A Line on Paper, a Society on the Ground: The 1949 Cease-fire Line, the Administration of Movement, and the Making of a Border Society in Jammu and Kashmir, 1949–1972

The Cease-fire Line (CFL) fixed at Karachi on 27 July 1949 was drawn by soldiers to end a war, not by diplomats to separate states, and both India and Pakistan insisted that it was not an international frontier. Yet between 1949 and the Simla Agreement of 1972 it became, for the people who lived along it, one of the hardest lines in South Asia. This article examines how that happened. It argues that the Line was made durable less by fortification than by administration: permits and passports that regulated crossing, State Subject and evacuee property regimes that decided who belonged and who could return, and civil and military control of frontier zones in Poonch, Rajouri, Jammu, Uri and Kargil. Drawing on United Nations and treaty documents, legislation, memoirs and the literature on Partition and borderlands, the article shows how these instruments divided families, cut older economic circuits and, across two decades and two further wars, produced a border society that organised livelihood, loyalty and memory around a line no government recognised as a boundary. The study joins the social history of Partition with the historiography of Kashmir, and it closes by identifying the district archival and oral evidence from the Pir Panjal against which the argument should be tested.