Idrees Kanth - Kashmir: History, Historian and the Archive
Idrees Kanth, a young Kashmiri historian, is currently engaged in research on modern Kashmir history, and also finishing up a course on Archival studies. Idrees is based at the University of Leiden and is also affiliated with the International Institute of Social History (IISH), The Netherlands. Earlier, he was enrolled at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and thereafter gained admission at the Faculty of History, University of Oxford (Brasenose College). Although he was registered for a year at Oxford, due to limited funding opportunities he subsequently moved over to Leiden. He is also part of the editorial team of the Taylor and Francis journal: Politics, Religion and Ideology (Routledge). In an interview with GK Features Editor Majid Maqbool, Idrees, who is currently in Kashmir, talks about his work, the importance of archival research, and the need for various state archives and repositories in Srinagar to organise their records properly and, more importantly, to allow students and researchers to access these records.
"I don’t know how many scholars/people are aware of the fact that the National Archives of India (NAI) does not allow any access to papers on Kashmir beyond 1924. This arbitrary ‘rule’ is justified in the name of security concerns of the Indian state. Aside from the problems it raises with regard to historical research which are obvious, it also goes to show how state control populations and how it shapes societal memory through controlling archives.."
What aspect of modern Kashmir history are you working on?
While my larger field of specialisation and interest is modern South Asia, my doctoral research is on the social and political history of Kashmir in the twentieth century, especially around the questions of community, state and rights. I am also keen on methodological problems (and possibilities) of carrying out archival research in conflict zones like Kashmir where access to archives and records is either restricted, or the records are completely missing from the repositories where they are otherwise expected to be. This stems from my personal experience of carrying out research in Kashmir and Delhi over the last six to seven years.
As a young historian engaged in archival research on Kashmir history how was your research experience especially in the Kashmir archives?
My initial foray into archives and archival research began in 2006 when I was visiting Kashmir from JNU to do some preliminary research on the events of 1931. As would have been obvious for a student of modern history, I went over to the State Archives to check out some old records. The State archives in Kashmir are part of the ‘Department of Archives, Archaeology and Museums’ and are housed in a dilapidated building in the Old Secretariat, Srinagar. As with others who have visited the Srinagar State Archives, it was a very poor experience. In fact I remember the experience was very overwhelming and I felt intensely depressed. However, as is expected of a researcher I kept visiting the department almost regularly for a few months hoping I will be able to look through some useful material. But that was not to be. What was also very surprising was that the ‘Record Room’ at the Srinagar Archives remained perpetually locked. It was only when I came over next summer in 2007 was it briefly opened.
What is the present condition of state archives in Kashmir?
The State Archives are very badly managed. I remember, after I was allowed to enter the Record Rom, when I visited the Archives again in 2007 I was horribly shocked. It seemed nobody had gone inside the room for years together. The roof had caved in and there was pigeon shit everywhere around. In between there were small red and blue boxes scattered around with huge puffs of dust on them. However, I was excited when I saw a few boxes labelled: ‘Ex-Governor Records’. These records deal with the period I was interested in: the early twentieth century. But when I opened a dusted box of 1931 Ex-Governor Records, I was hugely disappointed. The box did not have even a single file on 1931; instead there were various files on road widening etc for different years like 1917 and so on.
What also hurt me a lot was that I could not find the ‘Jia Lal Kaul Jalali’ collection even as I sought help form the staff at the Archives. The collection which had been bequeathed by Mr Jalali to the Srinagar State Archives is an important record on the events of 1931 etc, and which Chitralekha Zutshi had also previously accessed during her research in Kashmir in the mid 1990s. In short even while I kept visiting the Srinagar State Archives almost every year thereafter, there was very little work I could do there. I must also mention that there is not even a single trained archivist at the Srinagar State Archives. Some digitisation activity was going on in Srinagar State Archives last year. However, I am not aware of what they have been able to manage.
What is the importance of archives in historical research?
This is a very important question especially in the context of Kashmir. But before I begin to answer this question I guess we need to ask who an ‘historian’ is, and what is ‘historical research’. While we have seen an enormous amount of writing on various aspects of Kashmir over the last couple of decades, very little of this writing can be called historical scholarship in the academic sense of the term. Though historical production happens in a variety of publics, and there are various ways in which histories are constructed and a consciousness of Past is shaped, professional historians employ particular skills when they reconstruct history. Not only do they access diverse archival sources in a variety of archival repositories, they also employ their academic training to write about a certain period of history.
