Partition, identity and belonging among Sikhs in the borderland district of Kargil, Ladakh

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sikhs in Ladakh arrived as traders in Jammu and Kashmir, and settled around the major trading centres along the silk-route such as Skardu, Kargil, Leh in the then undivided erstwhile princely state as it existed before 1947-partition. Tracing their journey across tribulations of time, this paper studies identity and belonging among the Sikh-community living in the borderland town of Kargil through life-histories and oral-narratives collected on the ground. Despite having always existed as a small minority amidst an overwhelming Muslim majority, the work while recording the lived-experiences of the Sikhs during partition and, in times of subsequent wars in a post-partition era in this borderland, foregrounds the binding role that linguistic and territorial ethnic identity plays in a multi-religious community. In doing so, the work studies the parallel construction and evolution of a religious identity with that of an ethno-religious one, where shared ethnic-affiliations bind a multi-religious community together when religious differences tend to divide them.