The Kashmir Question w/ Ather Zia, Hafsa Kanjwal and Abdulla Moaswes

For episodes 202 to 204 of The Fire These Times, guest host Abdulla Moaswes, a Palestinian scholar and old buddy of mine, is joined by two scholars of Kashmir, Ather Zia and Hafsa Kanjwal to talk about Kashmir. It’s a long episode, but that’s because we wanted to make sure to present Kashmir’s history on its own terms, a Kashmir perspective that does not center Pakistan and certainly not India (or China).

This episode was published in 3 parts on the various podcast feeds, and in full on Patreon.

For much of the last 3 decades, Kashmir has been among the most militarised places on Earth, with its territory divided between the three nuclear-armed states of India, Pakistan, and China. Earlier this year, events in the region acted as a prelude to an armed confrontation between India and Pakistan, which the former used as an opportunity to more deeply entrench an emergent settler colonial form of rule in the territory. Many view the Kashmir question as simply a territorial dispute between these three states, but as this podcast series will demonstrate, the Kashmir question is one about colonial occupation and anticolonial resistance. In this podcast series, Hafsa, Ather and Abdulla first outline the origins of the Kashmir crisis, explaining how the region came to be partitioned as a result of British and Indian colonialism. They contextualise Kashmir’s colonisation within the project of Indian statebuilding, as well as the territory’s relevance to regional geopolitics. In part 2, they discuss Kashmiri resistance over the decades, including the events that led to and comprised the Kashmir Intifada that broke out in the late 1980s. The third and final episode consists of an assessment of Kashmir’s current status and the guests’ outlook for the future.

Ather Zia is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Gender Studies program at the University of Northern Colorado, Greeley as well as a poet, short fiction writer, and columnist.

Hafsa Kanjwal is an associate professor of South Asian History in the Department of History at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania

Abdulla Moaswes is a Palestinian writer, researcher, educator and translator.

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For more

Kashmir Lit
Abdulla Moaswes is on Bluesky
Ather Zia has a website
Hafsa Kanjwal has a website

Credits

Abdulla Moaswes (host), Elia Ayoub (producer, sound editor, episode design), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics).