The story of the former state of Jammu and Kashmir is usually told as though it belonged to a single people. Newspapers spoke of “the Kashmiri mood.” Television debates invoked “the aspirations of Jammu and Kashmir.” Even academic literature often treated the politics of the Kashmir Valley as the political grammar of the entire state. Yet this has always been an incomplete history. The erstwhile state was not a singular political community but a mosaic of histories, cultures, religions, and identities that often interpreted the same events in profoundly different ways.

Beyond the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley lived the Dogras of Jammu, the Buddhist-majority population of Ladakh, the Shia-majority district of Kargil, Kashmiri Sikhs, and smaller but historically significant communities such as the Gujjars, Bakarwals, Baltis, Brokpas, Changpas, and Purigis. Each possessed its own historical memory, political vocabulary, and relationship with the Indian Union. To speak of “the people of Jammu and Kashmir” as though they constituted a single political bloc was always more a convenience than a description. Communities outside the Valley have long argued that India’s national imagination ~ and much of international commentary ~ understood them primarily through the prism of Kashmir’s separatist conflict.

Their own aspirations, political preferences, and historical experiences often disappeared beneath a narrative that assumed the Valley represented the whole. The first casualty of this narrowing was arguably the Dogra imagination itself. The princely state established under Maharaja Gulab Singh in 1846 brought together territories that had rarely existed under one political authority. His successor, Maharaja Hari Singh, governed a remarkably diverse kingdom while introducing a series of administrative and social reforms. Whatever judgment history ultimately renders on princely rule, the Dogra dynasty occupies a foundational place in the making of modern Jammu and Kashmir. Yet after accession to India in 1947 and the eclipse of Maharaja Hari Singh’s political authority, the state’s public memory increasingly revolved around the Valley.

As constitutional disputes and later insurgency came to dominate national attention, the historical role of the Dogras gradually........

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