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ABSTRACT
How do the displaced recover tangible and intangible losses incurred in displacement? What does the process of recovery involve, especially for members of displaced families who come of age after displacement and face the burden of recovery? This paper engages with these questions in relation to the Hindu minority of the Kashmir valley, better known as the Kashmiri Pandits. Following the outbreak of conflict, the vast majority of this community fled the Kashmir valley in 1990. The paper will explore the biographies of two Kashmiri Pandit men who were children at the time of displacement and came of age in exile. By drawing on their experiences, set in the context of ethnographic research in the city of Jammu in Jammu and Kashmir, this paper examines the process of ‘growing up’ in a non-metropolitan urban area and balancing the recovery of loss alongside the aspirations of the youth. While existing scholarship on societies affected by violence discusses how recovery takes place in engaging with ordinary life, this process has to contend with the limits of ordinary life. The paper argues that the displaced are forced to come to terms with the limits of recovery and confront the dead-endedness of ordinary life.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Datta, On Uncertain Ground.
2. Allison, ‘Precarious Japan’; Greenberg, ‘After the revolution’ and Willis, ‘Learning to Labour’
3. Jeffery, ‘Timepass’; Kumar, ‘Indian youth and electoral politics’, Kumar, ‘The time of youth joblessness’; Lietchy, ‘Out here in Kathmandu’ and Nakassis, ‘Suspended kinship an youth sociality’
4. Valentin, ‘Transnational education and the remaking of social identity’.
5. Chatty, ‘Researching Youth in the Middle East’, 266.
6. Barbosa, “On Non-Cockfights.”
7. Buccholtz, ‘Youth an cultural practice’, 526.
8. Malkki, ‘Purity an Exile’
9. Eg. Peteet, ‘Landscapes of hope and despair’ and Sanyal, ‘Contesting Refugeehood’
10. Das and Kleinman, ‘Introduction’.
11. Kleinman, ‘What Really matters’, 14
12. Frederikson, ‘Waiting for Nothing’.
13. See Datta, ‘Dealing with dislocation’. In this paper I show how nostalgia affects a sense of connection to place.
14. See Jansen, ‘Homeless at home’.
15. See Jansen, ‘Homeless at home’, and ‘Refuchess’. Jansen’s observation seems applicable across a range of situations. I wonder if this applies in the case of Jammu and Kashmir in other ways. As a geopolitical problem, the Kashmir conflict is often explained as a problem of decolonisation and the establishment of nation-states in 1947. However, when the conflict as it is seen began in 1990, along with the displacement of the Pandits, the Indian state began a process of economic reforms which resulted in changes in notions of middle classness and aspirations for some. For the Kashmiri Pandits, the change in the relation with the state is important. A vast section of migrants was ‘government’ category, i.e. those who were employees of the state in some form. The period up to 1990 was a period when employment in the state was the most valued form of employment. The question of aspiring for private sector work emerges in the post 1990 period. I wonder what this shift means for an older generation of migrants. This may be explored later in further work.
16. Rajkovic, ‘For an anthropology of the demoralised’.
17. Greenberg, ‘On the road to normal’, 89, 93.
18. Chatterji, ‘The Spoils of Partition’, Zamindar, ‘The Long Partition’
19. See Das, ‘Our work is to cry, your work is listen’.
20. See Das, ‘Life and words’.
21. See Bhan, ‘Counterinsurgency, Democracy, and The Politics of Identity in India’; Calis, ‘Routine & Rupture’.
22. Fuchs, ‘Give me the space to live’.
23. Pant, ‘The Kashmiri Pandit’; Datta, ‘On Uncertain Ground’, 129–159. One chapter from this book features a detailed discussion of how caste and class shape a sense of self an image for the Kashmiri Pandits.
24. Bhasin-Jamwal, ‘Auditing the Mainstream Media’.
25. Datta, ‘Rethinking spaces of exception.’
26. Pseudonyms used for all names mentioned.
27. Datta, ‘Rethinking spaces of exception’, 169–170.
28. Datta, ‘Intangible Pressures in Jammu and Kashmir’, 18.
29. See Al Jazeera, ‘As Kashmir’s Hindus face targeted killings, hundreds flee valley’.
30. Jansen, ‘Misplaced masculinities’, 186.
31. Noorani, ‘Article 370.’
32. Bose, ‘Kashmir’.
33. Chowdhary, ‘Social diversity and Political divergence in Jammu and Kashmir’, 213–228. Chowdhary discussion in one chapter of the book is informative and nuanced summary the event and a discussion of its implications on the state as a whole. The chapter lays open the intra-regional faultlines.
34. Tripathi, ‘Majority of Kashmiris never had faith in the constitution’.
35. Naqash, ‘There is no solution. We will be killed one by one’.
36. Khajuria, ‘Kashmiri Pandits end strike, allege government stopped salaries’.
37. Datta, ‘Uncertain Journeys’, 1119.