However, the point is not to emphasise or privilege the ‘academic historian’ and his/her writing as the only legitimate reconstruction of the Past, but to mark the difference between historical scholarship and other kinds of histories that are produced variously and elsewhere.
In Kashmir since we do not seem to appreciate this difference it is often the non-academic (doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, etc) who takes on the task of writing what is generally acknowledged as ‘academic history’. For such people history is all about facts, and the task of the historian is therefore, to resurrect these facts from anywhere. Yet very few of these ‘people’ ever go to the archives or have the training to access and use the archival material. The so called ‘fact’ and its objective representation is but only a small part of what the historian is supposed to do. The historian is a trained professional who employs particular ways — archival research and other skills — to reconstruct the past. Unlike a chronicler who is keen on ‘facts’, the trained historian realises that there is no singular past, but multiple pasts. Historical production, it needs to be emphasised depends upon a variety of factors: the archives we use, the theoretical methods we employ, and importantly enough, our social location. So in many ways it is the dialectic and the dialogic between the historian and his/her archive that produces a particular construction of the Past.
Therefore, not everybody can be a professional historian even while he/she may claim to have read many history books; much like a person cannot be considered a physician or a surgeon only because they have read a lot of books on medicine. Training is a very important part of becoming an academic historian. And as I mentioned above, the training involves visiting the archives, accessing the material available there, and the critical use of this material. At the same time the prospective historian is expected to be well versed in the theoretical knowledge of his/her field of specialisation. In short, while the use of archives is an essential aspect of historical scholarship, the training helps the historian to problematise his archive, and therefore to write a critical narrative of the Past.
So what explains the lack of serious and quality academic writing by Kashmiri academics despite increasing production of other kinds of writing on Kashmir? .. read more:
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/Nov/25/kashmir-history-historian-and-the-archive-6.asp
See also:
S.A. Aiyar: Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre
Govt claims disclosure of Netaji Bose files will affect foreign relations, sovereignty & integrity of India; & cause serious law and order problems, especially W Bengal
Archive of historical documents
Modi says Congress committed 'sin' of partition // The Non-politics of the RSS
Here is the report of the first NDA government's (1998) brazen attempt to 'revise' Gandhi's Collected Works. Hundreds of whimsical deletions and changes were noticed by well-known scholars and Gandhians in India and around the world, who viewed them as an insult to scholarship, and demanded an end to such attempts to play with historical documents. Read the history of the controversy. Tridip Suhrud, now director of Sabarmati Ashram, wrote a detailed analysis of this shameless behaviour in EPW in November 2004. It was only after the defeat of the NDA government that the fraudulently 'revised' edition of the CWMG was withdrawn, in 2005
"I don’t know how many scholars/people are aware of the fact that the National Archives of India (NAI) does not allow any access to papers on Kashmir beyond 1924. This arbitrary ‘rule’ is justified in the name of security concerns of the Indian state. Aside from the problems it raises with regard to historical research which are obvious, it also goes to show how state control populations and how it shapes societal memory through controlling archives.."
What aspect of modern Kashmir history are you working on?
While my larger field of specialisation and interest is modern South Asia, my doctoral research is on the social and political history of Kashmir in the twentieth century, especially around the questions of community, state and rights. I am also keen on methodological problems (and possibilities) of carrying out archival research in conflict zones like Kashmir where access to archives and records is either restricted, or the records are completely missing from the repositories where they are otherwise expected to be. This stems from my personal experience of carrying out research in Kashmir and Delhi over the last six to seven years.
As a young historian engaged in archival research on Kashmir history how was your research experience especially in the Kashmir archives?
My initial foray into archives and archival research began in 2006 when I was visiting Kashmir from JNU to do some preliminary research on the events of 1931. As would have been obvious for a student of modern history, I went over to the State Archives to check out some old records. The State archives in Kashmir are part of the ‘Department of Archives, Archaeology and Museums’ and are housed in a dilapidated building in the Old Secretariat, Srinagar. As with others who have visited the Srinagar State Archives, it was a very poor experience. In fact I remember the experience was very overwhelming and I felt intensely depressed. However, as is expected of a researcher I kept visiting the department almost regularly for a few months hoping I will be able to look through some useful material. But that was not to be. What was also very surprising was that the ‘Record Room’ at the Srinagar Archives remained perpetually locked. It was only when I came over next summer in 2007 was it briefly opened.
What is the present condition of state archives in Kashmir?
