Mohita Bhatia | Beyond the 'Kashmir' Meta-Narrative: Caste, Identities, and the Politics of Conflict in Jammu and Kashmir

Mohita Bhatia is CSA's Visiting Scholar 2016-2018

Abstract:

In the academic representations of Jammu and Kashmir, territorial conflict emerges as the predominant theme. Such an exclusive conflict-centered approach precludes any nuanced analysis of the heterogeneous, everyday social practices that are not directly related to the conflict discourse; thereby offering only a partial representation of the region. This particularly holds for the marginal groups whose voices get submerged in the conflict meta-narrative. This article aims to unpack the layered caste and class experiences of the Scheduled castes in Jammu that have emerged from both conflict and non-conflict conditions.

Mohita Bhatia is a Fulbright postdoctoral fellow and visiting scholar at the Centre for South Asia, Stanford University. She was formerly an Assistant Professor at the Centre for the Study of Discrimination and Exclusion, JNU. Her research interests encompass the ethnography of ethno-national conflicts, nationalism and borders. She has published in a number of journals including Asian Survey and Economic and Political Weekly and contributed articles in edited volumes of India’s 2014 Elections: A Modi-led Sweep (2015, Sage) and New Perspectives on Kashmir: History, Representation, Politics (forthcoming 2017, Cambridge University Press). She is the co-editor of Religion and Politics in Jammu and Kashmir (forthcoming 2018, Routledge). She is also working on her book on marginal Hindu communities and the Kashmir conflict. Her current project at Stanford involves a comparison of two different India-Pakistan border sites - the LOC and Rajasthan-Sindh border to understand contextual and shifting notions of ‘nations’, ‘borders’ and ’national sense of belongings’.