Aside from popular conventions in how we would transliterate words from one language into another, no corresponding practise exists for the Pahari language spoken throughout the so-called 'Azad' or the 'Free' Territory of Pakistan Controlled Jammu & Kashmir. Usually Pahari expressions, phrases, and words are transliterated into English through Urdu, a separate language from the North Indian Plains. Pahari...
Competing ‘State Identities’ & Ethnic Ambiguities
In the absence of a genuine Pakistani state or nation-state identity what are Azad Kashmiris?
It is at this point that we enter the quagmire of the Kashmiri identity dialectic which in the UK some pro-independence actors from Azad Kashmir have been pushing as the ‘Kashmiri National Identity Campaign’. These individuals are extremely sincere and...
Mainland Pakistanis
By the term, mainland Pakistanis, I am strictly referring to Pakistanis from areas that constitutionally make up the territory of Pakistan. I am not speaking of nationality laws that apply to the citizens of Pakistan, but rather a defined area that is internationally recognised as the ‘Islamic Republic of Pakistan’. Collectively, the four Provinces of Pakistan, its Tribal...
“Pakistan and India are fighting over Kashmir, a third people's land! One way to win this fight is by splitting the Kashmiris into different groups, ethnicities, religions, castes, social groups, languages. When people are divided, or adopt the identities of the Occupiers naively, the Occupiers always win. Indians and Pakistanis celebrate their own unity, cynically. But Jammu & Kashmir...
A lot of us confuse our 'countries', and the technical term for what I'm describing is 'nation states', with ideas of historical continuity. We tend to confuse our countries delineated by their map-depicted borders as being the product of a natural timeline that connects all past events with contemporary ones. This view of our past is false.
Nation states are...
The term ‘cultural sphere‘ can be used in different contexts. At the core of the idea is the notion that a culture can be shared between people living in a clearly demarcated territory. There are three ingredients that I would like to explore in this article, 'culture', 'ethnolinguisticgroup' and 'region'. These three ingredients are vital to identifying a 'cultural sphere' that can...
What do we mean by the term ‘cultural heritage’?
For my British Kashmiri readers, I have compiled a series of short posts to educate them about their cultural heritage, as a means of showing them that modern identities have never been around since time immemorial. Identities are the product of complex processes and can become contested; they may work for...
People everywhere want to learn something about their past. I did too. I was born in the UK. The first member of my direct family to come here was my maternal grandad. He was a veteran of the British Indian Army. Terms can be misleading, so I should point out that he was from the erstwhile Kashmir State, and...
A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting with some local guys consuming copious amounts of alcohol to the backdrop of a varied playlist, and it dawned upon me that my opposite number were unaware of the caste titles they were fondly using as an address of endearment. “Chaudhry” this, “Rajah” that, these were the sorts of titles thrown about...
Some years ago, Saudi Arabia proscribed its male citizens from marrying the citizens of four nationalities. Pakistanis were included on this list. The Monarchy had its reasons, no doubt, good or bad; the preponderance of such marriages was given as the primary reason. Apparently, marriages were an automatic gateway of conferring Saudi citizenship on foreign nationals – women to be...
