The Partition of the Indian Subcontinent: Border Identities in Jammu and Kashmir (Asian Borderlands)

Pir-Panjals, the Himalayan ranges in Jammu and Kashmir, are home to various communities known for their distinctiveness, heterogeneity and diversity. Such diversity is historically embedded in the fluidity embodied by folds of Panjals. These folds encapsulated social, cultural, and religious plurality within the principalities that thrived here. The Partition of 1947 profoundly altered this by carving lines of demarcation―present day line-of-control―into the landscape. These lines have territorially, religiously and culturally divided ethnicities, including the Paharis of Poonch, known for multi-religious and linguistic cohesion. This book examines Partition’s impact on these pockets of diversity by exploring how Partition’s borders continue to shape social, symbolic and religious boundaries and how these boundaries impact shared plurality here. The work emphasizes the need to identify and archive sources of plurality so that their cultivation and practice continue to counter “the binaries” that essentially homogenize life-ways into categories of us versus them.

Malvika Sharma is currently a Nehru-Fulbright Post-Doctoral Visiting Research Fellow at Department of Religion, Wesleyan University, Connecticut, U.S. She has previously worked at Institute for Economic Growth, New Delhi. She has a doctorate in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her research work has appeared in key journals such as H.A.U. the Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation, and Culture, Asian Ethnicity, Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, among others.