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ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR
Territory of Desire
Representing the Valley of Kashmir


A result of territorial disputes between India and Pakistan since 1947, exacerbated by armed freedom movements since 1989, the ongoing conflict over Kashmir is consistently in the news. Taking a unique multidisciplinary approach, Territory of Desire asks how, and why, Kashmir came to be so intensely desired within Indian, Pakistani, and Kashmiri nationalistic imaginations. Literary historian Ananya Jahanara Kabir finds an answer to this question in the Valley of Kashmir’s repeated portrayal as a ‘special’ place and the missing piece of Pakistan and India.

Analysing the conversion of natural beauty into collective desire—through photography, literature, cinema, art, and souvenir production—Kabir exposes the links between colonialism, modernity, and conflict within the postcolonial nation. Representations of Kashmir as a space of desire emerge in contemporary film, colonial ‘taming’ of the valley through nineteenth-century colonialist travelogues, the fetishization of traditional Kashmiri handicrafts like papier machĂ©, and Pandit and Muslim religious revivalisms in the region.

Linking a violent modernity to the fantasies of nationhood, Kabir proposes nonmilitaristic ways in which such desire may be overcome. In doing so she offers an innovative approach to complex and protracted conflict and, ultimately, its resolution.

ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR is a senior lecturer in postcolonial literature at the School of English, University of Leeds, and research associate at The Centre for History and Economics, jointly established at Cambridge, UK, and Harvard University.

Hardback / 276PP / Rs 695 / ISBN 81-7824-268-2 / South Asia rights
Copublished with the University of Minnesota Press

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