Kashmir Specialists
A number of academics, journalists and novelists have written on Kashmir over the last
ten years. The purpose of this page is to alert serious researchers on Kashmir to the
range of writing available to them.
Some of the more notable writers and analysts are:
Victoria Schofield, a British writer and journalist, whose Kashmir in the
Crossfire (1996) is perhaps the most comprehensive work of history on Kashmir.
Her study is unusual in that it allows different stakeholders in Kashmir to speak for
themselves, rather than pushing her own opinions. Unusually her book is available in
both India and Pakistan in the same edition. In January 2000 she published Kashmir
in Conflict, a substantially revised and updated book on Kashmir.
In March 2003 a further, revised edition of the book was published.
Sumit Ganguly, an American
professor. He has written one
book exclusively on Kashmir, The Crisis in Kashmir (1997), as well as a series of
articles on Kashmir. He has also written books that cover the three Indo-Pak wars
that also include material on Kashmir. His 1997 study is the sharpest work from the
social sciences on Kashmir.
Alastair Lamb, a British academic. Lamb has now written three closely
researched books on Kashmir, all of which mainly deal with events surrounding 1947.
His line is that the accession of Kashmir to India has always been questionable, and that
original archival evidence has often been ignored.
Balraj Puri, the veteran Jammu-based journalist, has written a series of books
on Kashmir. He remains one of the best Kashmiri sources on politics in the state.
He is also the leading specialist on Jammu.
Robert Wirsing, an American academic, has written and edited several books on
Kashmir. His India, Pakistan and the Kashmir Dispute (1996) remains a core
text for students of Kashmir. His latest book on Kashmir
came out in early 2003.
Reeta Choudhary Tremblay has written some interesting academic articles on
Kashmir.
Noor Ahmed Baba, professor of politics at the University of Kashmir, is writing articles on
Kashmiri politics.
Rekha Chowdhary, professor of politics at the
University of Jammu, is writing on Kashmir and now
leads the new centre for strategic and regional studies in Jammu.
Navnita Chadha Behera, based at Delhi
University, published a major study
of Kashmir - State, Identity and Violence (Manohar 2000).
She is now working on a book for the Brookings Institute
Press on Kashmir. She is one of the best analysts of
Jammu/Kashmir/Ladakh relations.
Brian Cloughley, formerly Deputy Chief of UN Observer Group to India and
Pakistan (UNMOGIP), has written a series of interesting articles on Kashmir and Siachen.
He has also penned a book on the Pakistan army.
Surinder Singh Oberoi, of Star TV, and the former AFP bureau chief in Srinagar, has
written extensively on contemporary Kashmir (and has helped many of us who came in from
outside to get to grips with current issues).
Mridu Rai, at Yale, has just published an extraordinarily good
book on Kashmir, looking at history, society and politics in the 19th and
20th centuries. She is one of the (very) few academics to have
conducted significant archival work within Jammu and Kashmir itself, and
this shows.
Chandralekha Zutshi, at William and Mary College in the US, is an
academic who has arrived on the scene with an equally excellent study.
Like Mridu Rai, she has worked inside Kashmir on archival materials, and her
book (published in 2003) also breaks new ground in discussing Kashmir's
past.
Braj B. Kachru is a professor at the University of Illinois, and a
specialist on the Kashmiri language. He has written a guide for learners of Koshur
(Kashmiri) as a second language.
James Buchan, who wrote a perceptive piece in a 1997 edition of Granta magazine
on Kashmir.
Sumantra Bose has written two books and various articles on Kashmir, and
is a postdoctoral fellow at the LSE. He has also
written interesting articles on Kashmir in Survival and elsewhere. He
has just published a second book on the Kashmir issue,
which came out with Harvard University Press in 2003.
He has written about the Kashmir conflict in a comparative light.
Amitabh Mattoo, a Kashmiri,
is vice-chancellor of Jammu University.
He has written a series of incisive articles on Kashmir, and remains one of the
most interesting Indian commentators on the issue.
Roger Ballard, an academic in Manchester, is a specialist on Azad
Jammu & Kashmir, and has published on the Kashmiri diaspora in Britain.
He is now working extensively on Hawala.
Patti Gossman is a specialist on human rights in Kashmir.
Joseph Schwartzberg,
University of Minnesota, is a geographer and specialist in South Asia, and has produced
maps for the Kashmir Study Group and others.
Vernon Hewitt, a British academic at the University of Bristol. Hewitt
published a book in 1995 on Kashmir, which was updated recently. He is
a political scientist who has written on ethnicity and identity in Kashmir.
His 1997 History Today article is a useful backgrounder to the
Kashmir conflict.
Tahir Amin, a Pakistani academic at Quaid-i-Azam University.
His Mass Uprising in Kashmir (1995) is a classic statement of a Pakistani
perspective on Kashmir.
Gul Mohd Wani, an academic at Kashmir University (Srinagar) who
has written several books on Kashmiri politics.
His PhD is on Kashmiri identity - one of the few PhDs on Kashmiri
internal politics.
Tavleen Singh is an Indian journalist. Her Kashmir: A
Tragedy of Errors is a useful political study of Kashmir into militancy.
Tariq Ali, the journalist and writer, is writing a book on the Kashmir
issue. He recently contributed a major piece on Kashmir to the London Review of
Books.
Khem Warikoo, an academic at JNU New Delhi whose books on languages in Kashmir
are of interest.
Kanti Bajpai, another academic at JNU New Delhi whose international relations
articles on Kashmir are thoughtful and constructive.
Manoj Joshi, political editor of the Times of India.
His Kashmir: The Lost Rebellion (1999) is a rich empirical study of Kashmir based on
extensive Indian sources.
