Trading on High Ground: Risk and Regulation in Kashmir

How does the marketplace become a volatile site of interaction between political violence and everyday life? Drawing on fieldwork in Kashmir, and archival data from colonial commercial regulation, this talk explores how trade is an important field in which - and through which - political power is expressed and contested. Bringing together the social history of trans-Himalayan caravan trade with contemporary flows of goods and payments in Kashmir’s markets reveals complex exchange geographies that defy territorial enclosure and militarized state-building. The talk shows how historical exchange communities - and their credit practices that evolved to facilitate long-distance trade - now face the risk of criminalization as they navigate the increasingly blurred lines between legal and illegal domains of exchange. Furthermore, Dr Saraf argues that states manipulate the uncertainties of trade and exchange in the trans-Himalayas to enforce spatio-political demarcations in disputed “frontier” regions.

Register Now