The Fire These Times 202/ The Kashmir Question: Origins w/ Ather Zia, Hafsa Kanjwal and Abdulla Moaswes
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 is part 1 of the Kashmir Question series. The full version is already available 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.
The Fire These Times is a proud member of From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective. Check out other projects in our media ecosystem: Syria: The Inconvenient Revolution, From The Periphery Podcast, The Mutual Aid Podcast, Politically Depressed, Obscuristan, and Antidote Zine.
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For more:
Elia Ayoub is on Bluesky, Mastodon and blogs at Hauntologies.net
Abdulla Moaswes is on Bluesky
Ather Zia has a website
Hafsa Kanjwal has a website
The Fire These Times is on Bluesky, IG and has a website
From The Periphery is on Patreon, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, and has a website
Transcriptions: Transcriptions are done by Antidote Zine and will be published on The Fire These Times' transcript archive.
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).