Books
December, 2020
Educational Strategies for Youth Empowerment in Conflict Zones: Transforming, Not Transmitting, Trauma
My forthcoming book, Educational Strategies for Youth Empowerment in Conflict Zones: Transforming, Not Transmitting, Trauma, offers fresh and exciting new directions of inquiry into the highly contentious issue of conflict resolution in South Asia. By shifting its gaze from a politics of division mired in ethno-nationalisms into a healing and restorative focus, I move the dialogue forward into the realm of community, healing, and shared governance. The book analyzes the major constitutional and political missteps that have led to the current situation of violence and distrust in countries such as India and Pakistan, keeping the focus on Jammu and Kashmir. This monograph will appeal to a wide range of audiences including academics, researchers, graduate students interested in South Asian politics, development, trauma studies, and peace and conflict studies.
Published: 2020
Role: Political Science/International Relations
Author: Nyla Ali Khan
Buy Now:
Comments and Reviews:
“Nyla Khan’s new book immerses readers in emancipatory pedagogical and self-reflexive processes that have particular value for the university classroom, but which also offer survivors of trauma and cross-generational descendants a hopeful opportunity to unpack their own potential negative
adaptations to subverted personal harrowing histories of pain and suffering.
In ‘Educational Strategies for Youth Empowerment in Conflict Zones,’ Khan draws from a wealth of multidisciplinary sources that have, in recent decades, contributed to an abundance of research in trauma studies, including psychology, psychiatry, history, sociology, education, and my own disciplines of anthropology, women’s and gender studies.”
Fox, Diana J. (2021). Book Review Essay: Educational Strategies for Youth Empowerment in Conflict Zones: Transforming, not Transmitting, Trauma. Journal of International Women's Studies, 22(9), 480-486.
“In her book, Dr. Nyla Ali Khan brings attention to areas that are mostly ignored in conflict transformation, namely the role of psychological traumatization and the trans-generational transmission of trauma. She also highlights the lack of capacity to deal with such trauma, and thus the need for new groups within particularly non-Northern non-Western societies to do this work. The emphasis on this work is critical, particularly in societies suffering from conflict, which are in a post-conflict period, and/or where there is potential for violent conflict. Thus, Dr. Nyla Ali Khan is doing a great service to humanity, in our view, by discussing these issues.
Dr. Charles Tauber, CEO and Founder of Coalition for Work with Psychotrauma and Peace.
January, 2018
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s Reflections on Kashmir
This book is a compendium of the speeches and interviews of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who reigned as Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir from 1948 to 1953, and who was a large presence on the political landscape of India for fifty years. The volume is designed to enable a student of South Asian politics, and the politics of Kashmir in particular, to analyze the ways in which experiences have been constructed historically and have changed over time.
Published: 2018
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Author: Nyla Ali Khan
Buy Now:
Comments and Reviews:
World Literature Today: "Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s Reflections on Kashmir by Nyla Ali Khan"
“Nyla Khan had done vital service to our understanding of the plight of the Kashmiri people by putting together the writings and speeches of Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah. Sheikh Abdullah - decades after his death - remains an important voice for justice and peace in the region. Any observer of the region who ignores his words will fail to grasp the possibilities for Kashmir's future.”
Vijay Prashad, author of No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism
“This book reflects Dr. Nyla Ali Khan's meticulous intellectual engagement with the larger-than-life Kashmiri leader, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, who was much more than a politician. Abdullah opened up the possibilities of imagining a different Kashmir than what the nationalism projects of India and Pakistan dictated. His speeches, letters and interviews explain why Kashmiri voices have been subsumed by jingoism in the subcontinent - to deflect and undermine the inclusive and pluralist Kashmiri identity. This is an invaluable resource for students, researchers and all those who wish to understand the conflict ridden subcontinent and its elusive Paradise called Kashmir.”
Raza Rumi, author, journalist, and editor of Daily Times, Pakistan.
January, 2014
The Life of a Kashmiri Women Dialectic of Resistance and Accommodation
Nyla Ali Khan’s subject, Akbar Jehan, was a political activist and wife of Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, Kashmiri nationalist and first Muslim Prime Minister of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. The author uses oral testimonies and relies on written resources to add layers of understanding to the events that shaped the history of Kashmir. In this hybrid of memoir and autobiography, the author.
