Rethinking Kashmir's History from a Borderlands Perspective

Although borders haunt its historical and recent past as well as its contemporary political situation, Kashmir has rarely been theorized as a borderland. This article examines the perspective of borderlands as conceptualized in North American, Asian and African borderlands scholarship. It argues that the application of this perspective - in which borderlands are defined as middle grounds where imperial competition and negotiations among a variety of imperial and indigenous actors led to the production of distinct political cultures - to rethinking Kashmir's history has the potential to liberate the region from the imperatives of national borders that misread its history, while also reinvigorating South Asian borderlands scholarship.