Shahnaz Bashir
I was six when Javed Miandad hit that historic six in that last, long, pensive moment at Sharjah in 1986. Pakistan needed four runs from one ball to win the game against India. Since I was a kid, I had no idea about Kashmiris’ special emotion behind cricket. I was as unaware and confused about everything that had been going on in Kashmir, and between India and Pakistan, just as many young children in Kashmir must be today. People – kids, youths and elders – from our old mohalla and shopkeepers of Natipora, the place where I lived, would gather in front of our large black-and-white Weston TV and sit for the match, for both the innings, solemnly glued to the screen. After they left, my mother had to collect bits of eggshell or groundnut shells from the floor. Such was the sentiment for Pakistan that my aunt once placed a silk-cased Quran on the television set. As a gesture, it was meant to bless Pakistan to beat India in a One-Day International. That was when I began to grow curious about why Indo-Pak cricket held such a special place in the emotions of Kashmiris.
The first time I saw bunkers being built at the bridge named after Mehjoor, one of the greatest modern Kashmiri poets, my priorities began to change. Daata was the last film I watched with my father at Regal Cinema before bomb blasts in Srinagar began shutting the theatres down. I was eight or nine. I was a great Mithun Chakraborty fan.1 Pyar Jhukta Nahin, Ilaaka, and Elaan – amongst other movie hits from Mithun – struck the big screen in those years. I was perennially angry with the local barber for his failure to set my hair like Mithun’s. Only later would I realize that the nature of my own hair prevented it happening. As the situation began to worsen in Kashmir, Mithun began to fade from my mind. The most recurring photograph published in the Urdu newspapers of Srinagar of uniformed Azam Inqilabi, a Kalashnikov in either hand, settled in my imagination.2 Inqilabi issued a powerful message that called upon the youth to join a liberation movement. I too wanted to have a gun and fight like him.
Interestingly, for years after the cinema closed down in Srinagar, life-size posters of Daata with Mithun wearing a bullet-studded waistband over his double-pocket black shirt – one gun hanging off his left shoulder – remained plastered on the city walls. Many insurgents, I noticed in the beginning of the 1990s, wore their hair like Mithun. Even their moustaches aped the one from the Daata posters. The vengeful posture of Mithun from the movie – both his hands raised and holding two iron rods; the long fringes of his hair draped over his headband – shaped their militant mien.
I had no idea of the politics of my favourite serial Hazaar Daastaan (A Thousand Tales) that was telecast on Doordarshan Srinagar. I loved and imitated the character of Ahaid Raaza. I would sit in front of the television hours ahead of the serial and watch all the Itios-socks ads in the interval. For a long time, I knew Nazir Josh only as Ahaid Raaza, even though he played the character of Juma German in a second serial and Raaza Haaenz in another.3 But decades after Hazaar Daastaan was censored by the then National Conference (NC) government, and years after the tapes of the serial were destroyed in a mysterious fire in Doordarshan, I learned from Nazir Josh himself that ‘Hazaar Daastaan’ was a political satire meant to reflect the corrupt governance of Farooq Abdulla, the then chief minister of Kashmir.
I turned nine in 1989. I began to sense something unusual was happening in the Valley. I couldn’t comprehend the politics of the events but I understood that the people of Kashmir were agitated from suffering a serious political injustice. From an early 1989 winter evening when my father read aloud from a local Urdu newspaper, narrating how Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front’s Sheikh Abdul Hamid and his companion escaped on a scooter, after attacking a policeman with a Chinese pistol in downtown Srinagar, to the custodial killing of school principal Rizwan Pandit in March 2019, much has happened in the last thirty years to make one more than a political being in Kashmir.4 Much had happened before too. From an October day in 1947, when the Indian Army landed in Kashmir, to this day when there are almost half a million troops in Kashmir to control a population of one and a half million people; much has happened.
