WADING INTO THE RIVER OF KINGS
too. At times, Bashir’s arguments appear like a mirror image of the narrative it sets out to contest. But that seems to be deliberate in the what-is-sauce-for-thegoose-is-sauce-for-the-gander vein. In effect, it also posits that if the entire Kashmiri Pandit community can’t be held responsible for the past acts of a Pandit elite that served nearly all foreign rulers, all Kashmiri Muslims also cannot be held accountable for the wrongs of a medieval king painted as idol-breaker in historical accounts. The emphasis is clear: we must not employ past events, which took place in a different context, to ‘make right’ the present.
This book draws attention towards relevant historical facts that are missing from populist narratives surrounding the migration of Kashmiri Pandits in the past and the tragic mass migration of the community in 1990. For example, about
112,000 Kashmiri Muslims escaped to Punjab by 1891 to escape the anti-muslim policies of the Sikh and Dogra monarchies. This number comes close to the number of Kashmiri Pandits (124,078, according to the 1990 Census) who migrated at the onset of the armed insurgency. This is not to say that the two exoduses square up or one justifies the other but only underscores the fact that certain events are not exceptional.
The erasure of these facts in discourses on Kashmir leads Bashir to question the narrative building around the return of Kashmiri Pandits to their homeland. A section of Pandits are calling for a return to their homeland of those whose ancestors had migrated centuries ago to other parts of India for better opportunities or to escape persecution. Bashir asks are thousands of Jammu and Kashmir Muslims who had similarly left Kashmir in the past also entitled to a return? Bashir’s book can be better read within the politics of Kashmir historiography. It is in that context that it raises debate and serves as a corrective rather than being seen as ‘the’ truer version of history, which is anyway impossible for a single text to cover.