The contours of the Kashmir disputed map convey the idea of a spatial continuum, making it seem as if those who live within the contours of the former princely state inherently share some kind of bond, rather than simply having come to live side by side under the same ruler as the result of territorial conquests. As Winichakul Thongchai notes on the differences between pre-modern and modern maps as representations of spatial reality in his work on the making of Siam as a nation, ‘boundary lines must exist before a map’ because maps refer to an existing reality. The map of the Kashmir dispute also expresses an idea that this region is a politically integrated territory rather than a collection of loosely administered areas. In his seminal work Mapping an Empire, Mathew Edney points out that the mapping of British India through the Great Trigonometrical Survey served as the key ‘to the conceptual consolidation of a pre-existent India’. Similarly, it can be said that the mapped configuration of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir and its continued reproduction as a unit (albeit partitioned between India and Pakistan by a discontinuous line) over multiple decades demonstrates an essentialist understanding of the disputed territory. The unity conveys an idea of territorial contiguity that overlooks the fragments and fissures of the princely state that were never fully administratively integrated but rather shared an economic and political centre in the Kashmir Valley.