‘370 was an anomaly that has now been removed’ -- Shonaleeka Kaul

The amendment of Article 370 granting special status to Kashmir, far from undoing Kashmiri history, in fact restores it. The alleged “special status" stood precariously on an entrenched misrepresentation of the valley in political and academic circles as culturally insular, unique and hermetically sealed. My recent book (The Making Of Early Kashmir: Landscape And Identity In The Rajatarangini, Oxford University Press, 2018), however, has shown that Kashmir was never isolated or insular, but incredibly open and cosmopolitan; and overwhelmingly Indic in her genesis and composition rather than “unique".

All manner of cultural markers over 2,500 years of Kashmiri history (right from 500 BCE onwards) display unequivocally a Kashmir that was intensively integrated with the rest of India. From Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal in the east to Malwa and Saurashtra in central and west India, and even Karnataka and Tamil Nadu in the far south, not to mention Punjab and Himachal closer home—Kashmiris looked to these places for politics, state formation, trade, education, asylum, employment, art, religion, philosophy, and even fashion, while people from the rest of India travelled to and settled in Kashmir in large numbers over the centuries for the same reasons. In the face of this historical reality of Kashmir, Article 370 as an exclusionary means artificially separating Kashmir from the rest of the country was an anomaly that has now been removed.