governor of Jammu in 1846. The state was ruled by the Dogra Maharajas until 1947, when internal political and armed resistance and war between the new postcolonial nation-states of India and Pakistan ended monarchical rule. The Indian Princely States were not subject to the partition of the British territories in 1947; the accession of each principality was negotiated between the monarch of the State and the leaders of both the Indian National Congress and the Pakistan Muslim League—the political parties that ran the first postcolonial governments of India and Pakistan during the period of constitution formation. When the British Government of India transferred power to the independent postcolonial states of India and Pakistan on August 14, 1947, the monarch of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir had acceded to neither India nor Pakistan. Within months of independence, India and Pakistan had troops on the ground in the Princely State’s Kashmir Province. This first war between India and Pakistan was ambiguously resolved with a United Nations–negotiated ceasefire in 1949. The state was functionally divided, and nearly a quarter of its people were displaced within the territories of the former Princely State or into India and Pakistan.
This politico-geographical division was supposed to be temporary, until a United Nations–recommended referendum could be carried out. There was, at first, no question of changing the terms of legal political belonging to the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. The people of the Indian Princely States were “state subjects,” not British colonial subjects; unless an Indian monarch had acceded to one or the other of the Dominions before the Partition, the ruler’s displaced subjects were not counted as refugees who would have to be rehabilitated. Both people who were displaced by political violence in the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir between 1947 and 1949 and relief administrators in Pakistan and India made an important distinction between those (Kashmiri) refugees who were to return to their homes and those (Partition) refugees who would be resettled as permanent immigrants; “hereditary state subjects” of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir were supposed to return to their homes, lands, and properties. By the time the matter of princely state subjects was negotiated in the Karachi Agreement of March 1949, the (former) Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir was a “disputed territory” and the subject of a UN resolution. Its refugees were a specifically named part of the dispute-resolution process. Practices of identifying, regulating, and documenting Kashmiri refugees developed historically in the context of regional and international concern for (and dispute over) a Jammu-and-Kashmir that is both a former and a not-yet or a never-to-be political entity. The Hereditary State Subject provisions were adopted by the provincial successor states of both Jammu and Kashmir State (in India) and Azad Jammu and Kashmir (administered by Pakistan) as the basis of their legal frameworks for recognizing citizen-subjects of the disputed former Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir.
The 1949 UN Ceasefire Line—now called the LoC (military Line of Control)—simultaneously symbolizes and obscures the historical experiences of people who live in the divided regions of the former Princely State. On post-1949 maps of India and Pakistan, the LoC is a dotted line, representing its contested status. On the ground, it has been a permeable boundary without exact demarcation that has nonetheless shaped people’s apprehension of the political landscape. It forged a frontier through landscapes that people had previously experienced as contiguous, and these displaced people encountered the line not as a specific place but as a profound shift in the ways they experienced political power. Paradoxically, the LoC has had a more concrete presence when its physical location has been less certain—during periods of warfare. Thus, the line has had a cyclical as well as historical temporality; it has become more borderlike over time, but it has shifted in each war and has been serially revisited as a site of possible territorial settlement between India and Pakistan. 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
