Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah's Reflections on Kashmir

This book would comprise a collection of his speeches, interviews, and letters to other political personages in South Asia, plus some other material and commentary. The apparatus I will use is an Introduction (5000) plus prefatory setups/abstracts (1500-2000 words) of each item. I am driven to compile and edit his speeches, interviews, and letters from the late 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s by my unquenchable desire to pursue intensive and thorough research on the political history of Kashmir through the lives of principal political actors, which is a work in progress, and, is by no means, near completion. I am also motivated by a need to challenge distorted descriptions of the sociopolitical conditions and historical context that produced Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah. My attempt is not, however, to interpret history through the subjective lens of contemporary politics. I write about phases of populist and electoral politics in Jammu and Kashmir in a particular context. At this phase in the history of the state, when large parts of the life of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah have been obliterated, I am intellectually invested in reconstructing my subject. Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah has been venerated and glorified as much as vilified, so I attempt to write about the public life of my subject with clarity, neither idolatrously nor iconoclastically.