Narratives of Displaced Kashmiri Pandits: Mobility, Diasporic Morbidity and the Chronotope of Victimhood

The term ‘diaspora’, beyond its biblical usage, has been used to refer to groups of people who live in one place but have – and express – ancestral ties to another, an ‘idealised’ homeland (Cohen and Fisher 2019). The diasporic experience is generally considered one of ambivalence, of a double presence: nostalgia for home (then and there) and a possibility of opportunity in a new space (now and here). Rather than studying diaspora as a simple move between two sedentary time-spaces, I study Kashmiri diaspora from a slightly different perspective: I follow the sociolinguis­tic tropes of their ‘diaspora becoming’, the struggles in their acculturation to the ‘local’, in becoming the ‘other’. The conflicts that shape their cultural transformation become audible in the narratives of their new location, in the ‘peripheries’. These narratives provide insights into the ways in which dispersed populations express their diasporic identifications, the various linguistic resources and practices they recruit to instrumentalise Kashmiri diaspora in action; an irreversible, ongoing process of identity transformation, from káshir (Kashmiris) to ‘migrants’.