CSAS Lecture Series | Self and the World in a Life Narrative: Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah's Aatish-i-Chinar

This talk examines the autobiography of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah, the Kashmiri political leader, from the perspective of life narrative as political intervention. It reads the narrative’s ideas on the self, nationalism, history, and memory as a means to understand not just Abdullah’s public life and how he is remembered, but the larger contradictions and conflicts among these ideas in Kashmir and postcolonial India, which ultimately define the relationship between the two.

Chitralekha Zutshi is James Pinckney Harrison Professor of History at The College of William and Mary. She is the author of Kashmir's Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination and Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir, and the editor of Kashmir: History, Politics, Representation.

Cosponsored by the Department of History.