On Uncertain Ground: A Study of Displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir

This book seeks to engage the reader in questioning how societies come to terms with dispossession, loss, and protracted displacement; in other words, what does it mean to be a refugee in one's own state? Since 1989, Jammu and Kashmir has been affected by conflict between the Indian state and an Independence movement. Among the many casualties of this conflict is the historically prominent Hindu Pandit minority of Kashmir who became displaced. Most of them fled Kashmir within the first year of the conflict, relocating to cities like Jammu and New Delhi. They are among the most prominent Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the region. This book moves across different sites, from camps to the larger city of Jammu, exploring how Pandits have remade lives since their displacement and their relationship to nationalisms-Indian and Kashmiri-and the state. Questions of nostalgia, status , and victimhood shape these processes, which disables the displaced person to feel at home and recover their ordinary life. A perpetual tension lies between claims of victimhood that are both unique to and yet contend and compete with the universal narrative of violence faced by other societies.