History has fascinated me since school. I always wondered why we were only taught Indian history. I wanted to know about Kashmir, particularly about the events that led to the 1989 uprising. Resistance leaders like Syed Ali Geelani talked so much about what was happening in the Kashmir of the 1990s, and spoke very briefly about what had happened before, but they hardly said anything about their own positions. I always wanted somebody to ask Geelani to narrate his experiences as an MLA of the state. Under what circumstances had he sworn allegiance to the Indian Constitution after knowing that Kashmir had been occupied by India in 1947? I wanted somebody to ask Muhammad Aslam how he became Yasin Malik. I wanted Yasin Malik to share his experiences as a polling agent for the Muslim United Front, a polling agent who was beaten to pulp by the workers of the National Conference in the 1987 assembly elections. Such narratives of Kashmiris were unavailable.5
I would often read history in my university days. I read and loved literature too. The year I was born, Salman Rushdie published Midnight’s Children, the novel that surprisingly foresaw and foretold exactly what was going to happen a decade later in Kashmir. In my university years, I was amazed to read on the second page of ‘The Perforated Sheet’, the first chapter of Rushdie’s book, how it would all start in Kashmir, how India would begin consolidating control in the Valley:
In those days the radio mast had not been built and the temple of Shankaracharya, a little black blister on a khaki hill, still dominated the streets and lake of Srinagar. In those days there was no army camp at the lakeside, no endless snakes of camouflaged trucks and jeeps clogged the narrow mountain roads, no soldiers hid behind the crests of the mountains past Baramulla and Gulmarg. In those days travellers were not shot as spies if they took photographs of bridges, and apart from the Englishmen’s houseboats on the lake, the Valley had hardly changed since the Mughal Empire, for all its springtime renewals; but my grandfather’s eyes – which were, like the rest of him, twenty-five years old – saw things differently … and his nose had started to itch … Many years later, when the hole inside him had been clogged up with hate, and he came to sacrifice himself at the shrine of the black stone god in the temple on the hill, he would try and recall his childhood springs in Paradise, the way it was before travel and tussocks and army tanks messed everything up.6
In my teen years, I noticed that every day before he took his afternoon nap, my maternal grandfather read from a thick, torn, jacketless book on Kashmir history that was written in Urdu. I became curious. What was he reading in this book filled with photos in which Sheikh Abdullah either posed with his wife or his entire family, or with Nehru and other Indian statesmen – all those who were then employing every diplomatic, militaristic and political method to annex Kashmir to the Union of India? How to reconcile those pictures with the one in which the tonsured Abdullah sits sadly beside the cot that holds the body of a martyr of the 1931 Central Jail massacre?
One day I found the front cover of the book and finally learnt its title: Shabistaan: Sheikh Abdullah Dost Ya Dushman?7 On the ashlar hamaam8 of the local mosque, I once watched an old mason fight with a young man over Sheikh Abdullah. The old man reacted sternly in favour of the Sheikh, while the young man believed he had betrayed Kashmiris and allowed the Indian Army to occupy Kashmir. The debate on the Sheikh as good guy or bad continues to this day. During my adolescence, I browsed through some dusty and mote-ridden libraries and explored the untouched, mildewed archives. I marvelled at old facts and photographs. The black-and-white pictures that appeared alongside the text strengthened my picture of the years I had not witnessed myself. I traced the history of the land right from the time when, according to primary, mythological sources like the Nilamata Purana, Kashmir was a lake called Satisar – ruled by Pishachas and Nagas – to the early Hindu rule.9 I moved from the Hindu rule to the Buddhist conquest, to the formation of the Muslim Sultanate, to the invasion of the Mughals, to the advent of the Afghans, to the brutal Sikh rule, to the accession of the Dogras and finally, to the most crucial year, 1947.10 Before 1989, the years that were turning points in Kashmiri history were 1947, 1953, 1965 and 1971. Among them, 1965, the year when titles like Wazir-e-A’zam [prime minister] and Sadr-i-Riyasat [president of the state] were changed to those of the other Indian state titles like Wazir-e-A’la [chief minister] and governor; and 1971 was the year when India went to war with Pakistan. The year 1953 was when a new pivotal party Plebiscite Front was floated by some leaders of the NC; the same year, Sheikh Abdullah was dethroned and imprisoned. I noticed that overall, 1947 had been the most important year, for the most important event had taken place then: for the first time ever, the Indian Army had arrived in Kashmir, and the first seeds of military occupation were sown.
