Colonial legacies, tribal assertion, and situational agency: Gujjar-Bakarwal political mobilisation in Jammu and Kashmir, 1947 to 2023

Tracing seven decades of Gujjar-Bakarwal mobilisation in Jammu and Kashmir from the communal violence of Partition in 1947 to the Tribal Bachao March of 2022, this article situates the analysis within a postcolonial framework. The argument maintains that the community’s political trajectory defies any single explanatory lens and requires a periodised analysis attentive to shifting configurations of colonial and postcolonial state power, communal politics and armed conflict. Drawing on Partha Chatterjee’s concept of political society, Ranajit Guha’s subaltern historiography, and the political process model of social movements, the paper identifies five distinct phases of mobilisation. These include survival politics after Partition, the emergence of tribal consciousness and the campaign for Scheduled Tribe status, the constitutional moment and the politics of recognition, the entanglement of tribal identity with communal polarisation, and the post-Article 370 intensification of both threat and solidarity. Throughout each phase, the analysis traces situational agency, defined as political action calibrated to historical conjuncture that is neither pure resistance nor pure accommodation. Grounded in sustained qualitative fieldwork conducted over five years across seven critical districts, this account offers a comprehensive postcolonial political history of a community systematically overlooked by scholarship preoccupied with the Kashmiri Muslim and Indian state binary.