Identity matters: Hunza and the hidden text of Britain and China

Abstract

ABSTRACT How do stateless people embody identity when that identity is fixed to changing sites of knowledge? Such is the case for the people of Gilgit-Baltistan who reside in a territory that legally belongs to no nation-state. In particular, many people of Gilgit are aware of their ambiguous political situation but not of a stalemate between British India and China that predates the Kashmir Dispute. The matter hinges on an unremarkable issue: Britain’s colonial Gilgit Agency was in itself a legal governing instrument of British India but did not operate on British sovereign territory. The stalemate challenges the reductive view that the Kashmir Dispute rests solely on Pakistan’s and India’s perceived inheritance to British India. A question raised here is whether after so many years a suppressed history, like the one here, can make any difference to Gilgitis living in the twenty-first century; or if matters have shifted so much under the guise of the Kashmir Dispute that an alternative colonial history of political deception is inconsequential? The paper is constructed as a metaphor comprising three parts: the first and third parts focus on post-partition state identity. Studied between them – anachronistic and discordant – is a little known hidden text.