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As Kashmir\u2019s unofficial poet laureate, Agha Shahid Ali often spoke, in his writings, to both the region\u2019s complicated history and its more recent political quagmire. His words captured the ways in which the ethnic and religious divides that have shaped its past are now amplified by the presence of both Indian and Pakistani military forces. Ali also illustrated the ways in which communal religious tensions have increasingly turned neighbours into strangers and childhood friends into enemies. Kashmir, a once princely state, is now marred by conflict and politically divided among Pakistan, India, and China. The dispute over its statehood is now over seventy years old and the region, as Indian writer Arundhati Roy points out, is the scene of \u201cone of the deadliest and densest military occupations in the world.\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Arundhati Roy, \u201cHow to Think About Empire,\u201d interview by Avni Sejpal, Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, January 3, 2019, https:\/\/bit.ly\/2seWerg.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My own family history is deeply embedded in the grand narrative of Partition and Kashmir\u2019s history. Leading up to the upheaval, my maternal grandparents lived in the summer capital of Srinagar, and they bore the memories of slain relatives and communal violence for the rest of their lives. For years after Partition, my grandmother actively searched for her missing sister, believing that she had survived a massacre (one of the dozens that occurred at that time), to no avail. The loss of female relatives is a common, yet not widely known, historical aspect of Partition. In recent years, a variety of online and educational institutions have documented such family histories across the subcontinent; most notably, the 1947 Partition Archive<\/em> has recorded, to date, approximately 5,500 individual narratives on its website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The toll of Partition and subsequent territorial wars on Kashmiris has continued to be unbearable. In Kashmir\u2019s recent history, 2018 was the deadliest year, with 530 dead and thousands more blinded by pellets shot by the Indian army. Kashmiri journalist Majid Maqbool notes, \u201cThe conflict is sought to be managed from the central government in New Delhi, that dispatches interlocutors to hold meetings, buy some time, and talk to people, regional parties, and groups in Kashmir without making any headway towards a meaningful dialogue.\u201d^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Majid Maqbool, \u201cFor Young Kashmiris, Idea of Peace is Pause Between Killings and Encounters,\u201d The Globe Post, January 3, 2019, https:\/\/theglobepost.com\/2019\/01\/03\/kashmir-young-generation\/.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kashmir was annexed to India by the British in 1947, and a referendum on self-determination has long eluded Kashmiris. Conflict has been the primary lens through which Kashmir and its culture have been understood since the cataclysm of the Partition. As historian Chitralekha Zutshi writes, \u201cRepresentations of Kashmir\u2026 are the product of an ongoing exchange between the past and the present, myth and history, memory and forgetting, and the visual, oral and textual; they are also, as much, a product of an ongoing dialogue between self-representation and representations by outsiders.\u201d^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Chitralekha Zutshi, \u201cIntroduction: New Directions in the Study of Kashmir,\u201d in Kashmir: History, Politics and Representations, ed. Chitraleka Zutshi (London: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 12.<\/span> It is perhaps the representations by outsiders\u200a\u2014\u200aoften rooted in larger colonial projects or the interests of nationalism\u200a\u2014\u200athat continue to permeate across the globe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A number of Canadian contemporary artists have grappled with the conflict in Kashmir and Partition in South Asia, with some focusing on Partition and its lasting legacy, others on the Kashmir issue. A few major exhibitions, such as Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive<\/em> Space<\/em> (2012), have directly confronted the issue of Partition; many others look at national perspectives with works by artists wrestling with the ethnic, religious, and economic histories of the South Asian subcontinent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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