before he was a historical character. He himself likened his autobiography, Aatish-i-Chinar: Ek Aap Biti, to an extension of Rajatarangini, the twelfthcentury history of Kashmir by Kalhana, with his own life as its main driving force.2 In contemporary Kashmir, no matter how much his legacy is contested, it is within its parameters that Kashmiris continue their struggle to define themselves. As Muhammad Maroof Shah put it in a review of a recent English translation of the autobiography, Abdullah’s life embodies ‘Kashmir’s tragic story—its divided self’, as Kashmiris grapple with the ‘predicament of living in a place that others call paradise but its inhabitants have felt as hell’ and of trying to understand ‘why in this big and beautiful world of God, Kashmiris feel homeless, voiceless and directionless’.3
But as much as it was and continues to be a Kashmiri story, Sheikh Abdullah’s was also a deeply twentieth-century Indian public life. His political ideas were forged in the fire of competing Indian anti-colonial nationalist currents against British rule in Indian provinces and indirectly ruled princely states. He came to nationalism from the perspective of his homeland Kashmir, daring to dream of a free India within which Kashmir and its people could also be free—from authoritarianism and economic exploitation—and maintain their own political and cultural identity. He was hardly alone in these aspirations, which were held by other regional leaders in twentieth-century India, but unlike many of them, he could not resolve the essential differences between his vision for his region-nation and the demands of Indian nationalism, in part because the process of decolonization made it an uphill task. He sincerely believed that there had to be a way to bridge the divides created by the Partition of British India and worked tirelessly towards this possibility. But ultimately, like many others in the subcontinent, he was overwhelmed by the political order dominated by two antagonistic nation states and their nationalist imperatives.
This might also explain why Abdullah, perhaps more than most leaders, evokes such widely divergent reactions—from being adored as a prophet, a guide and a harbinger of freedom, to being condemned as a traitor, a demagogue and an opportunist like no other. Some elderly
Kashmiris born prior to 1947 continue to revere him as a pious, peerless individual and visit his gravesite as they do the shrines of other saints who made Kashmir their home. However, most members of the generation born after 1947—who came of age when he was in prison and were young adults at the time of the 1975 Kashmir Accord—are particularly embittered by what they see as his betrayal of their political dreams, dreams that he himself had fostered. Younger Kashmiris in general have little time for him, in part because they know him only through the region’s rancorous public discourse that holds him responsible for all that plagues Kashmir today. Interestingly, their memory of him is intermeshed with three moments: 1947, when the Indian Army entered Kashmir and began what they see as Kashmir’s long enslavement to India; the 1950 Land Reforms, which they are willing to admit brought some relief from economic exploitation for peasants and to an extent transformed the Kashmiri countryside for the better; and the 1975 Indira–Sheikh Accord, which foreclosed any possibility of Kashmiris being able to exercise the right to self-determination.
In Pakistan, Abdullah continues to be remembered as a leader who dared to take on India on behalf of Kashmiris, although the Kashmiri diaspora has more complicated feelings towards him. For the families who left voluntarily during the tumult of 1947, his memory is frozen in time prior to this moment, as a champion of the rights of the downtrodden Kashmiris. Those who were forced to flee during his first regime due to his repressive policies, on the other hand, hold a deep-seated animosity towards him and remember him as an Indian collaborator despite his later dismissal from office and founding of the plebiscite movement. In India, his memory seems to have faded, and even those who do choose to remember him focus merely on his secular credentials, holding him forward as an exemplary Muslim leader who dared to challenge the two-nation theory.
I was drawn to Abdullah to explore these dissonances in the way that he is remembered compared to his actual political life as a leader of unparalleled stature, but also because his path to leadership and power was unique in many ways. Although he rubbed shoulders with stalwarts such as Muhammad Iqbal, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, he did
not have the family antecedents that they did. He was from a fatherless sarhadi family—from the border between the city and country—considered crude in Kashmir because they were neither cultured and urbane like city folk (shahri) nor simple and honest like the country folk (greez). Nor— unlike Iqbal, Nehru and Gandhi—did his circumstances afford him the opportunity of travelling abroad for an education that would allow him to develop his ideological leanings and political vision. Even when compared to leaders who had a purely vernacular education such as he did, his was not one of immersion in the classics of history, literature and art since he was a science graduate. For all these reasons, Abdullah suffered from a deep sense of insecurity and inferiority throughout his life.
