Finding the Pandits

The mass exodus of Kashmir's Hindu Pandit community was one of the most significant movements of people to take place in Southasia during the 1990s, though one that has received surprisingly little rounded analysis. The documents that have been painstakingly gathered and presented in this new work, by the former head of the Department of Sociology at the University of Kashmir, now throw new light onto this exodus, as well as onto the major political developments that took place during that decade. Bashir Ahmad Dabla does not hesitate to address sensitive and politically volatile issues, and analyses the complex political situation against a background of rich historical material. In the process, crucial contextualisation is offered on the fleeing of roughly 165,000 Kashmiri Pandits.

The Pandit out-migration is widely understood to have begun during the early 1990s, following the dramatic increase in militant violence in Kashmir. In fact, however, this process was far from monolithic, and Dabla shows interesting differences between those fleeing from urban versus rural communities. In the early stages of the insurgency in Kashmir, it was the urban-based Pandits who migrated to Jammu, as well as Udhampur, Kathua, Chandigarh, Shimla, New Delhi and elsewhere in India. It was only later that rural Pandits migrated, after having lost their homes and possessions. The author has much to say about the economically downtrodden in these communities, though his discussion on the Pandit elite is curiously limited.