The Origins of a Dispute

In 1947, as the British left India and the subcontinent was torn apart by Partition, the future of Kashmir hung in the balance. Within a matter of weeks—amid invasion, political intrigue and hurried diplomacy—the princely state acceded to India, setting the stage for one of the world’s longest-running conflicts. In The Origins of a Dispute: Kashmir 1947, Prem Shankar Jha returns to those decisive months to ask a crucial question: how and why did Kashmir become the flashpoint it remains today? Drawing on newly declassified documents—including the Mountbatten papers and British government archives—Jha reconstructs the dramatic sequence of events that led to Kashmir’s accession to India. Moving beyond competing national narratives, he examines the roles of the Maharaja of Kashmir, Sheikh Abdullah, the Pakistani-backed tribal invasion and the geopolitical calculations of Britain in the final days of empire. Clear-eyed, rigorously researched and compellingly told, this book revisits the birth of the Kashmir dispute—and reveals how a crisis born in 1947 continues to shape South Asia’s politics today.