Urvi Kaul

Both histories of colonialism and contemporary nation-state politics have profound impacts on individual identity and the composition of present-day communities. When sociopolitical events trigger displacement from ancestral homelands, resulting in migration and the formation of new diasporic communities elsewhere, the biological and social effects are significant. In this project, I will investigate the legacies and contemporary impacts of imperialism on biological variation and social identity within diaspora Kashmiri Pandits, specifically considering the histories of empire, Partition, militarization, rebellion, and immigration that have contextualized the lives of people in Kashmir for centuries. This project will integrate newly collected qualitative, genomic and epigenomic data with other biological, cultural, and historical data to produce a more holistic understanding of the impact of political histories on the biology and identity of contemporary communities. Thus, this project will produce a multi-disciplinary, community oriented, and historically grounded representation of human genetic variation and social identity production in the Kashmiri Pandit community today.