Kashmiri Life Narratives

Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan

Rakhshan Rizwan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000071528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Asiatische Literaturkritik

Kashmiri Life Narratives takes as its central focus writings -- memoirs, non-fictional and fictional Bildungsromane -- published circa 2008 by Kashmiris/Indians living in the Valley of Kashmir, India or in the diaspora. It offers a new perspective on these works by analyzing them within the framework of human rights discourse and advocacy. Literature has been an important medium for promoting the rights of marginalized Kashmiri subjects within Indian-occupied Kashmir, successfully putting Kashmir back on the global map and shifting discussion about Kashmir from the political board rooms to the international English-language book market. In discussing human rights advocacy through literature, this book also effects a radical change of perspective by highlighting positive rights (to enjoy certain things) rather than negative ones (to be spared certain things). Kashmiri life narratives deploy a language of pleasure rather than of physical pain to represent the state of having and losing rights.

1 Mobilizing Pleasure Through Genre

Curfewed Night and Our Moon Has Bloodclots as Kashmiri Bildungsromane

Basharat Peer’s critically acclaimed memoir, Curfewed Night, was published by Random House Publishers in 2008. William Dalrymple, the award-winning author and historian, in a review of Peer’s work for The Guardian, described Curfewed Night as a “minor masterpiece of autobiography and reportage that [would] surely become the classic account of the conflict” and referred to Peer as the “new star of Indian non-fiction” (Dalrymple). According to Dalrymple, prior to the publication of Peer’s memoir, there was a dearth of Anglophone literature on the Kashmir conflict written by authors of Kashmiri origin (Dalrymple).

Kamila Shamsie, the acclaimed Pakistani author, had shared a similar view on the significance of Curfewed Night’s place within the Anglophone Kashmiri literary landscape. In her review, also published by The Guardian, she observes that apart from the Anglophone verses of Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali, there were hardly any literary works composed by Kashmiris, and lamented the “unwritten books of the Kashmir experience” (Shamsie, “Curfewed”). Here, she borrows a phrase from Curfewed Night itself, which appears in a passage where the author highlights the absence of literary narratives on Kashmir written by Kashmiris.

Curfewed Night is the first non-fictional memoir in English composed by a Kashmiri Muslim born and raised in Kashmir. It is also the first literary text written by a writer who belonged to the generation of young Kashmiris who came of age during the volatile 1990s, and it decidedly focuses on the plight and experiences of this particular generation. However, Curfewed Night is not the first Anglophone prose narrative composed by someone of Kashmiri origin. Salman Rushdie is typically classified as a ‘British,’ ‘British-Indian,’ ‘Indian-British,’ and ‘black British’ author but his Kashmiri roots, and his affiliation to Kashmir, are not usually emphasized in the mainstream press. Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005) and Sudha Koul’s The Tiger Ladies (2002) are examples of life narratives composed by Kashmiri authors, which appeared a few years prior to Curfewed Night.

Authors such as Basharat Peer have been able to successfully mobilize local and transnational publics through their narrative works, to garner considerable critical acclaim and to win prestigious literary accolades in the process. In 2008, Peer won the Vodafone Crossword Book Award (“Basharat”). According to the official website of the prize, V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie have referred to it as “the veritable Indian version of the Booker Prize” (“About”). Following the success of Curfewed Night in India, Peer’s memoir was published by Simon and Schuster in the US and by Harper Press in the UK. Basharat Peer has since become a familiar and prominent figure in left-liberal circles. According to The Delhi Walla, a popular online blog that documents the dynamic social lives of upper class elite Delhi literati, Peer and his wife – the acclaimed historian Ananya Vajpeyi – are a “power couple” in the Delhi intellectual scene (Soofi).

Basharat Peer’s rise to literary prominence and his propulsion into the limelight, particularly in India, can also be partly attributed to his collaboration with Bollywood director Vishal Bhardwaj, in producing the screenplay for the film Haider (Bhatia). This screenplay, which Peer co-wrote with Vishal Bhardwaj, is an adaptation of the Shakespearean revenge tragedy Hamlet (Bhatia). It also heavily borrowed plot elements as well as visual and thematic content from Curfewed Night (Bhatia). Bhardwaj approached Peer, a journalist and a writer unacquainted with cinematic work at the time, to work on the script for Haider, after reading Curfewed Night and being considerably moved by the work (Singh).

Haider, a film in which Basharat Peer has a silent cameo and plays a traumatized Kashmiri man who refuses to pass through any doorway without requesting to be stopped and searched, was a critical and commercial success that cast Peer into the national spotlight (Bhatia). Despite facing opposition at home in India from right-wing groups, Haider garnered 58 crore rupees at the Indian box office (“Shahid”). Haider went on to win the People’s Choice Award at the Rome Film Festival in 2014. The film, however, was banned in Pakistan by its censor board, on the bizarre grounds that it challenged “the ideology of Pakistan” (Bhatia). On account of the acclaim it received, Curfewed Night, the memoir upon which the film is based, also became a part of the national conversation and was discussed by prominent local Indian newspapers. Peer has participated extensively in literary festivals on both sides of the border and is frequently invited to speak on Kashmir at the Karachi and Lahore Literary Festivals in Pakistan. Curfewed Night also enjoys a critical following in the United States, where Peer has made prominent appearances at events organized by The Asia Society and at the independent news show, Democracy Now.

