Robinson - Body of Victim, Body of Warrior (South Asia Across the Disciplines)

Body of Victim, Body of Warrior

SOUTH ASIA ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

Edited by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sheldon Pollock, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam

South Asia Across the Disciplines is a series devoted to publishing first books across a wide range of South Asian studies, including art, history, philology or textual studies, philosophy, religion, and interpretive social sciences. Contributors all share the goal of opening up new archives, especially in South Asian languages, and suggesting new methods and approaches, while demonstrating that South Asian scholarship can be at once deep in expertise and broad in appeal.

Funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and jointly published by the University of California Press, the University of Chicago Press, and Columbia University Press. Read more about the series at http://www.saacrossdisciplines.org .

Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration , by Yigal Bronner (Columbia University Press, 2010)

The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab , by Farina Mir (University of California Press, 2010)

Unifying Hinduism: The Philosophy of Vijnanabhiksu in Indian Intellectual History , by Andrew J. Nicholson (Columbia University Press, 2010)

Secularizing Islamists?: Jamaat-e-Islami and Jama at-ud-Dawa in Urban Pakistan , by Humeira Iqtidar (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia , by Ronit Ricci (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

Conjugations: Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema , by Sangita Gopal (University of Chicago Press, 2011)

The Powerful Ephemeral: Everyday Healing in an Ambiguously Islamic Place , by Carla Bellamy (University of California Press, 2011)

Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists , by Cabeiri deBergh Robinson (University of California Press, 2013)

Body of Victim, Body of Warrior

REFUGEE FAMILIES AND THE MAKING OF KASHMIRI JIHADISTS

Cabeiri deBergh Robinson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu .

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

2013 by The Regents of the University of California

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-520-27420-4 ISBN 978-0-520-27421-1

eISBN 9780520954540

Manufactured in the United States of America

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In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

FIGURES

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

NOTE ON NAMES, TRANSLITERATION, AND PHOTOGRAPHS

In this book, I refer to the distinct governmental regions of the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir by the names by which they are identified in their own current constitutional documents. In Pakistan, the State of Azad Jammu and Kashmir is commonly referred to as Azad Kashmir (Free Kashmir) and in India it is known as POK (Pakistan Occupied Kashmir). I employ its full constitutional name except when I am presenting ethnographic materials, in which case I reproduce names like Azad Kashmir and Occupied Kashmir in order not to distort the speakers intentions. For the sake of consistency and clarity, I refer to its government as the government of Azad Jammu and Kashmir. Likewise, I refer to the 1949 UN Ceasefire Line as the military Line of Control, even though it wasnt officially renamed until the Simla Agreement of 1972.

Following anthropological convention, I use pseudonyms in my presentation of all ethnographic information. For unmarried youths and young men, I use only a single name. I use two names for older men to whom I owe the respect due to an elder, but in order to avoid the confusion that would result from using a fictive second name linked to descent-group identities, I use two male first names. Women generally have as a second name the first name of their father or of their husband; I use the second name Bibi for younger women and Begum for elder women. In my presentation of historical material, such as documents or memoirs, I use real names as recorded in the public or governmental record.

Transliteration of Urdu words follows the system standardized by John T. Platts in A Dictionary of Urd, Classical Hind, and English and reflects the standard spelling of the word as it is written . I do not use diacritical markings in any personal names, proper nouns, or adjectives generated from proper nouns (such as Kashmiri or Pakistani) unless they are a part of an Urdu language phrase. In the case of political parties and militant organizations for which there are several alternative English transliterations in use, I employ a common one. The term jihd has entered into English-language usage in the past decade. As an English word, jihad is used to refer to Islamic religious warfare. As an Islamicate word, however, the term has a more variegated meaning; it can refer to a struggle in either spiritual or material realms. In this text, I retain the hard diacritic to mark the fact that it has also become a dialectical term, jihd, which refers simultaneously to its use within specific Muslim societies and to its integration into a global political vocabulary. I use the term as a foreign word (jihd) to mark its use (1) as an ethnographic distinction within translated ethnographic quotes to draw attention to the speakers original use of the term; and (2) as a purely Islamic concept in religious texts. I deploy a grammatically unconventional plural in this text to make another ethnographic distinction; muhjirn is the correct grammatical plural of muhjir (refugee) and mujhidn of mujhid (warrior), but I use English plurals (muhjirs and mujhids) to indicate a plurality of individuals as opposed to a collectivity. This is an important distinction in the greater Kashmir context, where people use a singular noun with a plural verb to mean groups of individuals; for example, yeh lg mujhid hai (those people are mujhids ). Thus, I use the word mujhids when many individual militants are involved, but I use the word mujhidn when referring to a collective of militants acting or speaking as members of an organization.