Published: 2014
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Author: Nyla Ali Khan
Buy Now:
Comments and Reviews:
“Nyla Khan's biography of her grandmother is a valuable exercise in retrieval and reconstruction, a heartfelt stand against the dissolution of Kashmiri history and the mitigation of its sometimes self-inflicted wounds, and a continuation of her ongoing memorialization of the retreating wraiths of her elusive childhood in her oddly claustrophobic summers in the Himalayan foothills of the 1990s. The influence of Akbar Jehan in the Plebiscite Front and the National Conference, and the writing of this account from Khan herself, shine a welcome light on the role of women in Kashmiri self-definition."
John C. Hawley, Professor of English, Santa Clara University, USA
“This is a personal, political and devotional biography of a woman to whom the author pays homage, while also recording the history of Kashmir through the various political quagmires. Through the biography of her grandmother, Begum Akbar Jahan Abdullah, the author traces the political history of Kashmir and the traumas of the political process. The author through lyrical prose and cultural sensitivity deconstructs the life of her grandmother and other women in her family to situate them as women with agency through a feminist lens."
Huma Ahmed-Ghosh, Professor of Women's Studies, San Diego State University, US
2012
The Parchment of Kashmir History, Society & Polity
In this volume, Kashmiri scholars of all disciplines undertake a new look at their homeland and provide a set of visions for Kashmiri culture and society. The book offers a panorama of key cultural concerns of Jammu & Kashmir today, from the military aspects of the Kashmir conflict to the modern-day revival of indigenous cultural institutions, from the effects of religious discourse and gender-based social hierarchy to relations with India and Pakistan.
Published: 2012
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Author: Nyla Ali Khan
Buy Now:
Comments and Reviews:
"The Parchment of Kashmir is an impressively and suitably intricate representation of literate cultures in Kashmir. It is also the best available mosaic portrait of vibrant multilingual intellectualism and multicultural heritage in any region of Asia. It beautifully conveys the complexity of Kashmir's human composition at a crossroads of civilization and thus provides a supple foundation for subtle understandings of Kashmir's current political predicament."
David Ludden, professor of History, New York University
"The Parchment of Kashmir is an important and timely book. By bringing together writers, scholars and other intellectuals in Kashmir to speak about the history, politics, culture and their lived experiences of the region, Nyla Ali Khan gives us a sense of the complexity of the 'Kashmir problem' from the perspective of those most deeply affected by it. The essays in this volume are invaluable as both analysis and testimony."
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Global Distinguished Professor, New York University
June, 2009
The Fiction of Nationality in an Era of Transnationalism
My work focuses on the representation of South Asian life in works by four contemporary Anglophone writers: V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai. Of course, I also refer to works by other writers, such as Sara Suleri, Bharati Mukherjee, and Shashi Tharoor. I offer a critical dialogue between these works and the contemporary history they encounter, using history to interrogate fiction and using fiction to think through historical.
Published: 2009
Role: Literacy Critism and Cultural Theory
Author: Nyla Ali Khan
Buy Now:
December, 2008
Islam, Women & Violence in Kashmir Between India & Pakistan
Since 1989, religious fundamentalism and exclusionary nationalism in Indian administered Jammu and Kashmir have generated political and social turmoil that has eroded the ethos and fabric of Kashmiri culture. These forces are responsible for the silencing of dissenters, economic deprivation, infrastructural lack, mass displacements, political anarchy, and the repression of women. Nyla Ali Khan, the granddaughter of the first Prime Minister of Jammu and Kashmir.
Published: 2008
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US
Author: Nyla Ali Khan
Buy Now:
Comments and Reviews:
“It is first the amazing work of Khan through dozens of testimonies of Kashmiri from various social levels, religions, ethnics and genders that make it a reference in its field. I recommend Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir: between India and Pakistan for one who would wish to understand the complex history of the modern Kashmir.”
Olivier Rey, August, 2016
"I highly recommend Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir. Nyla Khan has written a very vivid, engaging, and insightful book analyzing the development of the Kashmiri crisis through literature, history, and ethnography while foregrounding the status of women. She leads the reader to a deeper understanding of this complex, continually unfolding crisis and clarifies issues that will need to be addressed as Kashmir moves on its future path."
World Literature Today