THE PHOTOGRAPH11
Venue: Palladium Cinema. Maharaja Hari Singh, the last king of Kashmir, has fled to Jammu and the tribal army has already been pushed back. Sheikh Abdullah is the emergency administrator of the state. In front of Kashmir Talkies, Jawaharlal Nehru delivers a speech. A wooden table, on which Nehru stands, has been placed atop a large wooden rostrum. The margins of the rostrum have been draped with namdas (tasselled and embroidered woollen Kashmiri mats). People peek out at the stage from the surrounding buildings, even from the windows of Palladium Cinema itself. Sheikh Abdullah sits in a chair to the right of Nehru, close to him, and listens intently. Nehru’s speech seems encouraging to Abdullah, enough to coax him and authorize him as a future leader of Kashmir. There is a life-size portrait of the Sheikh on the top left side of the facade of Palladium Cinema. In the portrait, he rides a black horse and holds the flag of his party in his right hand [Description of a photo from November 1947].
Seven years later, the same Nehru would send Sheikh Abdullah to jail for eleven years, during which time he would mutilate the political anatomy of the state. He would transplant the political organs and install new people on the throne. Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, would be one of them. Nehru would create conditions to confuse the aspiration of Kashmiris for an independent state of Jammu and Kashmir. Those confusions would alter perceptions too. It would be difficult for younger generations of Kashmiris like me to decide whether they should be supporters of the Pakistani cricket team and paste posters of Imran Khan on the mud walls of their homes, or become Mithun fans and set their hairstyles like him, or dream of a cricket team and cinema of their own. Something like a Kashmir cricket team and a Kashmir film industry with its own players, actors, villains and comedians. But the politically seasoned and shrewd Nehru would twist their political imagination forever. In the many years to follow, new political connections between Kashmir and the plains of India would be established, new political narratives written, mythological relationships appropriated and secularism invoked to blackmail one community to be at odds with another.
In my perusal of history, I was at the crossroads about the mass migration of Kashmiri Pandits from Kashmir. I was ambivalent about it; on the one hand, I felt that it was good because the people believed that Pandits had always sided with the monarchs of Kashmir and exploited the Muslim artisans and peasantry for generations. The Muslims had been treated as second-class citizens ever since the fourteenth century.12 On the other hand, I felt that something was seriously wrong.
Many of my teachers had been Kashmiri Pandits. Our neighbourhood buzzed with them. My parents had lived in great harmony with their Pandit neighbours. My most vivid memory is of a night in my childhood when I had to walk barefoot for a kilometre on the main road of Natipora accompanying an uncle, one of my father’s best friends, to a Pandit wedding. The late-night banquet was arranged in a marquee pitched in the plum orchard of the host. After dinner, I found that my nylon slippers were missing. I tried looking for them but finally had to go home barefoot. I still remember how safe and easy it had been to walk in the middle of the night along a road that shone so much under the illumination of street lights that I was able to keep my bare feet from falling on the tiniest pebble.
From 1989, it became difficult to come out of home after six in the evening, and I would often miss this night. A decade later, in an ironic coincidence, the army took me to the same plum orchard for an identification parade in a crackdown. I had grown into a teenager now, and it was my first experience of being part of such a parade. The house where the Pandit wedding had taken place was now a gutted, abandoned structure with a jagged pillar of bricks in the centre.
Shivani Koul had been one of my best friends in school. I still remember her lazy eyes and her silky hair. I remember her Nataraj pencil and sharpener and perfumed, multicoloured, fruit-shaped or animal-shaped erasers. She had been the most helpful and the kindest of all my classmates. Her sudden disappearance in 1989 or 1990, I don’t remember the year now, didn’t surprise me much. I grew up missing classmates like her, and thinking that the Pandits should not have migrated at all.13
My observation of the recent past of Kashmir tells me that 1947 has been the most intriguing of all the landmark years in modern history. It has been the most decisive and, politically, the most distorted too. The years following 1947 foreshadow the future: military incursions, maladministration, curfews, police brutalities, people’s demand for a permanent solution to the Kashmir issue, aspirations of freedom or azadi and other forms of solution including accession to Pakistan.14
Here I am reminded of a YouTube video.15 In this black-and-white film clip there are three men, in long coats and karakuls, sitting in front of a journalist whom the voice-over introduces as John Edwards. There is a brick wall behind the men. The man who speaks to John Edwards is none other than Ghulam Mohi-ud-Din Karra of the Opposition Action Committee. The interview begins and a swirl of smoke from Karra’s cigarette enters the frame. The video was taken in 1965 and the last clip shows two UN officials surveying the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir for any violations. To many questions regarding Indo–Pak politics and circumstances in Kashmir, Karra responds wittily, saying that India is not sincere in its attempts to resolve the political issue of Kashmir. He likens the Indian policies in Kashmir to those of the French in colonized Algeria. Karra’s answer to Edwards’s last question (…will the two sides [India and Pakistan] move back in time from the brink of war?) is a resounding ‘No’.
