Modern Intellectual History (2021), 1–28 doi:10.1017/S1479244321000470 ARTICLE Pure Kashmir: Nature, Freedom and Counternationalism Amar Sohal* Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge *Corresponding author. E-mail:
[email protected] Bringing political thought to bear upon one of the world’s most pressing geopolitical problems, this article explores Kashmiri engagements with nature and how these served the attempt to con- currently champion two nations: ethno-linguistic and almost homogeneous Kashmir, and hetero- geneous but organic India. Disconnected from human endeavor and, therefore, astonishingly unreliant on other ideas to define Kashmir’s distinctiveness, the idea of natural purity had some- thing in common with the earlier New World nationalisms of colonial white settlers who sought to remake conquered lands. But since Kashmiris had long resisted what they saw as the theft of their beautiful land by more powerful, envious outsiders, how far was it possible for their twen- tieth-century thinkers to integrate this disruptive idea of a nonhuman nature into an otherwise historicized sense of nationhood? Alongside the Israel–Palestine conflict, the legal status of Jammu and Kashmir, located in the far north of the Indian subcontinent, is the oldest unresolved matter before the United Nations. Immediately after independence and Partition in August 1947, the Indian Union and Pakistan found themselves locked in battle over this erstwhile princely state. Under colonial rule, the nominally sovereign princely states, unlike the Raj’s directly administered provinces, were governed by local kings within the ambit of British suzerainty. Spread out across the country, together these various pol- ities were home to one Indian in every four.