by MAHEEN AZMAT
Colonial travelogues and Hindu nationalist narratives have long cast Kashmiri Muslims as perpetual outsiders in their own land.
Kashmir has long occupied a curious space in the European imagination. For centuries, travellers, merchants, and colonial administrators produced narratives that constructed this Himalayan valley as a mythical ‘Paradise of the Indies’ — a land of extraordinary beauty whose inhabitants, strangely, were deemed unworthy of it.
This paradox, celebrating the land while denigrating its people, did not die with colonialism. It found new life in the ideological project of Hindu nationalism, which has weaponised these orientalist tropes to justify the ongoing colonisation of India-Kashmir and the systematic othering of its Muslim majority.
The question of who belongs in Kashmir, and who gets to define it, has never been merely academic. It is a question written in blood, displacement, and the language of competing nationalisms.
Annexed by India in 1947 through the contested Instrument of Accession, Jammu and Kashmir was granted ‘special status’ under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, a status effectively dismantled in 2019 amid heavily militarised conditions.
Today, as New Delhi strips Indian Illegally Occupied Jammu and Kashmir of its autonomy and Bollywood produces films that either sanitise or demonise Kashmiri Muslims, tracing the genealogy of these representations becomes an urgent political task.
The colonial gaze and the ‘paradise’ myth
European fascination with Kashmir began with travellers like François Bernier, a French physician who accompanied Aurangzeb’s entourage to the valley in the 17th century. Bernier likened Kashmir’s mountains to Mount Olympus and its meadows to European gardens, “enamelled with our European flowers and plants, and covered with our apple, pear, plum”. The language of possession — ‘our’ fruits in ‘their’ land — reveals the European impulse to claim Kashmir as a distant reflection of itself, a space of familiarity amid the strangeness of the Orient.
This fascination with places and people perceived as similar to Europe created a substantial readership for travel writing as a genre. The European identity was affirmed through encounters with distant lands that could be made familiar, comprehensible, and available for appropriation.
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