Karra’s understanding was proved right when India and Pakistan went to war in 1971. Fighter planes would whiz over the neighbourhoods of Srinagar, leaving twin trails of smoke in their wake. Years later, in the 1990s, my father would narrate to me how his father, my grandfather, had dug trenches and made underground shelters, like any other Kashmiri, to save our family from stray attacks. And then, after the violent 1990s, there would be yet another unfinished war between India and Pakistan, which happened in 1999. A glut of failed talks would follow. Then an era of forced peace would prevail in the Valley, punctuated by cycles of severe grass-roots protests, which would be suppressed by bouts of state violence. And there, on top of it all, would be the dirty nationalistic politics, waiting for the next war, without end.
Shahnaz Bashir is the author of the critically lauded and widely reviewed debut novel The Half Mother (Hachette, 2014) that won the Muse India Young Writer Award 2015. His second book Scattered Souls (HarperCollins, 2016), a collection of interlinked stories, was longlisted for Tata Lit Live Best Book Fiction 2017 and won The Citizen’s Talent of the Year Award 2016–2017. He teaches narrative journalism, conflict reporting to postgraduate students at the Central University of Kashmir.
NOTES
1Mithun Chakraborty was a famous Bollywood superstar in the 1980s and early ’90s.
2Azam Inqilabi was the leader of Mahaz-e-Azadi, a separatist resistance movement. He joined the movement at seventeen and has been arrested and released fifteen times so far.
3Nazir Josh is a Kashmiri stage and TV actor.
4Sheikh Abdul Hamid was a young pioneer of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. He was killed in an encounter with Indian Army on 18 November 1992.
5S.A. Geelani has published a three-part memoir in addition to other historical accounts detailing his life and experiences.
6Rushdie, Salman, ‘The perforated sheet’, Midnight’s Children, London: Vintage, Penguin Books, 1991, p. 5.
7Dehelvi, Younis, and Idrees Illyas (eds), Shabistaan: Sheikh Abdullah Dost Ya Dushman? (Sheikh Abdullah: Friend or Foe?), New Delhi: Shama Publications, 1968.
8Hamaam is a communal bathhouse; this one is particularly made of ashlar stones, which are cuboid.
9Kumari, Ved, Nilamata Purana: Cultural and Literary Study, Srinagar and Jammu: Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages, 1988.
10Prem Nath, Bazaz, The History of Struggle for Freedom in Kashmir: Cultural and Political History (From the Earliest Times to the Present Day), Srinagar: Gulshan Publications, 2003.
11The photo for this section, as the author says, is not to be printed because it has been ‘written’. This is after a technique used by Ryszard Kapuscinski in the Shah of Shahs [editors].
12For details on Muslim predicament under Dogra rule, see Abdullah, Sheikh, Mohammad, Aatish-e-Chinar, Srinagar: Ali Mohammed & Sons, 1985. Also see, Rai, Mridu, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of Kashmir, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 149–57; see Malik, Iffat, Kashmir: Ethnic Conflict and International Dispute, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
13Most of my understanding of Kashmir’s history comes from Pandit Prem Nath Bazaz, a Kashmiri Pandit, a great historian and journalist. He impressed me so much that I took him as the topic of my postgraduate dissertation and tried to argue that he was a pioneer in journalism in the Valley. Bazaz had written nearly a dozen books and about two dozen pamphlets on Kashmir history and politics, all arguing in favour of Kashmir’s independence from India.
14See Naqvi, Saeed, ‘The Killing Fields of Jammu: How Muslims Became a Minority in the Region’, Scroll.in, 10 July 2016; Also see, Snedden, Christopher, The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir, Columbia: Hurst Publishers, 2012, pp. 31–151.
15‘Kashmiri opinion on Kashmir conflict in the 1960s’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZr53wzaQSw (accessed on 7 July 2018).