Abstract
Presented in the form of a traditional ethnography that describes the life of Kashmiri Pandit migrants in Porkhu Camp in Jammu, this monograph fills a gap in the anthropological literature on migrant communities. Often categorised as an elite group, a form of categorisation that they identify with, Kashmiri Pandits defy easy classification. Unusual in the sense that as Hindus they all belong to a single caste, Brahmin, with radically heterodox customs that may sit uneasily with those of Brahmins elsewhere in India, especially when it comes to diet, that ambivalent status within the Indian mainstream is further exacerbated by the recent controversies around their political status. Labels such as ‘internally displaced persons’ or ‘refugee’ suggest a failure on the part of the state to protect its own citizens apart from the fact that they are generally associated with impoverished and marginalised populations. The designation ‘migrant’, failing as it does to distinguish between those who have voluntarily left their home states in search of a better future and those who have been forced out, also does not adequately describe the compulsions under which people may be forced to relocate. But once adopted, even bureaucratic categories can produce unexpected consequences allowing the Pandits to claim a different kind of voice and position themselves as ‘victims’ and that they are innocent of complicity in the present political turmoil in Kashmir. Ankur Datta’s discussion of the ambiguities around such identity markers occurs against the background of the transit camp, which was his field site and highlights the ‘permanent state of temporariness’ that now marks his respondents’ lives.
Datta’s monograph is written at a time when anthropologists are increasingly being forced to undertake fieldwork in places that are marked by endemic violence. He explores the ruptures created by such violence by exploring the ways in which violent events fold into people’s lives—by exploring the afterlives of such events as it were. Thus, the camp, while being a special kind of place marked by a state of exceptionality, also produces its own sense of everyday as people often live there for decades. In Datta’s work, the ethnographic description of the minutiae of everyday life in the camp is juxtaposed with a sense of contingency. Thus, a camp that has been ‘settled’ for decades may suddenly disappear as people are relocated to more permanent habitations as he found when he revisited his field. By using the ethnographic mode of thick description to describe a transit camp, Datta is also able to problematise his own method and the conceptual tools that anthropologists used to constitute the societies that they study as stable.
This book offers a perspective on Kashmir from the vantage point of a community that has been rarely studied by using a method that is also not often associated with the field of Kashmir studies. It is part of the growing body of ethnographic literature on the state and citizenship. Datta’s ease with the English language, his mastery of the tools of ethnographic description, the way in which he juxtaposes a discussion of the political situation of Kashmir and the Pandit migrants with phenomenological accounts of their experiences with displacement is fascinating and will appeal to non-specialist readers as well as anthropologists and specialists on Kashmir.