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Uncertain Journeys: Return migration, home, and uncertainty for a displaced Kashmiri community*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2017

ANKUR DATTA
ANKUR DATTA*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, South Asian University, New Delhi, India Email: ankurdatta@soc.sau.ac.in
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Abstract

This article explores situations in which forced migrants revisit places and homes they had fled from, drawing on research carried out among Kashmiri Hindus, better known as Pandits, who were displaced following the outbreak of conflict in Jammu and Kashmir in 1990. Due to the breakdown of law and order, selective attacks, and a climate of fear, most of the community had relocated from the Kashmir valley to the south in Jammu and to even cities such as New Delhi, constituting one of the most prominent groups of Internally Displaced Persons in the region. While there is an interest in repatriation/resettlement in scholarship and policy, the experiences of the Pandits reveal the multiple meanings ‘return’ holds for the displaced. This article will draw on the experiences of Pandit forced migrants in Jammu who have returned to visit Kashmir. Their experiences will be situated with work on return migration, the Kashmir conflict, and the political location of the Pandits in the region. The article argues that return migration is an inconclusive phenomenon that critically raises questions of home and uncertainty, and provides a way to understand how the displaced locate themselves in the world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 4 , July 2017 , pp. 1099 - 1125
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

*

I wish to thank Jayani Bonnerjee, Krishna Datta, Divya Vaid, my ‘writing-up’ seminar group from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and the two anonymous reviewers from Modern Asian Studies, whose comments helped make this paper a publishable article. Fieldwork was partly funded by the Central Research Fund, University of London and the PhD studentship, LSE.

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