The State Archives are very badly managed. I remember, after I was allowed to enter the Record Rom, when I visited the Archives again in 2007 I was horribly shocked. It seemed nobody had gone inside the room for years together. The roof had caved in and there was pigeon shit everywhere around. In between there were small red and blue boxes scattered around with huge puffs of dust on them. However, I was excited when I saw a few boxes labelled: ‘Ex-Governor Records’. These records deal with the period I was interested in: the early twentieth century. But when I opened a dusted box of 1931 Ex-Governor Records, I was hugely disappointed. The box did not have even a single file on 1931; instead there were various files on road widening etc for different years like 1917 and so on.
What also hurt me a lot was that I could not find the ‘Jia Lal Kaul Jalali’ collection even as I sought help form the staff at the Archives. The collection which had been bequeathed by Mr Jalali to the Srinagar State Archives is an important record on the events of 1931 etc, and which Chitralekha Zutshi had also previously accessed during her research in Kashmir in the mid 1990s. In short even while I kept visiting the Srinagar State Archives almost every year thereafter, there was very little work I could do there. I must also mention that there is not even a single trained archivist at the Srinagar State Archives. Some digitisation activity was going on in Srinagar State Archives last year. However, I am not aware of what they have been able to manage.
What is the importance of archives in historical research?
This is a very important question especially in the context of Kashmir. But before I begin to answer this question I guess we need to ask who an ‘historian’ is, and what is ‘historical research’. While we have seen an enormous amount of writing on various aspects of Kashmir over the last couple of decades, very little of this writing can be called historical scholarship in the academic sense of the term. Though historical production happens in a variety of publics, and there are various ways in which histories are constructed and a consciousness of Past is shaped, professional historians employ particular skills when they reconstruct history. Not only do they access diverse archival sources in a variety of archival repositories, they also employ their academic training to write about a certain period of history.
However, the point is not to emphasise or privilege the ‘academic historian’ and his/her writing as the only legitimate reconstruction of the Past, but to mark the difference between historical scholarship and other kinds of histories that are produced variously and elsewhere.
In Kashmir since we do not seem to appreciate this difference it is often the non-academic (doctors, engineers, bureaucrats, etc) who takes on the task of writing what is generally acknowledged as ‘academic history’. For such people history is all about facts, and the task of the historian is therefore, to resurrect these facts from anywhere. Yet very few of these ‘people’ ever go to the archives or have the training to access and use the archival material. The so called ‘fact’ and its objective representation is but only a small part of what the historian is supposed to do. The historian is a trained professional who employs particular ways — archival research and other skills — to reconstruct the past. Unlike a chronicler who is keen on ‘facts’, the trained historian realises that there is no singular past, but multiple pasts. Historical production, it needs to be emphasised depends upon a variety of factors: the archives we use, the theoretical methods we employ, and importantly enough, our social location. So in many ways it is the dialectic and the dialogic between the historian and his/her archive that produces a particular construction of the Past.
Therefore, not everybody can be a professional historian even while he/she may claim to have read many history books; much like a person cannot be considered a physician or a surgeon only because they have read a lot of books on medicine. Training is a very important part of becoming an academic historian. And as I mentioned above, the training involves visiting the archives, accessing the material available there, and the critical use of this material. At the same time the prospective historian is expected to be well versed in the theoretical knowledge of his/her field of specialisation. In short, while the use of archives is an essential aspect of historical scholarship, the training helps the historian to problematise his archive, and therefore to write a critical narrative of the Past.
So what explains the lack of serious and quality academic writing by Kashmiri academics despite increasing production of other kinds of writing on Kashmir? .. read more:
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2013/Nov/25/kashmir-history-historian-and-the-archive-6.asp
See also:
S.A. Aiyar: Declassify report on the 1948 Hyderabad massacre
Govt claims disclosure of Netaji Bose files will affect foreign relations, sovereignty & integrity of India; & cause serious law and order problems, especially W Bengal
Archive of historical documents
Modi says Congress committed 'sin' of partition // The Non-politics of the RSS
Here is the report of the first NDA government's (1998) brazen attempt to 'revise' Gandhi's Collected Works. Hundreds of whimsical deletions and changes were noticed by well-known scholars and Gandhians in India and around the world, who viewed them as an insult to scholarship, and demanded an end to such attempts to play with historical documents. Read the history of the controversy. Tridip Suhrud, now director of Sabarmati Ashram, wrote a detailed analysis of this shameless behaviour in EPW in November 2004. It was only after the defeat of the NDA government that the fraudulently 'revised' edition of the CWMG was withdrawn, in 2005
