Love in the time of conflict

Kashmiri writers lift the veil, bearing witness to the changes in their region through stories

“Srinagar cannot be read as a normal city; it has been a city of turmoil.” In Sadaf Wani’s fascinating new book, City as Memory, she keeps her eyes open to “witness the changes to the geography, demography and the idea of Kashmir.”

The main characters are Srinagar’s everyman and woman, and its extraordinary city spaces. Wani tells me, “The onslaught of Kashmir’s violent reality has been so continuous that there has been no temporal pause that has allowed Kashmiris as a community to look back and make sense of what has happened. There has been no space to document what went on, mourn what was lost, or memorialise the efforts that were made to shape a distinct Kashmiri identity based on shared values. In the absence of all these, there is a sense of unresolvedness that we all carry in our heads.”

Lamenting the gaps in the current canon of books on Kashmir, she says: “Much of the literature on Kashmir, especially by non-natives, exhibits an impatient tendency to oversimplify the region’s complexities, offering sensational and reductive solutions.” City as Memory is cautious against rehashing these stereotypes. Written in crisp prose, it is profound in its intimate investigations of identity. Wani says that recent art and literature from Kashmir have provided a “shared understanding of the context” of how its people have processed “macro-historical events”. In effect, they have performed the incredible task of “making Kashmiris visible to each other, of understanding the state of each other,” in all the inherent socio-politico-cultural complexities of the region.

‘Illness’ in the Valley

Over the past few months, a number of books on Kashmir have been published, including memoirs by M.K. Raina and Siddhartha Gigoo. If we were to look for a common thread, it would be that the stories from Kashmir, founded on interrogations about identity and belonging, are primarily about loss and accumulated grief. Raina, the eminent thespian and social activist, feels the psychological effects of the insurgency and continuous violence have not been addressed. “There is an illness in the valley,” he says.

In his memoir Before I Forget, Raina narrates heartbreaking stories about his work with the children of the Valley in the early 2000s. Raina’s team visited these children to organise creative workshops, but on the first day, the “children would not even know how to look you in the eye, they would keep their heads bowed.” Asked to colour a lush garden, the children could not even use different colours; all turned in similar-looking monochromic green sheets to mark the trees. Raina says that in the history of literature on Kashmir, “most ordinary stories have not been told.”

Siddhartha Gigoo’s A Long Season of Ashes is similar to Raina’s memoir. He was 16 when his family was forced out of their home at Safa Kadal in Srinagar in March 1990. It took Gigoo 34 years to return to his memories, but the act of writing was necessary for several reasons.

“It is my duty to tell the world what we were made to go through. I wanted to document how we struggled to survive in the camps, and also our resilience. A few years from now, Kashmiri Pandits will only have an inherited memory of our way of life in the Valley.”

Identity crisis

Karan Mujoo, whose debut novel, This Our Paradise, traces a Kashmiri Pandit family’s exodus, echoes Gigoo’s thoughts: “We are in the middle of an identity erosion. Slowly but surely, Kashmiri Pandit culture will cease to exist. The Pandit community has no geographical centre.” In alternating chapters, Mujoo’s novel also tells the story of a Kashmiri Muslim family’s decline as their son joins a militant group — revealing a fundamental truth about how wars make corpses of all.

On choosing this double perspective narrative style, he says, “Kashmir contains multitudes: of people, of stories, of events. Often in conflict with each other and often conflicting in their narratives. I wanted to explore what happened in Kashmir during the 1980s-90s. That needed multiple perspectives and creative liberties only fiction can provide.”

A forthcoming book by Mehak Jamal, Lōal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land, “traverses decades from the 1990s to the 2020s in Kashmir, and does so through stories of love affected by the conflict.”

All the stories have been collected from real people, and they illustrate how living through an unrest has affected them for better or worse, she says. By talking about love during conflict, are the people of Kashmir taking their power back? Jamal thinks so, and her words are similar to Raina’s who feels art and literature are the highest tools of soft power people have to preserve their culture, heritage and stories.

The writer is a Delhi-based literary reviewer. He can be found on X @karteakk and on Instagram @karkritiques.

Published - October 11, 2024 09:01 am IST