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.
As scholar Kim Phillips has argued, travel writing operates through a “referential pact”, whereby readers trust that their craving for knowledge about exotic places will be satisfied. These narratives became canonised over time, each new account building on previous ones, generating an ever-increasing interest in Kashmir.
This construction of Kashmir as a mirror of European beauty was paired with a troubling ethnographic curiosity about its people. George Forster, an East India Company employee who disguised himself as a Turkish merchant to enter the valley in the 1780s, described Kashmiris as possessing “stout, well-formed, European likeness”.
Other travellers went further, comparing Kashmiris to Jews — Europe’s internal other — and tracing their origins to the lost tribes of Israel. Charles von Hugel, an Austrian explorer, wrote in 1845 that Kashmiris had “almost Jewish features,” with their “white skin” and “colourless complexion” marking them as somehow out of place in the Subcontinent.
This preoccupation with denying Kashmiris their indigeneity — locating them elsewhere, whether in ancient Israel or in some European prehistory — served a colonial purpose. If Kashmiris were never truly native, then the land could be claimed, administered, and imagined by others. The beauty of the valley was severed from the people who inhabited it and made available for appropriation. As author Rafiq Ahmad in his study notes, such representations sought to attribute the creation of Kashmiri “traditions and customs to cultures more familiar to Europeans”, providing the civilisational basis through which orientalism continually reinforced its power and authority.
Yet alongside claims of ethnic kinship came harsh moral judgments. Edward Knight, a British officer who travelled through Kashmir in 1891, initially found Kashmiris “clever, cheery and civil”, before dismissing them as “among the most despicable creatures on earth, incorrigible cheats and liars, and cowardly to an inconceivable degree”.
William Moorcroft and George Trebeck, writing earlier in the century, described them as “selfish, superstitious, ignorant, supple, intriguing, dishonest and false”. The valley’s beauty, in this logic, was God-given and majestic; its people deserved no credit for it. Indeed, their very presence disrupted the Orientalist fantasy of Kashmir as an earthly paradise waiting to be discovered and possessed by more worthy inhabitants.
This aesthetic approach within colonial travelogues consistently portrayed the inhabitants as incompatible with their own topography. All anxieties around encounters with the unfamiliar were resolved by defining the European self through confrontation with the ‘other’.
For Phillips, travel and its associated cultural practices must be located within larger formations in which “inscriptions of power and privilege are made clearly visible”. The presence of Kashmiris was represented as an “unregulated threat” waiting to spill over, to effectively ruin Kashmir’s beauty — a sentiment that has persisted well beyond the colonial period.
Rewriting history: from Firishta to Hindutva
The orientalist framework did not merely produce aesthetic judgments; it rewrote history. As historian Manan Ahmed has shown, colonial scholars drew selectively on Persianate sources such as Muhammad Qasim Firishta’s Tarikh-i-Firishta, to construct narratives of Muslim tyranny and Hindu victimhood.
Firishta himself, writing in the early 17th century, presented a nuanced picture of Kashmir’s rulers — praising Zainul ’Abidin, for instance, for recalling exiled Brahmins, abolishing discriminatory taxes, commissioning translations of the Mahabharata into Persian, and patronising both Sanskrit and Persian literature. But colonial readings flattened this complexity, extracting episodes of religious conflict and presenting them as evidence of inherent Muslim despotism and “foreignness to Hindustan”.
Kashmir’s complicated history of invasions and rulers — from the Buddhist chief Rinchana who converted to Islam under Sufi instruction, to Shah Mir who established the first Muslim dynasty, to the Mughal emperors who built lavish retreats there, to the brutal Dogra rulers of the 19th century — was reduced to a simple morality tale.
The region that had produced Habba Khatun, who gave Kashmiri its literary form and encouraged the synthesis of Persian and Indian music, was recast as a site of eternal religious conflict. The European imperialist instinct demanded “extended and extensive ethnographic descriptions of the inherent oppression of Hindus at the hands of Muslims,” as Ahmed notes, and these descriptions were duly provided.
This selective historiography has found eager inheritors in the Hindu nationalist movement. For the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological parent organisations, Kashmir represents both a territorial claim and a civilisational wound.
The region is viewed through an India/Hindu versus Pakistan/Muslim framework, and its Muslim majority population is seen as evidence of historical injury against the ‘rightful’ Hindu inheritors of the land. The departure of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in the early 1990s — a genuine tragedy deserving serious engagement — has been instrumentalised as proof of Muslim barbarism, disconnected from the complex political history of the armed insurgency, Indian military occupation, and Pakistani intervention that produced it.