But he had an instinct for people and gravitated towards those with ideas, to whom he listened and from whom he learned. These individuals—Iqbal, Nehru, Ghulam Ahmad Ashai, Prem Nath Bazaz, B.P.L. Bedi, Mirza Afzal Beg, Bakshi Ghulam Muhammad, Ghulam Muhammad Sadiq, Chaudhuri Ghulam Abbas, Muhammad Sayyed Masoodi, Mridula Sarabhai and Jayaprakash Narayan, to name a few—became critical to his political education, and in a sense, defined his political persona. Gradually, with their help, he became a professional politician adept at drawing on multiple ideologies to shape a narrative around himself, one that he honed and jealously guarded. He also instinctively understood Kashmir, Kashmiris and what he thought they needed, and that became the singular ideology that directed him throughout the vagaries of his political life. He had enormous courage, which made him stand up for Kashmiris and stand out among an entire generation of Kashmiri youths who aspired to leadership. He was a regional leader who made a profound impact on the national stage, determined as he was to negotiate with the centre on behalf of Kashmir.
NATIONALISM, SOVEREIGNTY AND SECULARISM
Abdullah’s life compels us to understand Kashmir not simply through the lens of the territorial sovereignties of India and Pakistan, both of which claimed the region for the accomplishment of their respective nationalist projects. This is because he asserted an independent sovereignty for
postcolonial period as it went from being an insurgent, anti-establishment political entity to becoming the party in power. When in power, Abdullah was no different than many postcolonial subcontinental leaders whose regimes were defined by corruption, repression and nepotism. In the case of his government, which became synonymous with the NC, these ills were amplified because J&K was the centre of an international dispute. Abdullah’s enduring popularity as the most significant leader of Kashmiris through a large part of the twentieth century is understood best through the lens of two themes that defined his political career: prison and sacred spaces. In a literal sense, prison punctuated his political life multiple times: He spent a total of 16 years, 6 months and 22 days as a prisoner either of the princely Dogra state or the J&K state within independent India that followed it. In the early years of his entry into politics, prison catapulted him to fame among the masses as a fearless opponent of a tyrannical regime, eventually earning him the mantle of the leader of the Kashmiri Muslims. He made prison-going into a political act, an act of self-sacrifice to gain freedom for the people, until he himself became head of J&K and began to place his own opponents behind bars. His plummeting popularity was instantly restored as soon as he was dismissed in 1953 and made a political prisoner again, allowing him to reprise his role as revolutionary leader of the movement for Kashmiri self-determination.
During these years, he was not a typical prisoner living out his sentences in a jail cell, but placed either in a special jail constructed for the purpose of housing him or under house arrest in bungalows with a fair bit of freedom of movement. But he was not allowed to express his views on Kashmir or, in later years when he was housed outside J&K, visit his homeland, making him an exile in a country he refused to acknowledge as his own. Despite several opportunities to take on leadership positions within India and of Indian Muslims, he did not widen his field of vision beyond Kashmir, thus remaining, in a sense, a prisoner of the Valley and his own ambitions for and within it. Kashmir was his political capital, which he expended throughout his career. He refused to recognize any equals in Kashmir, eliminating anyone who stood in his path, even if that
meant turning on people and, in the process, losing countless friends, colleagues and advisors along the way. He was the sole leader of Kashmiris and a Kashmiri Muslim himself, nothing more, nothing less.
While prison allowed Abdullah to gain a following, Kashmir’s shrines and mosques provided the opportunity to cement his position as leader. Abdullah had a keen sense of Kashmiri politics and the practice of Islam in Kashmir, both of which he knew were connected and rooted in its sacred spaces. He could not hope to challenge the more established religious leadership and become the unrivalled leader of Kashmiri Muslims unless he gained control over these spaces, and by extension the localities surrounding them. He accomplished this systematically, by deftly exploiting the late nineteenth-century schism over the definition of Islam between the families of the two head preachers of the city. Through his fiery and melodious multilingual oratory, he expressed his support for shrine worship, combining it with rhetoric on justice and freedom from oppression and exploitation for the masses. In a matter of a few years, his popularity had reached such heights that not many dared challenge him. For Kashmiris, he was far more than a mere political leader—he was their saviour, a messiah, an image that he, too, at some level identified with. So intertwined did his image become with shrines that he had the audacity to rebuild in marble the wooden structure of Hazratbal—the holiest of Kashmir’s shrines—when his popularity was at a low ebb in the 1970s, rendering it into an indestructible symbol of Kashmiri identity and sovereignty.
Kashmir’s distinctive identity and sovereignty could only truly be preserved, Abdullah believed, in the idea of the Kashmir nation, of which he became a faithful proponent. His narrative of Kashmiri nationalism carefully threaded together elements from Kashmir’s narrative culture, such as its focus on Kashmir as sacred space, with elements from Indian nationalism that emphasized transcending religious and sectarian divides in the name of united nationalism. From the pulpits of Kashmir’s shrines, Abdullah exhorted Kashmiris to think beyond religious community and envision the nation as a form of community that included multiple religious groups, all of which were suffering equally under authoritarian
rule and economic exploitation. The only way to free the nation was for all groups to embrace secularism and join hands under the umbrella of the nationalist movement.
