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, and the Frontier Ilaquas (Frontier Areas) made up the state’s three large administrative units. The administrative hierarchy was most consolidated in Jammu and Kashmir Provinces; each was divided into districts that were in turn distinguished by taxation units called tehsils. Chenani Jagir and Poonch Jagir were incorporated into Jammu Province only in the 1930s. The Frontier Ilaquas consisted of the Ladakh Wazarat, the Gilgit Agency, the vassal states of Hunza and Nagar, and the tribal region of Chilas (which was never successfully surveyed by the monarchical state). These areas had a semi-autonomous feudatory status within the Princely State, which had limited administrative control.14
To establish their power, the Princely State’s first Maharajas (Gulab Singh and Ranbir Singh) began consolidating the dispersed jāgīrdārī system of land tenancy and revenue administration, in which the revenue of a territorial estate (jāgīr) and the responsibility of governing it accrued to an appointed official (jāgīrdār) who owed allegiance to the monarch.15 Establishing a consolidated administrative hierarchy involved bringing the semi-independent hereditary jāgīrs—such as Chenani Jagir and Poonch Jagir—into a subordinate relationship with the Maharaja’s court and enforcing the state’s claim that all land was government property (khālsah).16 The Maharajas also extended the system of containment and exit permits (rehdārī) that had been used by the Sikh governors of the Kashmir Valley to the whole of the Princely State, in an effort to prevent people who were subject to taxation in the form of compulsory corvee labor (bēgār) from leaving the state or migrating out of their taxation divisions.17
Identifying awām-e-riyāsat (people of the state) as a category of political belonging, administration, and governance first developed in the 1880s, during the agrarian land reforms of the jāgīrdārī system.18 During that period, famine and excessive bēgār led to large-scale migrations to the Punjab.19 The colonial administration of Punjab wanted a stable rural agricultural population; the British India Office considered migrations a security issue because the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir had become a frontier between the British colonial empire and Russian imperial projects in Central Asia.20 The land-settlement assessments in the state began in 1887, carried out by an officer of the British colonial government. British colonial permanent settlement practices were associated with the introduction of capitalist revenue systems and gradually transformed occupancy rights into proprietary rights. However, in the Princely States, these settlements transferred usufruct rights but not proprietary rights, which remained instead with the monarch, albeit in attenuated form.21 In Jammu and Kashmir, land reforms focused on imposing limitations on bēgār by establishing taxation assessments in cash or as a share of agricultural product and by granting occupancy and usufruct rights to cultivators. The Jammu and Kashmir Land Settlement Act identified people—kashmīr mulkī—who had usufruct claims on land and who had rights to state patronage in the form of government employment. The legislation also articulated a category of people who did not have such rights—the gairmulkī (people not of the land).22
After the permanent settlements in Kashmir Province and Jammu Province (1887–1905), successive Maharajas faced pressure to recruit only state subjects for employment in state administration. Populist demands to reserve “Kashmir for Kashmiris” erupted, and the state’s first political parties organized protests.23 The Kashmir for Kashmiris demand required a clear definition of who a Kashmiri was, and Maharaja Pratap Singh first established a bureaucratic definition of Jammu and Kashmir nationality in 1912. That definition was based entirely on the conferment and recognition of land occupancy and proprietary rights, and it limited state patronage to those who possessed an ijāzatnāmah (document of permission [to hold land]) issued by the Maharaja’s Darbar, or the state administrative bureaucracy. The Maharaja had full discretion to confer state-owned community land; therefore, he was empowered to confer or to withhold subject status.24 This popular demand for an articulation of state identity was at first primarily about patronage, but it became increasingly connected to rights claims through the franchise and antitaxation movements of the 1920s.
The 1912 nationals definition excluded nomads and migratory people such as the Gujars and Bakerwal herders, whose grazing lands were generally held as khālsah (government property).25 It also excluded residents of Jammu and Kashmir’s internal feudatory dependencies (e.g., Poonch Jagir, Chenani Jagir, and the frontier chieftainships). In mass protest movements in the 1920s and 1930s, members of excluded
