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.” Not infrequently, the same thing was given to me from radically different stated motives; one person brought me a collection of jihadist magazines so that I could better understand why jihād is a legitimate form of “resistance against a terrorist state [India],” and another brought me one of the same magazines so that I could see how it “exploits the uneducated [and has become] a terrorist business [which is] ruining Pakistani society.” Many people risked social or state disapproval to show me the truth as they understood it.
The ethnographic quotations in this book come from my transcripts of recorded interviews and from my own original field notes. To maintain the confidentiality of my interlocutors, I have identified people by a combination of fictive name and a general time frame for the interview. I don’t use specific identifying information except when the significance of the information cannot be conveyed without knowing that information. In the process of analyzing the life histories and narratives that refugees constructed for me, I tracked the different markers in the narratives that would make the speakers recognizable. I did this originally in order to obscure such markers, but in the process of doing so, I came to a much clearer perception of how Kashmiri refugees as historical subjects are implicated in multiple sites of power, both informal and institutional. Twice, I have attributed a quotation or a piece of a life story to a new speaker when in fact the narrator had already appeared in the text under another name. I did this because the information conveyed was so specific that to use the same name twice would have effectively revealed the actual identity of the person. However, none of the stories represent compilations of multiple accounts. I have selected narratives and accounts that are good examples of the personal experiences, sentiments, and concerns expressed by many people over the years. The selection of stories represents my own final understanding of the development and transformation of refugee political life in AJK and Pakistan.
ORGANIZATION OF THE BOOK
Chapter 1 discusses the history and historicity of Kashmiri political subject formation in order to explain the apparent paradox of the Kashmiri refugee collective identification—that the very existence of the Kashmiri refugee as a politicolegal and sociocultural identity both underwrites and challenges the structural foundations of the postcolonial nation-state in South Asia. In the colonial-era Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir, the first political movements produced a highly territorialized definition of political belonging in the greater Kashmir region. The historical patterns of dislocation in the region between 1947 and 2001 then created a dispersed population of people who became categorized as “refugees from the State of Jammu and Kashmir” living in Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir. The identity category Kashmiri refugee emerged as a subject position, within a domain of rights claims, as the sovereign ground of the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. For this reason, the state's territorial borders provide neither the empirical nor analytical language needed to express the relationship between being Kashmiri and political activism.
Chapter 2 delves into competing ideas about what it means to be a refugee in the Kashmir region, aided by life-history narratives of men and women, young and elderly, who have been forcibly displaced because of interstate wars or intrastate insurgency. In their lifetimes, displaced people can move between being muhājirs (refugees) and mujāhids (Islamic warriors). The chapter examines the Islamicate concepts of protective migration (hijarat) and struggle (jihād) to show how