“Refugee in My Own Country”: Exile, Hospitality and Ethics in the Writings of Kashmiri Pandits

Abstract

The fascination with a national history has dominated our imagination for a long time.
The aptness of Chatterjee’s argument brings into focus histories of regions that have
remained largely ignored and not received much scholarly attention. My intention in
this essay is not to uncover the history of such a confederation or province, rather this
essay seeks to examine the little explored fictional and non-fictional narratives of
Kashmiri Pandits, a Hindu ethic community who left the valley of Kashmir, following
the armed call for independence by Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front(JKLF) from
India that resulted in wide-spread conflict and violence in the valley as an attempt to
understand how the nation(if any) is conceptualized from a prism that is already
fragmented by exile and trauma . While the JKLF allegedly targeted the informers of
the state, especially civil servants and police officers, the Pandits were not spared and
some of them suffered inconsolable violence