A timely and urgent intervention that powerfully demonstrates how postcolonial nation-states mobilize settler colonial forms of sovereignty to generate devastating consequences for Indigenous communities. By situating the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir within a global history of settler colonialism, the book provides a crucial reframing of Indias violent relationship with Kashmir. A landmark in anticolonial and anti-imperial scholarship on the region, Osuri upends conventional understandings of settler sovereignty, self-determination, indigeneity, and climate catastrophes, and offers a portrait of Kashmiri resilience and resistance in the face of collective erasure.
Mona Bhan, co-author of Climate Without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene
This important book uses the analytic of settler/colonialism (a hybrid form of power that straddles settler- and classical colonialisms) to understand how the Indian government uses capital, caste, and military force to impose its colonial power over the regions of Kashmir subjected to frontier violence. Deeply urgent, Settler/Colonialism in Kashmir provides a roadmap to the harrowing forms of power states use to suppress indigenous populations across the world.
Laleh Khalili, author of Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies
In these worst of times, this book commits us to refuse the erasure of Kashmiri history and memory. Not (only) as an act of empathy, but because Kashmir teaches us that it is the concoction of frontiers and imposed catastrophes that builds the horrors of our settler/colonial world. This book is likely to become essential reading for those seeking to understand the emerging formations of our time, but I am afraid of the lessons that we must learn.
Gargi Bhattacharyya, author of The Futures of Racial Capitalism -- .