The multiple contradictions within this narrative haunted Abdullah’s career and Kashmir’s political trajectory in the twentieth century. Although he claimed to speak for the entire state of J&K, Abdullah’s vision for the Kashmiri nation did not go beyond the Kashmir Valley. Key parts of the state—Jammu and Ladakh—were left out of its ambit, with their people never quite getting over their belief that Abdullah’s nationalism came at their expense. And while Kashmir’s minorities joined the movement, they were never quite convinced that Abdullah’s turn towards nationalism and secularism was genuine, since he always presented himself as a devoted Muslim who believed in Islam as the sole means of spiritual salvation. But it was also Islam that, as he noted in a speech in 1933, taught him to fight for the rights of all his countrymen, regardless of their religious affiliation, and to protect the honour of his Hindu mothers and sisters just as he would the honour of his Muslim mothers and sisters. ‘I am Muslim,’ he said, ‘but I see Hindus and Muslims with the same eye in worldly affairs and want them to live and work together happily.’4 His secularism, thus, was drawn from Islam.
At the same time, while he genuinely believed that Kashmir would prosper only if all communities were included in the task of building a free society, at some level, Abdullah continued to feel that Muslims deserved special treatment because of the discrimination and abuse that they suffered in the past at the hands of the state and its officialdom. After all, his Kashmiri Muslim base felt the same way too; his supporters were willing to accept secularism to the extent of protecting and including minorities but not necessarily by sacrificing their own interests—for instance, by sharing government employment with Hindus or, indeed later, by supporting India.
As a result, Abdullah’s relationship to secularism and particularly the minority community of Kashmiri Pandits remained fraught. At a personal level, he worked closely with several Pandits, many of whom were a critical part of the movement itself and then part of his administration.
But the community as a whole, he always thought, could be more amenable to thinking beyond its own interests to those of the nation as a whole. And since for most Pandits there could be no compromise on Kashmir as an integral part of India, Abdullah came to believe that they had played a key role in his dismissal from office in 1953. One of his Pandit compatriots, Kashyap Bandhu, described Abdullah years later as a man whose ‘conscience was Muslim, his heart was Kashmiri, and his brain was secular’.5
Abdullah’s life story is thus a thoroughly Kashmiri, quintessentially Indian and essentially global one that illuminates the struggles of one regional leader to balance the demands of his region with those of the nation state, the demands of his faith with those of nationalism, and the demands of his personal convictions with those of his critics.
WRITING A LIFE
Writing a life history is a delicate and complicated task, made especially so in Abdullah’s case because his legacy is so contested in the present. But that is also what makes his individual life such a critical prism through which to understand the intertwined histories of twentieth-century Kashmir and India, along with the ambiguities and inconsistencies in their national projects. As Daniel R. Meister has suggested, historical biography has the ability to ‘strike a balance’ between larger historical processes and ‘the reality of people’s complex, contradictory, and messy lives’,6 foregrounding neither and thus making a deeper contribution to sociopolitical and cultural history.
This biography, accordingly, probes the ways in which Abdullah’s life—along with the lives of many other individuals who surrounded him—interacted with, was influenced by and in turn shaped historical events, processes and ideologies in the twentieth century. It is as much a biography of Abdullah as that of a generation, of national ideas and of the two states, in particular India, that emerged from the debris of the British Empire in South Asia. At the same time, it addresses a gaping lacuna in the scholarship on late colonial and postcolonial India, which shies away from biographies in general—other than of figures such as Nehru,
The narrative’s translations and reprintings too have appeared at critical moments to rehabilitate Abdullah’s political image, and along with it that of his party, the NC. Khushwant Singh’s abridged English translation, Flames of the Chinar: An Autobiography, was published in 1993, at the height of the Kashmir insurgency against the Indian state.9 The second official edition in Urdu was published in 2007, as the NC prepared to take on its rival, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), in the 2008 state assembly elections. A complete English translation by Mohammad Amin, entitled The Blazing Chinar: Autobiography, appeared in 2013, when the J&K government headed by Abdullah’s grandson, Omar Abdullah, was facing angry street protests led by Kashmiri Muslim youth at its handling of a series of misdemeanours by the Indian Army in the Valley. Abdullah was not an intellectual or an ideologue, but he surrounded himself with individuals who were deeply committed to particular ideologies. Hence, I was able to make up for the paucity of his writings by sifting through the private collections and interview transcripts of the individuals who had a profound impact on shaping his political career. This allowed me to write his life not simply through his own lens, but through the eyes of his close colleagues and friends. In the process, it revealed hitherto unknown facets of the personalities and political lives of these individuals as well. The documents of Bazaz, Munshi Ishaq, Balraj Puri, Nehru, Jayaprakash Narayan, T.N. Kaul, Y.D. Gundevia, N.N. Raina, and Mridula Sarabhai proved particularly useful in this regard. The post-1947 Jawaharlal Nehru papers, housed at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library—that had remained closed for decades and which I was fortunate enough to be given permission to access—were a revelation in terms of Abdullah’s relationships with a number of key individuals, especially at sensitive moments of his political life, and their role in shaping the history of Kashmir and India.
