Ellipses of Exchange: Freedom, Mobility and the Moral Economy in Kashmir

This dissertation focuses on the political dispute in Kashmir to examine the role of commercial networks and economic regulation in the making and un-making of sovereign authority. With its Muslim-majority population, Kashmir has been the site of intense political and territorial rivalry between India, Pakistan and China since 1947, and remains one of the most militarized regions in the world. The study of Kashmir has tended to privilege either communal relations between Hindus and Muslims or nationalism in its major and minor forms as the dominant motor of political relations and tensions. However, existing credit and market networks suggest a different mode for reading the political fissures, one that recalls and incorporates Kashmir’s past as a long frontier before its fragmentation and absorption into empires and nation states. Through a combination of ethnographic and archival research, this dissertation argues that the physical terrain, political jurisdiction, material goods and a highly differentiated merchant class, comprised the conditions of possibility for a form of sovereignty of a different order than that realized in the figure of the nation state. Towards this end, I intercalate the history of regional caravan trade with contemporary modes for mobilizing goods, payments, as well as popular protests towards the achievement of self-determination. The material and political traces of frontier trade are examined across three key sites of inquiry: everyday practices of exchange and brokering, encryptions in political, economic and religious vocabularies, and in the genealogy of commercial regulation. The endurance of trade networks and forms of mediation undertaken by traders shed light on the vitality of political striving in the sphere of everyday economic life and relations, indicating that any future imagination of Kashmir as a sovereign region must take seriously the political significance of its history embedded in trade. I argue that that contemporary networks of trade, and the histories that inform them, are not simply remnants of a pre-national cosmopolitan past but emergent templates for the imagination of future political communities.