India’s settler colonialism: Jeremy A. Rinker, ‘The settler colonial imagination: Hindutva, neoliberal development, and coming to grips with the collective trauma of Kashmir’s protracted colonization’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

India’s settler colonialism: Jeremy A. Rinker, ‘The settler colonial imagination: Hindutva, neoliberal development, and coming to grips with the collective trauma of Kashmir’s protracted colonization’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

05Oct25

Abstract: Despite growing literatures on the intersection between narrative testimony, persistent marginalization, and public storytelling as democratic, legal, and therapeutic resource for survivors of mass political violence (see Kirmayer, Gone, and Moses, ‘Rethinking Historical Trauma’, among others), there is little empirical understanding of the importance of creating socio-legal mechanisms for testimony and storytelling in overcoming the historical legacies of colonialism, settler exceptionalism, and collective trauma in protracted social conflicts. Indian administered Kashmir is a case in point. Stuck in the post-colonial imagination of a country now ruled by nationalistic Hindutva forces, the 2021 Russell Tribunal on Kashmir took as one of its four key goals to interrogate the Kashmir conflict through the lens of settler colonialism. In the context of neoliberal and hegemonic Hindutva forces, is such a reframing of this protracted social conflict accurate, or even possible? When powerful forces embrace a belligerent and oppositional narrative of the Kashmir conflict, like that found in the 2022 Bollywood film Kashmir Files, one must question how a settler colonial frame informs the protracted nature of the conflict. This article argues that what Harold Saunders called, a public peace process is not only welcome but required for peace with justice in Kashmir.

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