Praveen Swami, an Indian journalist, whose book The Kargil War
and whose articles in Frontline provide a critical account from the left of
Indian politics. He is one of the few specialists
working on the rural areas of Jammu region. His book is
particularly informative about the communal aspects of militancy in Jammu
region - almost a different conflict to that in the Valley.
Cabeiri deBergh Robinson is a PhD. candidate in socio-cultural
anthropology at Cornell University. Since 1995, she has served for one year as an
Urdu interpreter for the ICRC in Jammu and Kashmir and has spent 3 years conducting
research on the social, cultural, and political history of the settlement of Kashmiri
refugees in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and Pakistan. She is currently writing her dissertation
under the working title The Formation of Cultural and Political
Identities in a Disputed Territory: Refugees, Migrants, Violent Histories, and National
Memory in Azad Jammu & Kashmir.
Sten Widmalm, a
professor at Uppsala
University, Sweden, wrote a PhD on Kashmiri politics and writes on Kashmir.
His PhD has since been published.
Prem Shankar Jha has written a book on Kashmir, Kashmir
1947, that presents the Indian case as to why Jammu & Kashmir acceeded to India
in October 1947.
Sanna Malik has completed a PhD on Kashmir at the University of Hull
and now teaches in Pakistan.
Ershad Mahmud, Research Coordinator at the Institute for Policy
Studies, Islamabad, has been writing on Kashmir. He is one of the few
Pakistani analysts of Kashmir to have visited the Kashmir Valley.
Raspal Khosa is completing a PhD on Kashmiriyat at the Australian National
University.
John Cockell is currently working for the United Nations, but is also
completing a PhD at the London School of Economics. He has published a range of
articles on Kashmiri politics.
Matthew Webb is completing a PhD on Kashmir at the Australian National
University.
Jeffrey Kile is finishing a PhD thesis on Kashmiri diaspora politics at
Berkeley, California. In 2003 he took over as
editor of jammukashmir.net.
Yogi Sikand, based at the University of London, has written a series
of articles and pamphlets on contemporary Kashmir. In particular he has worked on
Jamaat-i-Islami (J&K). He can be contacted on ysikand@hotmail.com.
Gowhar A. Fazili is a research student in politics at the University
of Kashmir, and an environmental activist. He is doing some work on the
development
of civil society in Kashmir, and presently working on Political Ecology of Dal Lake.
Alexander Evans is a specialist who
has mainly worked on the contemporary politics of Kashmir. Formerly a
fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs, his latest
publications include a book chapter on Kashmiri identity (in a T.N.Madan and
Aparna Rao collection, 2003) along with pieces in Foreign Policy and
Contemporary South Asia.
Amelie Blom is a
Ph. D candidate at the
Institut d'Etudes de Paris (Institute of Political Studies, Paris or
Sciences-Po.). Her thesis is on "Pakistan's
Policy towards Kashmir, 1947-2002". She was a
"Visiting Teaching and Research Fellow" at the Lahore University of
Management Sciences (LUMS), Social Sciences Dept, from
2000-2002. She has published articles on
Pakistan's policy towards Kashmir and decision-making, and
on the Kargil crisis, in French magazines and in
Jaffrelot (Christophe) ed., Pakistan, Nationalism Without a Nation ?, New
Delhi, Manohar/CSH, 2002.
Syed Andrabi, a Kashmiri now resident in the UK, continues to write
articles on politics in contemporary Kashmir.
Subhash Kak, who teaches at Louisiana State University, is a Kashmiri
who has written poetry and articles on Kashmir.
Dipankar Banerjee,
a former General in the Indian army (and Indian Army commander in Kashmir),
was working on counter-insurgency in Kashmir at the US Institute of Peace
(2002-2003). He is now at the RCSS in Colombo.
Oliver Uhrig is a
German researcher working on
Kashmir. He is completing a PhD in Germany
on decision making and the impact of militant
ideologies.
Bill Reid, a former UNMOGIP officer now with ANU, is researching the
Dixon mediation on Kashmir. He has already completed a significant amount of
archival work in Australia and the UK.
Usmaan Ahmed is a postgraduate student at the Fletcher school in the United
States, and is also the JKLF (Yasin Malik) representative in the US. A young
American of Kashmiri-origin, he is planning to write a book on Kashmir.
Hassan Abbas, a former Pakistani police officer, wrote his LLM thesis
at University of Nottingham (1999) on Kashmir. Presently he is doing another Masters
at the Fletcher School, and is writing a book on Kashmir with Marco Odello.
Shams Rahman is an activist for the Kashmir National Identity Campaign
(which campaigns for the recognition of Kashmiri identity in Britain). He has
written various pamphlets and completed a Masters thesis on Kashmiri identity at
Manchester University.
Vijay Sazawal, who was born and
educated in Srinagar (J&K), is the International Coordinator of the three
overseas political advocacy organizations of Kashmiri Pandits based in
North America, the U.K. and Europe. He is also the national president of
the Kashmiri Pandit political advocacy group in the U.S. - namely, the
Indo-American Kashmir Forum (IAKF). Dr. Sazawal is a member of the
National Advisory for South Asian Affairs, and the Advisory Group on South
Asia, Brookings Institution. He is an
engineer and lives in the Washington, DC.
Paul Beersmans was
a Belgian UNMOGIP observer in
Kashmir, and since 1994 has been visiting
Jammu and Kashmir annually, reporting to the
Human Rights Commission in Geneva. He has
written a book in Dutch 'Jammu en Kasjmir, het omstreden paradijs' ('Jammu
and Kashmir, the disputed paradise') and is
president of the 'Belgian Association for Solidarity with Jammu and
Kashmir'.
I cannot normally provide contact details for any of the above, but suggest that if
you want to contact them you search for them on the web or write to them at their
institution.
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