One of the persistent concerns and conflicts faced by social scientists who study different aspects of Indian society and politics pertains to a methodological divide. This divide is constituted by a separation of methods into the quantitative and qualitative broadly. While these two categories cover a wide range of methods and techniques of research and data collection, they have also been treated as representing two polarities of the social sciences, often seemingly opposed. This note will explore the division between the quantitative and qualitative. 3 While we feel that any divide in method and theory is counterproductive to the larger project of studying political life, we want to try and see how this separation can be bridged without necessarily forcing cohabitation. By looking at the survey as a method, this note is an initial attempt to engage in a dialogue between quantitative-and qualitative-oriented scholars and to perhaps consider how the two groups are far closer than they think.

This article explores situations in which forced migrants revisit places and homes they had fled from, drawing on research carried out among Kashmiri Hindus, better known asPandits, who were displaced following the outbreak of conflict in Jammu and Kashmir in 1990. Due to the breakdown of law and order, selective attacks, and a climate of fear, most of the community had relocated from the Kashmir valley to the south in Jammu and to even cities such as New Delhi, constituting one of the most prominent groups of Internally Displaced Persons in the region. While there is an interest in repatriation/resettlement in scholarship and policy, the experiences of the Pandits reveal the multiple meanings ‘return’ holds for the displaced. This article will draw on the experiences of Pandit forced migrants in Jammu who have returned to visit Kashmir. Their experiences will be situated with work on return migration, the Kashmir conflict, and the political location of the Pandits in the region. The article argues that return migration is an inconclusive phenomenon that critically raises questions of home and uncertainty, and provides a way to understand how the displaced locate themselves in the world.

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This article addresses two questions: first, how do communities facing protracted displacement deal with the experience of migration and place-making? Second, how do notions of home mediate this relationship? I approach these questions by taking the case of Kashmiri Pandits, the upper caste Hindu minority of the Kashmir valley, who were displaced due to the outbreak of conflict in Jammu and Kashmir in 1989–90 and a significant section of whom were located in displaced persons’ camps during 1990–2011. The article draws upon discussions with Pandits who contrast nostalgia for life in Kashmir with experiences of re-establishing social and political relationships after displacement. Place and migration here are both treated as contexts and products of social activity that involve considerations of objects, physical environment and communal relationships. The article will argue that discussions of place and home are marked by a tension between desires for reclaiming home and security, and the condition of uncertainty faced by groups like Kashmiri Pandits in the present.

In her seminal essay written in the aftermath of the 1984 pogrom against Sikhs in New Delhi, Veena Das discusses the difficulties of working with communities who have been subjected to traumatic violence, and who are unable to access justice from the law and the state. Das writes about the experiences and the difficulties of fieldwork in an area where not only did the victims find it difficult to articulate their experiences and feelings, but where they also continued to live in the same area as the perpetrators who enjoyed impunity from legal action. Nevertheless, the cornerstone of Das' essay lies in its title, which comes from a conversation she had with one of her respondents who told her: 'Our Work is to Cry, Your Work is to Listen!' (Das, 1990). Das' (1990) essay can be read in different ways: from a discussion on space and locality in the context of communal violence, to the role of the state in permitting violence and the breakdown of law, to the relations between victims and perpetrators and to the ethical and methodological challenges of working with victims of violence and in collecting data. What also emerges from her engagement is the encounter between researchers and the researched, whose lives are being explored. Ethnography, and other approaches in qualitative research, has been discussed both in studies of political life and in terms of their theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of politics (Kumar, 2014; Spencer, 2007). In this note, I shall discuss the ethnographic 'encounter' that takes place in the study of political life with reference to certain ethical dilemmas that are incurred in the process of fieldwork. Ethics are an integral part of research and data collection. They influence the interaction between researcher and the so-called 'researched' and are an integral part of discussions on ethnographic methods. I will first unpack the idea of the encounter and then situate the encounter in fieldwork on politics, and especially violence, or where fieldwork is set in politically complex sites. In the process, I hope to raise certain questions regarding ethical choices made by social scientists who carry out ethnographic fieldwork on political life. The Encounter and Political Life For anthropologists, and perhaps most practitioners of Indian sociology, ethnography is definitive of their disciplines. Students may look at Clifford Geertz's (1973) ethnography on the cockfight as a way