Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Maps and Images
- Acknowledgements
- Map
- Introduction
- 1 Kashmir: The Idea and its Parts
- 2 Conceptualizing a Borderland Approach to Kashmir
- 3 Urban Areas Near the LoC (I)
- 4 Urban Areas Near the LoC (II): The ‘Kashmir Issue’ in Skardu and Kargil
- 5 The Line… the People
- Conclusion: The Politics of Belonging in the Kashmir Borderland
- Acronyms
- References
- Index
1 - Kashmir: The Idea and its Parts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Maps and Images
- Acknowledgements
- Map
- Introduction
- 1 Kashmir: The Idea and its Parts
- 2 Conceptualizing a Borderland Approach to Kashmir
- 3 Urban Areas Near the LoC (I)
- 4 Urban Areas Near the LoC (II): The ‘Kashmir Issue’ in Skardu and Kargil
- 5 The Line… the People
- Conclusion: The Politics of Belonging in the Kashmir Borderland
- Acronyms
- References
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The map of the Kashmir dispute conveys an idea of territorial continuity and unity that is understood not in the sense of identity but rather as a spatial relationship with the Kashmir Valley. The continued framing of the dispute as an issue between India and Pakistan and as a nationalist struggle in the Kashmir Valley reinforces the notion that there was once a consolidated colonial entity against which present developments are to be examined. However, since its creation Kashmir has been a contested space. A border perspective shows how territorialization processes that took place in the colonial and postcolonial period can explain the different attitudes held by those living in these disputed territories towards the whole Kashmir question.
Keywords: Kashmir, colonial entity, Partition, territorialization, militarization, border perspective
The contours of the Kashmir disputed map convey the idea of a spatial continuum, making it seem as if those who live within the contours of the former princely state inherently share some kind of bond, rather than simply having come to live side by side under the same ruler as the result of territorial conquests. As Winichakul Thongchai notes on the differences between pre-modern and modern maps as representations of spatial reality in his work on the making of Siam as a nation, ‘boundary lines must exist before a map’ because maps refer to an existing reality. The map of the Kashmir dispute also expresses an idea that this region is a politically integrated territory rather than a collection of loosely administered areas. In his seminal work Mapping an Empire, Mathew Edney points out that the mapping of British India through the Great Trigonometrical Survey served as the key ‘to the conceptual consolidation of a pre-existent India’. Similarly, it can be said that the mapped configuration of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and its continued reproduction as a unit (albeit partitioned between India and Pakistan by a discontinuous line) over multiple decades demonstrates an essentialist understanding of the disputed territory. The unity conveys an idea of territorial contiguity that overlooks the fragments and fissures of the princely state that were never fully administratively integrated but rather shared an economic and political centre in the Kashmir Valley.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Kashmir as a BorderlandThe Politics of Space and Belonging across the Line of Control, pp. 35 - 62Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019