Within weeks of the birth of independent India, the Kashmir Valley was in flames. Indian troops were fighting against invading Pathan tribesmen who sought to claim the princely state for Pakistan. These were the first sparks in a conflict which remains unresolved.

Attempts to establish how the Kashmir dispute first erupted have been obscured and impeded by competing nationalisms. Retrieving stories of attackers and survivors, looters and looted, fighters and civilians, Andrew Whitehead sets out to write a full and impartial account of how Kashmir became a theatre of war. He has gathered a remarkable range of first-hand testimonies of the most notorious episode in the invasionâ€"the desecration of a convent and mission hospital in the riverside town of Baramullaâ€"including one written by a missionary priest and never consulted before.

It provides a powerful human dimension to what is often seen as a dispute about territory. In the process we come closer to resolving questions that have for decades been the subject of controversy: Who were the invaders? Were they commanded by Pakistan? What support did they get from local Kashmiris? And why, when Srinagar was at their mercy, did they fail to capture the Kashmir capital?

Apart from making brilliant use of oral history, Andrew Whitehead has uncovered archive documents which challenge both Indian and Pakistani accounts of the genesis of the Kashmir dispute. Also unearthed is a letter from Kashmir's last maharaja, written at the height of the crisis, requesting immediate accession to India. Rigorously researched and immensely readable, this book not only explains how the Kashmir conflict started but also why it has proved so difficult to solve.