Since Abdullah was in politics for decades and so closely identified with the Kashmiri people, there were many others whose lives he touched, including his staff, lower-level NC functionaries who formed the backbone of the party and ordinary Kashmiris who had been caught up in the fervour of the movement. I was able to interview many of these
people who had come of age during Abdullah’s time, or their descendants, all of whom were quite willing to share, along with a cup of tea, their memories of their own and their elders’ relationships and interactions with Abdullah. Many had collections of documents that, along with their reminiscences, proved invaluable in constructing a multifaceted picture of his life. These conversations took me across the Valley, and to Jammu, Delhi, Mumbai and Lahore.
Abdullah was keenly sensitive at all times to his public image, particularly as presented in the press. The Urdu-language press in the Punjab had played a key role in promoting the Kashmiri movement and him as its sole leader in the 1930s. Throughout the 1940s, the British Indian press kept tabs on the ups and downs of the Kashmir movement and its leader. In the immediate post-Independence period, he became engaged in a battle with the Pakistani press, which took it upon itself to malign his name because of his support for J&K’s accession to India. But his longest-running feud was with the Indian press, which lasted through most of his career in the post-1947 period, in many ways shaping Abdullah’s relationship to the Indian public and the government. These press reports, as well as Abdullah’s attempts at regaining control over the narrative at key moments, are a rich source for understanding multiple aspects of his relationships with a cross section of individuals, institutions and political entities during his career.
Most regional leaders from the subcontinent could not boast the extent of international coverage—both from the press and government agencies—that Abdullah was subject to for the obvious reason that Kashmir was a disputed region. These detailed reports and dispatches in newspapers, magazines and from the US Department of State and intelligence agencies such as the CIA were critical in providing fresh insights into Abdullah and his associates, and others such as Prime Minister Nehru, from an external perspective. They highlighted how Abdullah and those around him were perceived in the global arena at critical moments, particularly in the context of developing Indo-US/ US-Pakistani relations and the Cold War. Abdullah’s interactions with the foreign journalists, diplomats, political operatives and visitors who
generated these reports add yet another layer to the complex mix that fashioned his political personality.
I also had access to the voluminous secondary literature on Kashmir generated mostly after the beginning of the insurgency in J&K, which at some level deals with Abdullah and his legacy. But the books I found most helpful were published in Pakistan in the 1960s and ’70s by individuals who had themselves been involved in Kashmir’s political scene prior to Independence and Partition and continued to play a significant role in the politics of the part of Kashmir in Pakistan. Sardar Ibrahim Khan’s The Kashmir Saga and Muhammad Yusuf Saraf’s Kashmiris Fight—For Freedom , 10 although far from scholarly, provide a textured picture of Abdullah’s personality and his interactions with his peers and the masses, especially during the early years of his political life. These books give us a sense of Abdullah before he became a towering political personality, and the tumultuous political climate teeming with jostling ideas and individuals through which he emerged as one. When read alongside his own autobiography, these works as well as the autobiographies of his peers, such as Ghulam Abbas’s Kashmakash, 11 were instrumental in providing a multidimensional view of Abdullah’s political temperament.
As noted earlier, there are far fewer biographies written of Abdullah, both in English and Urdu, than one would expect, given how important he was to the twentieth-century history of Kashmir and the subcontinent. Those that do exist are unidimensional and mostly brief studies of his political career, usually with a particular partisan objective in mind; many are based almost entirely on previously published sources, most often on an indiscriminating reading of his autobiography. Few delve deeply into Abdullah’s political mind or the minds of the individuals who were the driving forces in his life. As a result, these biographies are more helpful in terms of understanding how certain groups perceived Abdullah and created a narrative around him at specific moments than in gleaning any significant information about his life. The Urdu biographies, published in Pakistan and dating mostly from the 1960s, are concerned with keeping Abdullah’s memory alive during the years of his long incarceration.12 The more recent biographies, both in Urdu and English, published mainly in