Since 1947, the valley of Kashmir has become synonymous with a territorial dispute. Such is the emphasis on “territorial integrity” in the mediatized discourse on Kashmir, both in the South Asian subcontinent and the west, that the territorializing of the region is hidden under the self-evident notions of nationalism and statecraft. The political narratives on the contestations of sovereignty in the region assume a nexus between territory, state, and sovereignty at the cost of literary imaginaries. These literary imaginaries offer a space for historical thought to begin re-telling and remaking the topography of Kashmir as an instance of multiple histories, temporalities and human geographies. As some of the Kashmiri writers are celebrated in the canon of global English literature, identified by their representativeness of regional territory, their writing reveals an enquiry into how territorialism happens. By focusing on the key Kashmiri writers of the present, I will argue against the forgetting of issues of migration, an alternative subaltern postcolonial history and the solidification of sub-national orientation. These three axes of my argument intersect at the current reality of the political fragments of Kashmir, drawn across subcontinental nationalisms, which require a new imaginary to even begin describing the immense loss of lives, aspirations, languages and cultures of contact that is the Kashmiri condition since the last century.

Asiya Zahoor hails from Baramulla, Kashmir. She studied Caribbean literature, Kashmiri Literature and Psycholinguistics, at the Universities of Kashmir, Jamia Millia Islmia (New Delhi) and Oxford University (UK). Her research explores the issues of migration, representation, identity and cognitive processes involving language learning. Asiya has translated short stories from Kashmiri to English. Her film, The Stitch, has won the Critics’ Award for the Best Short Film at the South Asian Film Festival and Best Short Film at Third Eye Film Festival, Mumbai. It has been an official selection at several international film festivals, including Roshd International festival in Tehran and Sharam Al Sheikh Festival, Egypt. Asiya has curated a website www.bolbosh.net that aims to document the literatures and languages of Kashmir. Her latest book, Serpents under my Veil (2019) is a collection of critically acclaimed poems. Currently, Asiya is a Sanford Taylor Fellow in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University.