Colonial Tourism Is a Hedonistic Ritual: A Kashmiri Perspective
How pleasure, spectacle, and state narratives converge in a contested homeland.
Every summer, Kashmir disappears.
Not physically. The mountains remain. The lakes continue to mirror the sky. The houseboats still drift across Dal Lake, and the scent of pine still hangs in the air.
What disappears is Kashmir as a political place.
It is replaced by a fantasy.
Social media fills with cinematic drone shots of Gulmarg, shikara rides at sunset, and captions proclaiming that Kashmir is finally “safe,” “peaceful,” and “open for business.” Television channels celebrate record tourist arrivals as though they are election results. Government advertisements invite millions to experience “paradise on earth.”
For most people, these images are harmless.
For me, they are unsettling.
I am Kashmiri. I do not experience tourism as a neutral industry or an innocent celebration of beauty. I experience it as a political performance. Increasingly, I have come to see tourism in Kashmir as a form of colonial tourism, a hedonistic ritual through which occupation is made to feel ordinary.
The tourist arrives looking for escape.
The state welcomes them with carefully curated images.
The political reality fades into the background.
Everyone leaves believing they have seen Kashmir.
But what they have seen is a version of Kashmir that has been carefully constructed.
This is not to say that tourists come with bad intentions. Most do not. They come because they have been told Kashmir is beautiful, because it is affordable, because they want snow, mountains, and a break from everyday life.
The problem is not the individual tourist.
The problem is the political work tourism performs.
Occupation is rarely sustained by force alone. It also depends on stories. It depends on convincing both those who govern and those who visit that the existing order is natural, permanent, and legitimate.
Tourism tells precisely that story.
Every photograph of untouched landscapes detached from their political context, every travel vlog celebrating “the new Kashmir,” every headline boasting about record visitor numbers reinforces an image of normalcy. It suggests that whatever conflict once existed belongs to the past.
But normal for whom?
For the tourist, Kashmir is a destination.
For many Kashmiris, it remains a place shaped by militarization, surveillance, and an unresolved political future.
These realities do not disappear because they are absent from an Instagram reel.
They simply become invisible.
That invisibility is not accidental.
Colonial projects have always depended on transforming contested lands into spaces of leisure and consumption. Landscapes are romanticized while the people living within them become secondary to the scenery. The land becomes easier to possess once it has first been turned into a postcard.
Kashmir is no exception.
Its mountains are marketed.
Its culture is commodified.
Its politics are edited out.
What remains is a paradise stripped of its history.
This is why I describe colonial tourism as a hedonistic ritual.
A ritual is not merely something people do repeatedly. It is something that produces meaning through repetition.
Every tourist season repeats the same script.
The government announces unprecedented tourist arrivals.
News channels celebrate economic success.
Influencers post aesthetic videos.
Visitors return home convinced they have witnessed reality.
The cycle begins again.
The repetition itself creates legitimacy.
It tells the world that Kashmir is settled, peaceful, and unquestionably part of India.
Whether one accepts that conclusion politically is almost beside the point. Tourism helps make it feel emotionally true.
This is where pleasure becomes political.
The enjoyment of Kashmir depends upon not seeing everything that exists alongside its beauty. The checkpoint remains just outside the camera frame. The bunker is cropped out. The conversations about self determination, grief, fear, and political aspiration rarely make it into the travel itinerary.
Paradise requires selective vision.
Some will argue that tourism benefits Kashmiris, and they are right.
Thousands of families depend on it.
Houseboat owners, taxi drivers, hotel workers, artisans, guides, and restaurant owners deserve livelihoods. No serious critique of tourism can ignore this reality.
But earning a living within an existing political order does not amount to endorsing that order.
People survive because they must.
Economic dependence should never be mistaken for political consent.
What troubles me is how quickly economic success is mobilized as evidence that political questions no longer matter.
As though hotel bookings can resolve questions of sovereignty.
As though sold out resorts can substitute for democratic legitimacy.
As though vacation photographs can erase decades of conflict.
They cannot.
Perhaps what unsettles me most is how effectively tourism reshapes memory.
Visitors leave believing they know Kashmir because they have experienced its beauty.
Yet beauty alone cannot tell the story of a place.
A lake has no opinion.
A mountain cannot speak.
The silence of a landscape should never be mistaken for the silence of its people.
I still want people to visit Kashmir.
I want them to experience its generosity, its poetry, its food, its language, and the breathtaking beauty that has captivated travelers for centuries.
But I also want them to understand that they are entering a place whose political reality cannot be left behind at the airport.
Kashmir is not merely a destination.
It is someone’s home.
It is someone’s history.
It is someone’s unfinished struggle.
Until that struggle is acknowledged rather than concealed, I will continue to see tourism not simply as an industry but as a political ritual, one that invites visitors to consume paradise while asking them to look away from the conditions that make that paradise possible.
That is what makes colonial tourism so powerful.
It does not ask anyone to celebrate occupation explicitly.
It simply teaches them to enjoy it without noticing.