An poshi teli, yeli van poshi, or ‘while there are forests, there will be food’. This Koshur proverb attributed to Kashmiri Sufi Nund Rishi offers uncanny commentary on the present crisis in Jammu and Kashmir, where controversies over forest land have intertwined with a furore over an economic blockade, and where environmental concerns have been bypassed in the clash of religious and political symbols now demarcating the interests and emotions of Jammu from those of Kashmir. Yet there exists a widespread inability to analyse the situation as a battle of symbols and symptoms. This is a psychologically sick state, but its sickness betokens something rotten in the state of India. To understand it, we need to understand two sets of symbolic oppositions that precede 1947, but which have defined the current crisis: the Valley vs. Jammu; and the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad highway vs. the Banihal pass route.

The opposition between the Valley and Jammu originates in the colonial creation of ‘Jammu and Kashmir’ as a ‘princely kingdom’, sold by the British for a song to Gulab Singh and his descendants. The strategic desire for a buffer zone between the Indian plains and the Central Asian playing fields of the Great Game soon led to the need for a prime holiday retreat for the Raj. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, hunting, fishing, espionage, photography, and summer balls flourished in the Valley under the gaze of the Dogra maharajas based in Jammu, even as the rulers ruthlessly exploited the inhabitants of this prized space. Kashmiris of the Valley were denied the basis of modern subjecthood such as education, sidelined to promote the Dogra rulers’ self-fashioning as, according to historian Mridu Rai, ‘Hindu rulers of a Hindu state’. Their practice of ‘begaar’ conscripted Kashmiri Muslims as unpaid porters for the manual transportation of goods across the kingdom. Kashmiri Pandits, showcased by European Orientalists as representatives of a Hindu antiquity, were however mobilised to enhance Dogra Hindu identity. These are regional memories not easily forgotten.

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