Far away, so close. Imagining the border with two Kashmiri communities

According to Willem Van Schendel, the South Asian sub-continent has been marked by the Wagah syndrome, “a show of aggressive territoriality based on frail sovereignty, developed to compensate for this frustration.” Wagah is the border crossing between Amritsar, Punjab in India and Lahore, Punjab in Pakistan. Van Schendel breaks the Wagah syndrome into further forms including Kashmirian issues. This article is an attempt to consider the ways in which the Kashmir border is imagined by two communities from the Kashmir Valley.