political lives. The rise of international access to AJK after the earthquake of 2005 facilitated vocal public critique.63 Despite Pakistan’s influence, however, the reality is that the state of Azad Jammu and Kashmir plays a key role in organizing the experiences of daily life and in shaping the national historical consciousness of people who derive aspects of their political identity from its regulatory regime. For residents of AJK and for Kashmiri refugees resident in Pakistan alike, living a political life means negotiating AJK’s semiautonomous institutional structure, political parties, and civil associations, as well as the Pakistani state’s surveillance and oversight.
ON THE RESEARCH, SITES, AND METHODS
I conducted the fieldwork upon which this book is based between 1998 and 2008. That fieldwork included twenty-two months of ethnographic research with Kashmiri refugees in Azad Jammu and Kashmir and in Pakistan and four months of archival research at the National Archives of Pakistan. I maintain connections with overseas Kashmiris based in the United States and in England, and over the years I have met with Kashmiri political party leaders on extended political or personal visits in New York, London, and Geneva. My primary methods were participant observation, life-history interviews, and archival research. I also conducted numerous structured interviews on topical issues with government officials and administrators, politicians, and religious leaders. Published scholarship on AJK is limited, and a number of relevant sources are available only in Urdu. I use the available materials—including histories, pamphlets, and memoirs—to contextualize my analysis of the historical development of Kashmiri refugees as a political category, and I draw on government documents from the National Archives of Pakistan, which holds the original records related to Kashmir refugee relief in Pakistan from 1947 to 1965. I also examined jihadist publications, including magazines and taped lectures and songs (tarānas). The conclusions that I present in this book emerged from a sustained analysis of various kinds of information considered in light of others.
I designed my research around the different categories of refugees rather than the places where I could encounter them. I thus met with men and women, displaced during each of the wars and from various parts of the Jammu and Kashmir region living in both AJK and Pakistan. This design accommodated the theoretical issues involved with working with Kashmiri refugees as well as the pragmatic concern that my access to any particular place could change unexpectedly. I was always aware that any number of factors could affect my ability to work with a particular community in a particular place, including the escalation of tensions between Pakistan and India or a decision by the Ministry of Kashmir Affairs that local conditions were dangerous for foreigners. On many occasions I adjusted the timing of meetings with people or visits to certain places in order to allow people to evaluate my project and reputation among other communities. In the first year of my research, I avoided developing close ties with political parties and formal associations to keep my research separate from their political projects, although I did visit a number of nongovernmental organization (NGO) projects on request. Once I felt that my research was well established and that I was not seen as affiliated with any particular group or party, I began meeting with political representatives. Over the years, my fieldwork within AJK has been made feasible by some of these connections.
When I was resident in AJK, I was based in Muzaffarabad city. I made day trips to refugee camps and spent extended periods of time in refugee resettlement villages in the district. When I was resident in Pakistan, I was based in Rawalpindi or Islamabad, and I met with settled refugees living in urban allotments, unsettled refugees living in three different labor camps, and camp refugees who were living and working in Pakistan illegally. I also met with people displaced from villages near the LoC who had come to Pakistan seeking temporary wage labor. I made many short trips to Muzaffarabad and Mirpur for important social and political events, and I moved around a great deal, often following networks of kinship alliances. People from refugee communities in AJK added me to their broader networks of visiting, which were connected to wage-labor migration and kinship obligations between AJK and Pakistan. I, in turn, also traveled these networks to meet with Kashmiri refugee families in cities in the northern Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunwa (NWFP), such as Murree, Abbottabad, and Mansera. One spring, I accompanied a family group of migratory goat headers (bakerwals) on the seasonal migration from a village near Rawalpindi to the high grazing grounds of Skardu, meeting other Kashmiri bakerwals along the route. I turned back as they embarked on the last leg of the journey, a dangerous stretch that passed within firing range of the LoC.
As a female researcher, it was more appropriate and easier to travel in public spaces and to work with unrelated men when a male companion accompanied me. I therefore worked with a research assistant who came with me on most of my field visits from June 1999 through December 2000. For reasons of protocol, he almost never accompanied me on official meetings with government officials or politicians. For reasons of his security, I never had him accompany me on visits to places like refugee camps or to meet people that I knew were likely to be under high surveillance. My assistant had extended kin relations in several refugee resettlement villages in Muzaffarabad District, and he identified two families who had been displaced from resettlement villages on the LoC who were living in labor camps in Rawalpindi and Islamabad; those families gave me my first entrance into communities of unsettled Kashmiri refugees living in Pakistan. I have not worked with a research assistant since 2001. I have sometimes been the guest of government officials in AJK and, at other times, members of local families who have assumed collective responsibility for me have escorted me to and from meetings.
I was almost always allowed to record life-history interviews. Many of my interlocutors insisted that they wanted their life histories to be preserved in their own words, and one of my research assistant’s primary jobs was to transcribe Urdu- and Pahari-language interviews. I also took cameras into refugee resettlement villages and made short films of rituals and ritualized events. I never took photographs in refugee camps, which are already profusely, if selectively, photographed. In retrospect, I rather wish I had photographed those things that underscore the “getting-on-with-life-ness” of living ten years in a refugee camp. At the time, however, I found that not having a camera in the camps facilitated my research: foreigners often came to the camps to take pictures as documents of human rights abuses or to “expose” the presence of militants in the camps, so without a camera it was easier to abandon that official script and access the daily life of the camps.
Over time, I found that some of my interlocutors took up the life-history part of my project in ways I had not expected. Several people who were present during my interviews with other people made their own recordings of their experiences of displacement or resettlement and gave me the tapes. On two occasions, I received recordings from young men who I have no record or recollection of having met, but who sent their stories to me. Others took pictures or made videos of events or people who live in places where I was not allowed to go (such as the Security Zone) and asked me to view them. The viewings were always social occasions, with others who for various reasons could not go to these places also watching, explaining, commenting, and asking questions. Like viewings of videos received from across the LoC, these were often heterogeneous social events, with men and women from several generations participating. On one occasion, I received the taped life-history interview of a member of a jihadist organization who did not feel comfortable meeting me. Someone who had been present during my conversations with several other young refugee men conducted the interview, entirely on his own initiative. He said later that he knew the man’s story well and felt that I needed to know “the whole dirty truth” about the Kashmir Jihad.
Indeed, many people gave me materials that they thought I should consider in my research. For example, people sometimes brought me jihād manuals or other publications such as recordings of lectures and militant songs, things they had bought at fairs or from militant organizations. Once, I received a pamphlet in the mail from a town near Peshawar. The pamphlet explained the “necessity of organizing jihād to combat injustice and protect the innocent” from the abuses of unchecked power; the accompanying anonymous letter, painstakingly penned in English, explained that the sender hoped I would give serious attention to the continuity between spiritual and political jihād and attempt to understand why “ jihād is not a terrorist practice.”
