Title: Pure Kashmir: Nature, Freedom and Counternationalism
Abstract: 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 concurrently champion two nations: ethno-linguistic and almost homogeneous Kashmir, and heterogeneous 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 something 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 twentieth-century thinkers to integrate this disruptive idea of a nonhuman nature into an otherwise historicized sense of nationhood?