Postcolonial India has the longest border fence in the world, of which one-third is present in the disputed region of Jammu and Kashmir. The Line of Control, which became a de facto border following the first Indo-Pak War of 1949, divided J&K into two parts: each controlled by the two newly formed dominions. It also pierced the Poonch district which had historically existed as a single socio-political entity; separating families, dividing communities, and fragmenting identities. Borders are 'superimposed' (Newman, 2006) and act as battlegrounds for expression of a nation-state's power and culture (Wilson & Donnan, 1998). Even as they represent spaces of daily struggle for those who inhabit them (Anderson & Dowd, 1999), the multiple identities that exist in the borderlands disrupt the manufactured national unity and state centralization through everyday performance of cross-border connectedness against the everyday state practices of reinforcing the state boundaries.
Following these theoretical considerations, the proposed paper examines the formation of LoC in Poonch region of J&K through which India demarcated and limited its sovereign territory while suppressing historical connectedness of the region. The proposed paper draws from the case studies of select divided families conducted in the Indian-administered side of erstwhile Poonch to study the entrenchment of everyday state in social world of borderlanders. On one hand, through practices such as national festivals, developmental projects, and border fencing, the state produces and reproduces new national identities on an everyday basis subsuming traditional ties. On the other, people constantly negotiate these attempts and somehow continue to sustain their traditional relationships. Thus, the two important questions that this paper seeks to answer are: How the everyday state practices dislocates people from their communities and integrates them into postcolonial nation-states, and how do people navigate the matrix of everyday state practices to preserve their traditional community linkages?
