ABSTRACT
Peasant studies have received very little attention in the academic writings on Kashmir. The available writings reinforce the familiar notion that Kashmiri peasants rallied behind their leader Sheikh Abdullah during his struggle for rights against the Dogra princely regime in the 1940s. The struggle is often portrayed as the awakening of “national” consciousness among the Kashmiris and is supposed to have reached its culmination in 1947 when Kashmir was freed from the “oppressive” Dogra rule, leading to the empowerment of peasants through the promised land reforms initiated by the Abdullah government in the post-1947 period. However, the struggle for political rights in Kashmir continued to sustain well beyond 1947 as the slogans of haq-e-khudiradiat and rai-shumari became rife, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, from the available sources it seems the peasants were more status quoist and less invested in these struggles that sought Kashmir’s accession with Pakistan or desired an independent state of Kashmir. Their political imagination and involvement in Kashmir appears to have been rather non-ideological and shaped and mediated by their immediate concerns and everyday relationship to land. In general, as a political sentiment but more so as a political blue print, the “national” in Kashmir appears to have been insufficiently imagined.
