Return to Bandung Colonizing Kashmir with Hafsa Kanjwal
In this episode, I’m joined by Hafsa Kanjwal, Professor of South Asian History at Lafayette College and author of Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023), to discuss the long and complex history of colonization and resistance in Kashmir. We explore how the rights and agency of the Kashmiri people have been denied for decades by the Indian state’s settler-colonial project, how Kashmiris have resisted settler logics of assimilation and erasure, and what a genuinely liberated future for Kashmir might look like.
Return to Bandung is hosted by Pranay Somayajula, an Indian-American writer, researcher, and organizer based in Washington, D.C. His work explores themes of diaspora, (inter)nationalism, anticolonial politics, and the many lives and afterlives of empire. You can learn more about Pranay and read his writing on his website, as well as on his Substack blog, culture shock.
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Sources and helpful links:
Hafsa Kanjwal — Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation (Stanford University Press, 2023)
Stand With Kashmir — The Kashmir Syllabus
Stand With Kashmir — Militarization, Surveillance, and Silencing: The 75th Year of Indian Occupation in Kashmir (May 2023)
Pranay Somayajula — Holiday in Kashmir (The New Internationalist, November 2023)
From Domicile to Dominion: India’s Settler Colonial Agenda in Kashmir (Harvard Law Review, May 2021)
Leoni Connah — ‘Everyone lives in fear’: trapped between two warring nuclear giants, the people of Kashmir continue to suffer (The Conversation, May 2025)
Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons and Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society — Torture: Indian State’s Instrument of Control in Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir (February 2019)
Nusaybah and Asfur — “We Know Where You Live” How to See the Surveillance in Kashmir (Verfassungsblog, December 2022)
Mir Aiyaz — Kashmir’s residents are living under the watchful eye of surveillance (Index on Censorship, May 2025)
Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons — Half Widow, Half Wife?: Responding to Gendered Violence in Kashmir (July 2011)
Human Rights Watch — Getting Away With Murder 50 Years of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (August 2008)
Arundhati Roy — Come September (September 2002)
Social links:
Return to Bandung:
Twitter: twitter.com/returntobandung
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/returntobandung/
Pranay Somayajula:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/p_somayajula
Website: https://www.pranaysomayajula.com/
Substack: https://www.culture-shock.xyz/
Hafsa Kanjwal:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/colonizingkashmir