Ethnographic inheritances in Kashmir: The academic and social life of an ethnographic monograph

Abstract

What are the connections between different ethnographic texts of a particular society that emerge in different times? How do these connections play out in practice in the writing of ethnography, and methodologically in ethnographic research and analysis? These questions will be explored in relation to the study of societies based in Jammu and Kashmir, and with specific interest on the Kashmiri Pandits. This article focuses on T.N. Madan’s book Family and Kinship: a study of the Pandits of rural Kashmir. First published in 1966, this ethnography was a seminal text in the study of the Hindu family and was one of the first modern ethnographies set in the region of Jammu and Kashmir. I explore the place of this text in establishing a baseline for ethnographic studies of the Kashmiri Pandits that followed Madan’s work, the anthropology and sociology of Kashmir, and how it interacts with the actual practice of ethnographic research in the region, including my own ethnographic work on the Kashmiri Pandits. Apart from serving as a source of knowledge, I discuss how Madan’s monograph circulates among Pandits, thus considering the social life of Madan’s text and how ethnographies circulate in different publics. The article therefore explores the relation between ethnographic texts that focus on the same people separated by time, theme, contexts their subjects inhabit, the contexts in which they are read and the connection contemporary ethnographies have with older texts in their descriptions of a particular society. The article looks at the tension that mark ethnographies as social science texts, as resources of a kind and as potential chronicles over time.