Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
This speculation has made it possible to envision the LoC gone or redrawn, even while it has become more entrenched. It has become an object of ideological struggle in daily life, even as the act of transgressing it has been criminalized by the state. The LoC becomes a real social object at the moment when people encounter new regimes of power, but it does not exclusively regulate the conception of either relatedness or political belonging. Instead, the social dynamics within bisected regions of the (former) Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir reveal the importance of cross-border alliances—including those that are interrupted—to the ongoing cultural construction of social relatedness. In this sense, the greater Kashmir region was, and remains, a borderland in which forms of social regulation contest rather than buttress the regulatory processes of the state.1
The Kashmir Dispute is often called the “unfinished business of Partition.” Explanations of the dispute paradigmatically begin by recounting the origins of the territorial dispute between India and Pakistan.2 The story I tell here is different, and it has a different history. The continuing conflict in the Kashmir region is fundamentally not a territorial dispute between states. It is a struggle by the ruled to establish limits on the sovereign power of their rulers. Social groups, political parties, and the regional successor states of the monarchical State of Jammu and Kashmir employ the symbolic territoriality inherent in categories of political identity to make claims on absent and lost geographic territories through the territory of the political body. In the context of unresolved political status, the Kashmir borderlands extend not only across the disputed LoC or into the “occupied” territories but also through the indeterminate sovereignty of the bodies of the borderlands’ subjects.
The background to this story is about the conflicts and contestations for political recognition that were happening at the time of decolonization, when Kashmiri peoples’ struggles for political rights were with the monarch of Jammu and Kashmir, not with the British colonial power or with the postcolonial nation-states of India and Pakistan.
THE PRINCELY STATE OF JAMMU AND KASHMIR AT THE END OF EMPIRE
The Partition of British India was a long process of creating political and cultural (rather than simply territorial) separations.3 In this process, the postcolonial states were formed not only by dividing colonial holdings but also by dissolving the borders of hundreds of tributary polities and integrating the semi-autonomous Indian Princely States and their peoples.4 The postcolonial historiography of India and Pakistan has highlighted the forms of modern collective politics that were prominent in British India, but the decolonization and partition process was also shaped by political forms that emerged in the Princely States and that disappeared after their integration.5 In the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, an articulation of subject peoples as rights-bearing subjects developed during the period when sovereignty was vested with the monarchical court. This idea of the distinct identity and rights of the people-of-the-state (awām-e-riyāsat) or people-of-Kashmir (awām-e-kashmīr) still underlies and competes with other postcolonial articulations of political and cultural belonging.
The Indian Princely States were governed by hereditary monarchs under relationships of suzerainty and paramountcy with the British colonial government of India. How autonomous these states really were is the subject of significant debate in the historiography of South Asia.6 One of the challenges in the historiography of the Indian States, specifically in evaluating their relative sovereignty, has been their vast differences in size and historical state formation. There were numerous small states that commanded little autonomy (on the scale of Jammu and Kashmir’s smaller jagīrs and much smaller than its internal wazārats).7 There were also much larger Indian States, like Jammu and Kashmir, with composite political structures, heterogeneous regional cultures, and transregional networks of relationships to other Princely States that exercised aspects of sovereign control over their subjects.8 The monarchs of these more autonomous states had to establish new forms of legitimate authority over their subjects as they centralized their power during the colonial period.9 The Treaty of Amritsar, signed in 1846, demarcated the territorial borders of a new Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir—the riyāsat-e-jammū-okashmīr. Unlike established Indian States with hereditary thrones, Jammu and Kashmir had not had a political center of historical state expansion, and sovereignty within the state was dispersed. Like other Indian Princes, the Maharajas’ political universe included limitations on their influence in matters outside their territorial boundaries, but they enjoyed considerable security at the treaty boundaries of the state. While the Maharajas of Jammu and Kashmir struggled with British attempts to influence the internal politics of the court, the real challenge of kingship in the Princely State was to centralize power and establish new relationships between the ruler and his subjects and between the state and its political community, which eliminated the intermediate forms of layered sovereignty within the treaty state.10
The first political movements in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir developed out of demands for protections against arbitrary rule and guarantees of patronage and employment for its subjects . Out of those movements, the “hereditary state subject” emerged as the primary category of political identity for the State’s peoples, and the legal provisions for state subject recognition were codified and elaborated by the Maharaja’s government between 1912 and 1932.11 Protections from arbitrary rule were linked with establishing and recognizing land-holding rights, both usufruct and proprietary, which created a distinction between the monarchy’s sovereignty over territory and its sovereignty over its subjects. The first articulation of this distinction emerged during the period of agrarian land reforms, and the category mulkī (the people of the land) emerged as a legal–administrative category in the Kashmiri Nationals’ Law of 1912. The Hereditary State Subject Order of 1927 (amended 1932) clearly distinguished between state subjects who had rights to government office and land use and ownership versus those (non-state subjects) who did not have such rights. The concept of the awām-e-kashmīr or awām-e-riyāsat became a political category through which it was possible to articulate new limits on princely sovereignty, and Jammu and Kashmir state subjects demanded further political recognition in the form of representation and franchise.
At the historical juncture of liberation struggles against monarchical rule and the dissolution of colonial India, the relationship between land rights and protection from arbitrary rule informed both elite and popular political mobilization in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. Between 1947 and 1949, the “Azad Kashmir Government” based in the town of Pulandri, in the Poonch Jagir, maintained the state subject as its definition of Kashmiri political identity, as did the “Emergency Interim Government of Jammu and Kashmir State” based in the city of Srinagar, the summer capital of the Princely State. After 1950, both India and Pakistan began to integrate the regions of the former Princely State that were under their control. The Princely State’s own competing successor regimes—the Government of Azad Kashmir (in Pakistan-administered territory) and the Government of Jammu and Kashmir State (in Indian-administered territory)—struggled to maintain regional autonomy from the administrator states of India and Pakistan; they did this in part by maintaining the historical distinction between the subject-citizens of the former monarchical state and citizens of the new nation-states of Pakistan and India.
The Awām-e-Riyāsat: Making the State, Making Its Subjects
In 1846, the new Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir had been a unified polity only in name, and only at its borders. The Treaty of Amritsar, which set the state’s territorial borders, was part of the negotiated settlement that ended a war between the British and Sikh rulers of the Punjab and brought the Punjab under colonial control. Within the new state were numerous hereditary estates and chieftainships that had been awarded by the Sikh court at Lahore and by the Mughal, Afghan, and Tibetan monarchs who had once had feudatory arrangement with rulers within the treaty borders.12 With the borders of the new state secure, but internal control uncertain, the Dogra Maharajas of Jammu and Kashmir focused on consolidating political and administrative authority.13
The eventual internal organization of the Princely State reflected localized sociopolitical alliances as well as the monarchs’ uneven consolidation of political power within the borders established by the Treaty of Amritsar—a process by no means complete in 1947. Jammu Province, Kashmir Province,