To a lesser but significant extent, Rahul Pandita, the author of Our Moon Has Bloodclots (2013), a memoir published by Random House India a few years after Curfewed Nights, has also managed to make Kashmiri Pandit victim narratives and their competing human rights claims legible and visible, particularly within the Indian public sphere. Rahul Pandita is an Indian journalist and writer of Kashmiri Pandit origin whose family was forced to migrate to Jammu and to leave the Kashmir Valley during the turmoil of the late 1990s, a historical episode commonly referred to as “The Pandit Exodus” (Soni). The Hindustan Times commends the “power of the book,” drawing attention to the way in which it “speaks of the pain of fleeing a beloved home, incorporates moving descriptions of rituals specific to the Shaivite Pandits, and weaves in oral histories and snatches of poetry from, among others, Lal Ded and Agha Shahid Ali” (Narayan, Review). Livemint recognized Our Moon has Bloodclots as a “timely memoir” that relates the “often ignored and unfashionable story of the purge of a thriving minority community backed by Islamist militants in Kashmir” (Biswas).

However, while Basharat Peer’s memoir was praised for its showcasing of “Kashmiri voices,” Rahul Pandita’s memoir was received as a controversial text and became embroiled in discussions pertaining to its factual authenticity and historical accuracy (“Failing the test”). Somjyoti Mridha criticized Pandita’s memoir for its “selective appropriation of historical facts and events for record and projection” (53). Most of the critical attention that Our Moon has Bloodclots received post-publication was centred on the debate concerning the factuality of its historical claims and the dissection of its problematic representation of the Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandit subjects residing in the Valley of Kashmir at the time of the exodus (Fazili, Our Memories). Kashmiri author and activist Arif Ayaz Parrey raised the issue of the biographical veracity of Our Moon has Bloodclot in a prominent review of the work, published in Kindle Magazine and satirically titled, “The Imaginarium of Rahul Pandita.” In it, Parrey offers a laconic and tongue-in-cheek suggestion that Pandita’s memoir should be classified as a fictional rather than a non-fictional text. His reasons for stating this are manifold but primarily involve Pandita’s perceived distortion of the historical facts pertaining to the insurgency in Kashmir, the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley in the mid-1990s and his portrayals of Kashmiri Muslim subjects.

In this chapter, I want to shift the discussion of Pandita’s text from its viability and authenticity as a historical source to its function as a literary narrative in the service of human rights. Probing the veracity of the historical account that is constructed by Pandita is, in my opinion, an interminable exercise in which historical claims are quickly followed by counter-claims. Instead, it is much more fruitful to probe the way in which Pandita constructs his literary work such that it is able to create and mobilize space for Kashmiri Pandit stories and victim narratives within Kashmiri, Indian, and ultimately, global publics.

It is my contention that the two memoirs, Our Moon has Bloodclots and Curfewed Night, despite the obvious differences in their critical reception, are stylistically and formally similar to one another, and that they can also be classified and studied as nonfictional Bildungsromane, a prominent form of life narrative. Building on Slaughter, I argue that Our Moon has Bloodclots appropriates the generic conventions of the coming-of-age novel or the Bildungsroman, in order to advance human rights claims on behalf of the Kashmiri Pandit community.

Historical Context

Curfewed Night is a memoir that chronicles the coming of age of the narrator Basharat Peer through the politically volatile 1980s and early 1990s, when Kashmir’s national liberation movement took an increasingly unfortunate and violent turn. In the year 1990, there was what Bose terms a “crucial rupture” between the Indian state and Kashmir, as a result of which large parts of Jammu and Kashmir became engulfed in “guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency” (Bose 42). This “rupture” occurred due to the failure of the electoral process in Kashmir, which led to the brewing of anti-state sentiment and anger among the local population (48). Elections in that year were contested by three major parties, the National Conference (NC), the Congress party and the Muslim United Front (MUF) (Bose 48–49). Both the NC and the Congress party were in an alliance while the MUF had popular support and was predicted to sweep the elections (49). The government allegedly fiddled with the results and resorted to electoral rigging on a massive scale to produce results in their favour (49).

Kashmiri citizens were forcefully disqualified from voting, voting booths were captured and closed, and the final vote count was manipulated. In the aftermath of these tactics, the NC-Congress alliance won by a landslide, whereas the MUF only managed to secure four seats in the local legislative assembly (49). In response to suspicions of rigging, there was widespread turmoil and the police force deployed high-handed tactics in order to curb the protests, including arresting the MUF’s electoral candidate Yusuf Shah, and his election manager Yasin Malik (49). Sumantra Bose characterizes the 1987 elections as an “atrocious episode of denial and subversion of democratic rights” and holds these elections responsible for the radicalization of young Kashmiris (Bose 49, 98). Denied lawful, democratic, and peaceful means for political participation and dissent, Kashmiris found violent means for releasing their anger (Bose 49, 98).

Upon his release from prison, Yusuf Shah fashioned himself a new name, Syed Salahuddin, after a historical Muslim warrior, and became the commander-in-chief of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen (HM), the “largest guerrilla force” in Kashmir (50). His former election manager, Yasin Malik, meanwhile became a ‘core member’ of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), another guerrilla outfit which ultimately “launched insurrection in the Valley” shortly afterwards (50). In the year 1990, the rallying cry of azadi [freedom] resonated in the streets of Kashmir and the region became enveloped in sustained mass protests. The JKLF and HM, no longer fringe militant elements, gained popular support and approval and spearheaded an armed guerrilla uprising against the Indian state in the Valley (48–50). During this time, young Kashmiri Muslim men enlisted as members of militant outfits in a show of resistance against the policies of the state, and were consequently targeted by the Indian security forces, including being unlawfully arrested and even routinely tortured in an effort...