Who Belongs to the State ? A Genealogy of the 1927 Hereditary State Subject Notification, the Agitations over Outsiders, and the Making of Article 35A in Jammu and Kashmir
DOI: 10.66715/jirf/2026.v1.i2.229239 | Review Paper | 2026 | Volume 1 | Issue 02 | Page 229-239
Kashab Kumar, Assistant Professor of History, Higher Education Department, Government of Jammu and Kashmir, Research Scholar, University of Kashmir
Abstract
The Hereditary State Subject notification issued in the name of Maharaja Hari Singh in 1927 is routinely invoked in debates on Article 35A of the Indian Constitution as the ancient root of Jammu and Kashmir's special protections for its 'permanent residents'. This article reconstructs the genealogy of that notification and asks what such a reading leaves out. It argues that the 1927 order was the contingent outcome of competing claims, advanced by Kashmiri Pandits, Dogra elites and others, over access to state service and land in a state where Punjabi professionals and administrators were prominent; that it was designed to allocate a bounded set of occupational and proprietary entitlements rather than to articulate a theory of citizenship; and that its categories carried exclusions, of later-settled outsiders, of women in subsequent administrative practice, and of groups who arrived after the cut-off dates, which the post-1947 constitutional order inherited. Tracing the passage from the 1927 order through the Praja Sabha reforms, the Delhi Agreement of 1952, the Presidential Order of 1954 and the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir to the changes of 2019, the article shows how a service-and-land entitlement became a marker of political identity and a constitutional symbol. It concludes by identifying the archival work needed to test this account.
Keywords: State Subject; Hereditary State Subject notification (1927); Article 35A; permanent residents; Jammu and Kashmir; Dogra state; Kashmiri Pandits; princely states; citizenship
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