Body of Victim, Body of Warrior. Cabeiri deBergh Robinson
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units. The administrative hierarchy was most consolidated in Jammu and Kashmir Provinces; each was divided into districts that were in turn distinguished by taxation units called tehsils. Chenani Jagir and Poonch Jagir were incorporated into Jammu Province only in the 1930s. The Frontier Ilaquas consisted of the Ladakh Wazarat, the Gilgit Agency, the vassal states of Hunza and Nagar, and the tribal region of Chilas (which was never successfully surveyed by the monarchical state). These areas had a semi-autonomous feudatory status within the Princely State, which had limited administrative control.14
To establish their power, the Princely State’s first Maharajas (Gulab Singh and Ranbir Singh) began consolidating the dispersed jāgīrdārī system of land tenancy and revenue administration, in which the revenue of a territorial estate (jāgīr) and the responsibility of governing it accrued to an appointed official (jāgīrdār) who owed allegiance to the monarch.15 Establishing a consolidated administrative hierarchy involved bringing the semi-independent hereditary jāgīrs—such as Chenani Jagir and Poonch Jagir—into a subordinate relationship with the Maharaja’s court and enforcing the state’s claim that all land was government property (khālsah).16 The Maharajas also extended the system of containment and exit permits (rehdārī) that had been used by the Sikh governors of the Kashmir Valley to the whole of the Princely State, in an effort to prevent people who were subject to taxation in the form of compulsory corvee labor (bēgār) from leaving the state or migrating out of their taxation divisions.17
Identifying awām-e-riyāsat (people of the state) as a category of political belonging, administration, and governance first developed in the 1880s, during the agrarian land reforms of the jāgīrdārī system.18 During that period, famine and excessive bēgār led to large-scale migrations to the Punjab.19 The colonial administration of Punjab wanted a stable rural agricultural population; the British India Office considered migrations a security issue because the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir had become a frontier between the British colonial empire and Russian imperial projects in Central Asia.20 The land-settlement assessments in the state began in 1887, carried out by an officer of the British colonial government. British colonial permanent settlement practices were associated with the introduction of capitalist revenue systems and gradually transformed occupancy rights into proprietary rights. However, in the Princely States, these settlements transferred usufruct rights but not proprietary rights, which remained instead with the monarch, albeit in attenuated form.21 In Jammu and Kashmir, land reforms focused on imposing limitations on bēgār by establishing taxation assessments in cash or as a share of agricultural product and by granting occupancy and usufruct rights to cultivators. The Jammu and Kashmir Land Settlement Act identified people—kashmīr mulkī—who had usufruct claims on land and who had rights to state patronage in the form of government employment. The legislation also articulated a category of people who did not have such rights—the gairmulkī (people not of the land).22
After the permanent settlements in Kashmir Province and Jammu Province (1887–1905), successive Maharajas faced pressure to recruit only state subjects for employment in state administration. Populist demands to reserve “Kashmir for Kashmiris” erupted, and the state’s first political parties organized protests.23 The Kashmir for Kashmiris demand required a clear definition of who a Kashmiri was, and Maharaja Pratap Singh first established a bureaucratic definition of Jammu and Kashmir nationality in 1912. That definition was based entirely on the conferment and recognition of land occupancy and proprietary rights, and it limited state patronage to those who possessed an ijāzatnāmah (document of permission [to hold land]) issued by the Maharaja’s Darbar, or the state administrative bureaucracy. The Maharaja had full discretion to confer state-owned community land; therefore, he was empowered to confer or to withhold subject status.24 This popular demand for an articulation of state identity was at first primarily about patronage, but it became increasingly connected to rights claims through the franchise and antitaxation movements of the 1920s.
The 1912 nationals definition excluded nomads and migratory people such as the Gujars and Bakerwal herders, whose grazing lands were generally held as khālsah (government property).25 It also excluded residents of Jammu and Kashmir’s internal feudatory dependencies (e.g., Poonch Jagir, Chenani Jagir, and the frontier chieftainships). In mass protest movements in the 1920s and 1930s, members of excluded groups demanded the benefits of recognition as state nationals. In 1927, Maharaja Pratap Singh instituted the Hereditary State Subject Order of 1984 (1927 C.E.),26 which defined hereditary state subjects as “all persons born and residing in the State before the commencement of the reign of His Highness the late Maharaja Gulab Singh Sahib Bahadur (1846 C.E.) and also persons who settled therein before the commencement of Samvat 1942 (1888 C.E.).”27 The 1927 state subject definition established that subjects of the monarchy had durable rights. By limiting the Maharaja’s ability to confer land rights and by restricting employment in government institutions to established state subjects, it also created a legal mechanism though which they could make claims on the Princely State. At the same time, state subjects also became the site of new forms of control, regulation, and political contestation. Whereas the regulatory acts of the nineteenth century had focused on the border, during the 1920s to 1940s, the Maharaja used the legal category “state subject” to exert claims over his subject nationals when they were in foreign territories. The category also facilitated the development of legal mechanisms to exclude foreigners and seditious (i.e., antimonarchist) ideas from the Princely State.28
Demands on the Maharaja’s government for patronage and legal recognition of proprietary rights continued into 1931, culminating in riots at religious sites in the Kashmir Valley, Mirpur district, and the city of Jammu.29 The subsequent Glancy Commission Report reflected British colonial anxieties about communal politics in British India. However, the commissioners’ recommendations reflected the emphasis within the state on legal and rights-based definitions of political belonging; the report recommended that government jobs be reserved for state subjects, that full proprietary rights be allocated to land occupants, that the state pay for all forms of labor services as a resolution to remaining bēgār taxation, and that state subjects participate in state government.
Between 1932 and 1936, Maharaja Hari Singh redefined the state subject and accepted the Jammu and Kashmir Constitution Act of 1996 (1934 C.E.),30 which established the state’s first Legislative Assembly—the Praja Sabha. An amended Hereditary State Subject Order (1932) was drafted concurrently with the Constitution Act of 1934; it established three classes of state subjects and a hierarchy of rights firmly based on claims to immovable property and agricultural land, bureaucratic labor, and limitations on taxation.31 Although these rights were not directly linked to political representation, the Praja Sabha representatives (who were appointed by the Maharaja) used the recognition and distribution of land rights as a means of conferring political rights. The Praja Sabha passed a number of regulations that prevented the commodification of property and transferred some of the power of conferring political status from the Maharaja to the Legislative Assembly. Similarly, the Maharaja’s council used the connection between land rights and state subject status to extend its own administrative control in the many internal feudatories it did not fully control. Poonch Jagir, for example, was not represented in the first Praja Sabha because in 1934 it was still an independent jāgīr with its own hereditary Rajas. In 1939, the council brought the Poonch Jagir into the Princely State’s direct administrative structure—and more pointedly shifted the right of taxation to the Maharaja—by conferring land rights, and thus state-subject status and Praja Sabha representation, to residents of the Poonch Jagir.32
In the late 1930s, political parties and subaltern movements began to argue for direct franchise rights for state subjects. The Praja Sabha allowed for only minimal direct popular participation and had only advisory power. Its formation, however, legalized political parties in the Princely State, and a number of regional and transregional parties developed after 1932. Political party development in Jammu and Kashmir was not a simple extension of anticolonial and nationalist movements in British India. Parties developed from networks of educational reading groups and religious associations that had been legally permitted formal associations before 1932. During the agitations of 1931, members of these groups, including the prominent leaders Ghulam Abbass, Sheikh Mohammad