Shiv Kunal VermaArticles

A ten-part history · The Sunday Guardian

Kashmir and Ladakh

23 August 2020 to 25 October 2020

Ten articles printed weekly in The Sunday Guardian from August to October 2020. The series starts with the insurgency of the 1990s. It then goes back through the Dogra maharajas, the Sikh Empire and the British to the early history of the Valley and Ladakh. All ten parts are here in full, with the original photographs, the readers’ letters and the PDFs.

10 parts22,716 wordsAbout 1 hr 39 min to read

Begin with Part IAll ten parts
  1. Part I23 August 2020 Nights Without End Four Days with the Hizbul Mujahideen At the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy for Administration in Mussoorie, my film Kashmir: Baramula to Kargil was being screened on the very day the Government of India decided to nullify Article 370 and reconstitute the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories. 10 min read
  2. Part II30 August 2020 The Heaven Born The Men Who Ruled Kashmir There is a road that runs from Roing to Anini in Arunachal Pradesh that goes over the Mayudia pass. 10 min read2 letters
  3. Part III6 September 2020 Puppeteers without Strings The Pied-pipers of Hate One of the questions that seems to haunt Indian academics and intellectuals in particular, to say nothing of the 1.3 billion multitude, is the identity of India itself. 10 min read4 letters
  4. Part IV13 September 2020 Dining at the High Table The Early Military History of Kashmir Time and again one hears the lament that Kashmir somehow evolved as an isolated entity, and hence it must be treated as a special, stand-alone case. 10 min readwith a reply by Shonaleeka Kaul
  5. Part V20 September 2020 The Master Minds Gulab Singh and the ‘Haramzadas’ After having signed a Treaty of Friendship with the British in 1809, Maharaja Ranjit Singh had bought time in an effort to keep the fast growing British Empire at bay. 10 min read1 letter
  6. Part VI27 September 2020 Stones of Silence Ladakh and Beyond The Kiang, or the Tibetan Wild Ass (Equus kiang) whose small herds inhabit the area around Chushul and the Spangur Gap, shows a lot more common sense than the Chinese premier, Xi Jinping when it comes to identifying borders. 10 min read
  7. Part VII4 October 2020 Kingdom of Mountains Dogras and the East India Company The Treaty of Amritsar, between the East India Company and the Dogra ruler, Raja Gulab Singh on 16 March 1846 was a watershed, for it not only created the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir under the suzerainty of the British Indian Empire, it also virtually defined the southern, eastern and western boundaries of a new political creation that elevated the Dogras into being the key players controlling northern India. 10 min read
  8. Part VIII11 October 2020 Cat and Mouse Games The British Empire & the J&K Maharajas I first heard of the Gulabnama, written by Kripa Ram, from Tsering Angdu’s son, Rinchen, who said a copy written in Urdu and wrapped in red makhmal (velvet), had been with the Stakjing family for more than a hundred years if not more. 10 min read
  9. Part IX18 October 2020 A Bipolar Universe Maharaja Hari Singh’s ‘Great Betrayal’ By the time Hari Singh ascended the throne of Jammu and Kashmir, coincidently on his thirtieth birthday on 23 September 1925, he was already marked by the British as a bit of a wild card. 10 min read
  10. Part X25 October 2020 The Islamization of Politics Enter the Lion of Kashmir ‘Papa’ 10 min read