ABSTRACT
In May 1949, India’s then prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wrote to his friend and ally Sheikh Abdullah, the prime minister of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, to warn about one of the Kashmiri leader’s key advisors. This chapter seeks to retrieve something of B. P. L. Bedi’s method in compiling New Kashmir, and his debt in particular to what is an unlikely model for a political dispensation in a princely state, much of which nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas. From the late 1930s, the Bedis were part of an informal group of leftists and progressive intellectuals who spent much of the summer in the Kashmiri capital, Srinagar, away from the punishing heat of the Punjab plains. Kashmir was a princely-ruled autocracy, and prior to the 1930s there were no political parties, no rights of political assembly and few local newspapers in the Kashmir Valley. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad continued to talk of the goal of New Kashmir.
