Historiography from the Margins: Rethinking Jammu's Place in the Historical Narrative of Princely Kashmir

Abstract

This paper undertakes a historiographical audit of the scholarly literature on the former princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, arguing that the Jammu region has been systematically marginalized within a body of scholarship that, despite the state's compound name, has overwhelmingly organized its narrative, sources, and interpretive categories around the Kashmir Valley. Surveying nationalist historiography from Prem Nath Bazaz to the court-chronicle tradition of Bamzai and Sufi, the diplomatic-legalistic scholarship of Huttenback and Lamb, and the post-1990 conflict-studies literature of Ganguly, Schofield, and Wirsing, the paper demonstrates that Jammu recurs across nearly eight decades of scholarship chiefly as backdrop, as dynastic origin point, or as a site of communal violence invoked to explain Kashmir Valley politics, rather than as a subject of historical inquiry in its own right. Drawing on the comparative regional framework developed by Navnita Chadha Behera and the journalistic-historical corpus of Balraj Puri, both of whom explicitly named this imbalance, the paper traces the historiographical and archival conditions that produced and sustained it: the concentration of colonial and princely-state administrative records around Srinagar, the disciplinary convergence of Kashmir studies with international-relations and conflict-resolution scholarship after 1989, and the analytical convenience of a Valley-centric narrative for both Indian and Pakistani nationalist historiographies. The paper concludes by proposing a set of methodological correctives — regional archival recovery, comparative triregional analysis, and attention to Jammu's own internal social and caste heterogeneity — through which a historiography from the margins might be written, and situates this project as a contribution to that wider corrective effort