In 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that “Kashmir humara hai” (Kashmir is ours) and promised to transform it into “swarg” (heaven) once again, he was drawing on centuries of representation that imagined the valley as a paradise stolen, corrupted, or held hostage by Muslim inhabitants. The rhetoric of restoration implies that its current population has somehow desecrated it, that their removal or subjugation is necessary for the land’s redemption. This is presented not as partisan ideology but as the “iccha” (wish) of 130 crore Indians, reflecting the national stake every citizen is encouraged to have in ‘protecting’ Kashmir.
From romance to revenge
Hindi cinema has served as a powerful vehicle for these narratives, translating political ideology into emotional spectacle.
For decades, India-held Kashmir functioned as Bollywood’s scenic backdrop — a place of snow-capped romance, safely depoliticised, its conflicts invisible. But as academic Julia Szivak has highlighted, the 1990s insurgency transformed Kashmir into a site of nationalist melodrama, where the “fight for survival of the Indian nation” was dramatised against the valley’s picturesque landscape. Kashmiri insurgents were portrayed as Pakistan-supported religious zealots, while heroes served as instructive guides establishing appropriate patriotic norms for Indian citizens.
Kunal Kohli’s Fanaa (2006) offers a relatively moderate version of this formula. Its Kashmiri heroine, Zooni, embodies ideal Indian citizenship: she salutes the flag, delivers patriotic speeches comparing Kashmir’s beauty to all of India, and ultimately sacrifices her love for her country by killing her militant husband to prevent a terrorist attack. The film distinguishes between ‘good’ Muslims — loyal, self-sacrificing, aligned with the state — and ‘bad’ Muslims whose desire for azadi (freedom) marks them as threats. It offers a conditional belonging: Kashmiri Muslims may be accepted if they perform their allegiance enthusiastically enough.
Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files (2022) dispenses with such niceties. Claiming to expose the ‘truth’ of the Pandit exodus, the film presents Kashmiri Muslims as uniformly bloodthirsty, deceitful, and sexually predatory. Characters are named after Hindu deities — Krishna, Shiva, Brahma, Vishnu — anchoring their indigeneity to ancient mythology, while Muslims are depicted as foreign invaders. The film’s protagonist delivers a speech tracing Kashmir’s glory to pre-Islamic sages like Rishi Kashyap and Shankaracharya, describing the valley as the ‘Silicon Valley of the first millennium,’ before presenting its corruption as beginning with Muslim arrival — a narrative that mirrors colonial historiography almost exactly.
What’s striking is how these films reproduce orientalist tropes almost unchanged. The beautiful land defiled by unworthy inhabitants; the ancient civilisation destroyed by foreign invaders; the need for civilisation, order, and redemption from outside. The British claimed this role for themselves; Hindu nationalism claims it for the Indian state. The target remains the same: the Kashmiri Muslim, constructed as eternally alien, perpetually threatening, fundamentally incompatible with the paradise they inhabit.
The politics of paradise
To trace these representations is not to deny the genuine suffering of Kashmiri Pandits, nor to minimise the violence that has marked the valley’s recent history. It is, rather, to insist that this violence cannot be understood outside the longer history of how Kashmir has been imagined, claimed, and fought over. The ‘paradise’ myth was never innocent. From colonial travelogues to contemporary cinema, it has served to separate the land from its people, to make the valley available for possession by others.
Jawaharlal Nehru, himself a Kashmiri Pandit, described the valley in 1940 as “some supremely beautiful woman, whose beauty is almost impersonal and above human desire”. The feminisation of landscape and the language of desire and possession are tropes that have structured Kashmir’s representation for centuries.
As Emmanuela Mangiarotti argues, the Indian state has worked to fix a specific historical narrative through Kashmir that anchors “specific imaginings of community and the nation to a recognisable cultural repository”. Today, as the Indian state imposes unprecedented levels of military control, as communication blackouts silence Kashmiri voices, as demographic changes threaten to transform the valley’s character, these representations take on urgent political significance.
The question is not merely how India-held Kashmir has been represented, but whose representations count, whose stories are told, whose belonging is recognised. Colonial officers, Hindu nationalists, and Bollywood filmmakers have all claimed the right to define Kashmir, to determine who belongs there and on what terms. Kashmiri Muslims, however, have not just been passive observers, but have actively written back: in protests met with pellet guns, in poems circulated despite censorship, and in testimonies recorded before each communication blackout.
The orientalist tropes of the past, therefore, have found a new home in modern state policy and popular cinema. While the tools of representation have changed, they still rely on the old conviction that Kashmir’s landscape is a national treasure and its inhabitants, specifically the Kashmiri Muslims, are a threat to its perfection. The colonial equation remains intact: the land is everything, its people an inconvenience.
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