), Rahmatullah Khan (Kashmir and the United Nations), M.L.Kotru (The Disputed Legacy, 1846-1990), Arjun Ray (Kashmir Diary: Psychology of Militancy), B.L. Sharma (The Kashmir Story),Shafi Shauq, Qazi Zahoor and Shoukat Farooqi (Europeans on Kashmir), Tavlen Singh (Kashmir: Tragedy of Errors), Robert G. Wirsing (ed., Kashmir: Resolving Regional Conflict; India, Pakistan and the Kashmir Dispute), and Lars Blinkenberg (India-Pakistan:the History of Unsolved Conflicts). The last mentioned recent study consists of a re-edition of the original single volume and a new analytical volume containing an evaluation of many structural factors. Terrorism continues to pose a serious threat to India’s
security. The volatile situation in Kashmir has been discussed in a
number of publications. The India Ministry of Home Affairs brings out
periodic volumes on Profile of Terrorist Violence in Jammu and
Kashmir, which contain descriptions of atrocities by militants. Ved
Marwah, a former member of the India Police Service who held many
important assignments in different states in India, traced the genesis
of terrorist movements and analysed how extremist violence has taken
deep roots, in his book entitled Uncivil Wars: Pathology of Terrorism
in India. Manoj Joshi’s The Lost Rebellion: Kashmir in the
Nineties is a riveting account of the human drama in Kashmir. Tara
Kartha’s Tools of Terror examines the connection between light
weapons and India’s security. Beyond Terrorism by Salman
Hurshid, the Indian Minister of State for External Affairs, provides a
graphic account of the suffering in Kashmir and also looks beyond
terrorism to a more peaceful future. Who new Indian periodicals, Aakrosh
and Faultines, concentrate
on conflict, terrorism, and resolution. The former is published by the
Forum for Strategic and Security Studies, and the latter by the
Institute for Conflict Management, both in New Delhi. The founder of the
Institute is K.P.S Gill, who served in a number of theatres of civil
strife an low intensity warfare and led a successful campaign against
terrorism in Punjab. Strategic Analysis, a monthly journal of the
Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), frequently caries
articles on Kashmir and terrorism. IDSA, led by Air Commodore Jasjit
Singh, also brings out books, a recent one entitled Kargil 1999, which
may be described as Pakistan’s fourth war for Kashmir. The Kashmir
Trends is a digest of news and views from J&K media files as
well as international and Indian national press on Kashmir. Several
other periodicals (Asian Affairs, Asian Strategic Review, BIISS
Journal, Islamic Order, Kashmir Today, Kashmir Watch, Journal Of Peace
Studies, Pakistan Defence Review, Pakistan Horizon, Pakistan Journal of
History and Culture, Pakistan Perspectives, Peace Initiatives, Regional
Studies, Secular Democracy, Seminar, South Asian Studies, Strategic
Bulletin, Strategic Studies, U.S.I Journal, World Focus) are also
useful. The past issues of some Indian daily papers are available at the
main library of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi).
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