When it comes to Kashmir, it’s not just a battle for land or resources minus the welfare of the people. It is also a battle of narratives depending on which side of the border one is and which community one belongs to in the Valley itself. The battle of the narratives started a few years back when the first literary accounts of the "conflict" years started to come to light. Young writers with their urge to 'speak the truth' found themselves platforms and a massively receptive audience who were yearning to hear it from the affected lot themselves, having had enough of experts and opinion makers. Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir is a memoir about the early years of the turmoil in Kashmir. Published in 2010, it won the Crossword Prize for Non-Fiction and was chosen among the Books of the Year by The Economist and The New Yorker. It got raving reviews about its frank portrayal of life in the 90s and it resonated with a generation that had known the fear, the helplessness and the desolation of those nights themselves. The launch of the book opened a kind of floodgate for future memoirs displaying a confidence that had come off age and experience.
The year 2011 saw the publication of two books, one was Mirza Waheed's much acclaimed The Collaborator and the second was Siddartha Gigoo's The Garden of Solitude. Waheed's novel about a 19 year old boy belonging to a border village along the line of control has been called a devastating debut in The Guardian by Pakistani author, Kamila Shamsi. It very subtly portrays Kashmir's isolation in the third decade of 'a war' completely forgotten or distorted by the rest of the world through the isolation of its lonely, unnamed protagonist. Waheed's descriptions of the valley floor 'littered with corpses' among the flowers brings into stark view Kashmir's naked truth; beauty amidst horror. Then came Siddartha Gigoo's The Garden of Solitude, a novel woven together with dreams, memory and reality to portray the plight of the Pandits exiled from the Valley amidst the confusion and terror of the nineties and how the main protagonist (an alter-ego of the writer) decides to seek out stories because of the haunting fear of his history of his ancestry forgotten. Sridar's fears of a lost legacy are not his alone – an entire two generations of Kahsmiris too fear the lost legacy of progressivism, harmony, secularism and an amalgamation of the blending of two cultures which had given birth to a unique Kashmiri ethos known as 'Kashmiriyat'. Both the above novels poignantly portray the isolation, whether physically or in the minds of these men – the unnamed 19 year old Muslim boy and Sridar, the exiled Pandit that almost all Kashmiris irrespective of class, caste, gender or sect feels with the huge burden of the past. This "unfinished business" of 66 years weighs so heavily on every individual, family or community that there is no escaping it. Except possibly in the silences and dreams of the characters respectively.
Rahul Pandita's Our Moon Has Blood Clots, makes its appearance in 2013 and the narratives reach a new standard of style. The memoir form contributing to much of the powerful narrative of the book in which Pandita speaks of the pain of fleeing a beloved home and the subsequent travails of living the life of a desplazado . His memoir aims at reaching a "consensus on the circumstances that led to the exodus" so that both communities – Muslims and Pandits can move on to renewed trust and forgiven wounds as acknowledged narratives are capable of doing. It has been termed as a much needed 'salve' on the collective psyche of the Kashmiri Pandit community whose pain and grief was drowned in the mightier, dominant, more powerful victim narratives and provided a perspective from a minority community who found themselves exiled into homelessness and statelessness forever. In Rahul's own words, "Kashmir is essentially a Greek tragedy - of sons who do not return home, and of sons who cannot return home". In the "unfinished business" of the Partition, Kashmir lost not only sons but daughters too and was thrown into a frenzied cauldron of boiling blood with the stirring spoon of historical wounds and perceived slights for a long time.
I have watched the battle of the narratives on social networking sites and still do. Though the authors have mutual respect for each other, it is fascinating to see immediate affected groups as well as extensions of those social groups by way of a shared religion or culture go for the jugular. Is this a propensity in conflict zones or is it a deliberate attempt to distance a collective psyche from harsh truths and build a cocoon through which the victimhood can be maintained? In Salman Rushdie's words, in his own memoir Joseph Anton: A Memoir, which is an autobiographical account of his years under the fatwa of the Iranian regime, he sums up my observations - "...although stories may be untrue, they are powerful because they help us to understand truths that cannot be accessed otherwise and also because they belong in an intimate way to each of us".
As Chitralekha Zutshi, Professor of History and author of the 2014 book Kashmir's Contested Pasts: Narratives, Sacred Geographies, and the Historical Imagination, writes '...Instead of dismissing these narratives as impure histories at best or as superstitious myths at worst, those who write about Kashmir's history – both in the popular and academic domains – have a responsibility to nurture these stories and learn from them". She has coined the term 'Kashmir narrative public' for the arena of battling binaries of Kashmir's past and present, with Indian, Pakistani and Kashmiri nationalisms competing over each other. She encourages participating in this arena because Kashmir has the unique position of being located at the crossroads of the history of the subcontinent just emerging from the shadows of 'the great game' – if I may use Peter Hopkirk's title of his book which was very thoroughly overturned by Narinder Singh Sarila in his landmark book In The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India's Partition.
The narratives should not and cannot be dismissed, reviled, cut down to shreds just because we feel that our pain is more deserving and justified. To be able to step back and see how the entire Kashmiri population has been a pawn in the aftermath of the partition and how misplaced our sense of purpose is. Without secular, visionary statesmen and stateswomen to guide us we easily fall prey to the rhetoric of those we consider as our 'rehnumas' forgetting that rehnumas (guides) own lives have to be lived in accordance with the principles they profess. In our pain and desperation of more than two decades we listen to the jingoism of the few who profess to fight a war in the comforts of their homes with the usual cognitive dissonance that accompanies struggles based on religious lines. No one can reasonably deny that the schism between Muslim and Hindu in India, though not invented by the British, was fomented by them on the principle of divide and rule. And 'the great game' is still being played in Kashmir. As the two countries of India and Pakistan race to outdo each other in changing their history books with each passing year to suit each other’s leading ideologies, it will become more and more difficult in the near future to sift away reality from myth, truth from propaganda and intention from lived reality. This is where I apply the aphorism "the personal is political", whenever the accounts get murky. Those personal stories do matter.