ABSTRACT
Engaging with the broader issues of transnationalism and homeland politics in postcolonial South Asia, this paper explores how Kashmiri transnational actors imagined freedom in the global arenas and shaped the politics of the homeland. The focus is primarily on the decades of the 1960s and 1970s when the anti-colonial struggles across Africa and Asia shaped transnational solidarities and mobilized British Kashmiris to shape their political claims in the image of the worldwide political movements for self-determination in the twentieth century. This paper argues that the long-distance nationalism of Kashmiri emigrant groups provided Kashmir visibility in the international arena. Kashmiris in Britain also found the space to challenge and replicate the territorial nationalism of both nation-states and to claim that Kashmiris should have the right to choose independence for the entire state.
