THE POLITICS OF LIVING
Zia and Bhat have pooled 12 stories, the majority by young Kashmiris, that tell of lives lived under martial law
Amajor obstacle to diversity in nation-states is the grossly sweeping historical and political narratives that often underpin them. State power allows those in charge to define the nation and its structures with circular arguments that legitimise the territorial delimiting and historical disinheriting of peoples— who have cultivated those same territories for centuries. In the mid-twentieth century, as the modern colonial empires began to be dismantled, official histories were established by newly independent states for their newly established territories and official chronicles were created to support these narratives.
Editors Ather Zia and Javaid Iqbal Bhat are not shy about the objective of their insightful anthology on Kashmir. They take on two states—India and Pakistan—with the aim of ‘destabilising [those] official and nationalistic histories’. Theoretically, this is not difficult. Almost all post-colonial states are sad portraits of artificial territorial separation and inelegant control of people.
But sound theory is born of understanding and practice, even if the latter is missing from many an academic description of freedom struggles. Desolation argues for azadi with personal stories and dense accounts that are crucial to understanding the real losses that can result from government decisions and policies. Zia and Bhat have pooled 12 stories, the majority by young Kashmiris, that tell of lives lived under martial law. The stories illuminate how freedom must have seemed almost within grasp in 1947, and eloquently articulate the continuing struggle for it, despite the difficult obstacles of modernist statecraft and geopolitics.
Shahnaz Bashir’s story, for instance, shows how he—at the age of six—found himself navigating the intricate web of the 1986 India-Pakistan cricket match
at Sharjah, how he made sense of the cavorting actors in Bollywood movies and his understanding of Nehru as the one who ‘would mutilate the political autonomy of the state’. His ambivalence about the Kashmiri Pandits’ exiled state is as simple and disarming as it is complex. ‘I felt it was good because… people believed the Pandits had always sided with the monarchs’, and yet ‘I felt that something was seriously wrong’.
Mona Bhan’s story of growing up amidst divided political opinion in a Kashmiri Pandit household fluently depicts how political logic, and not just confessional passion, drives the movement to liberate ‘Kashmir’s imprisoned history’. Her memories of ‘rooms and resistance’ are a poignant description of how her own political beliefs flowered over the years. Similarly, Anuradha B. Jamwal describes how her politics of resistance emerged as a result of having to swim against the tide in a world filled with manufactured regional divides. Her surprise at her Kashmiri Muslim friends choosing to play cricket as part of a ‘Pakistani team’ does not prevent her from observing that they are more ‘liberated and progressive’ than her friends from Jammu.
The essay by Mirza Waheed elegantly weaves childhood memories of swimming in lakes and playing pranks with dark realities—how the sound of gunfire became quotidian, the details of torture became ubiquitous and military cordon-and-search operations were seared into personal experience. Mohamad Junaid’s chapter, the only story in the book that is not overtly personal, is a deeply insightful interpretation of the work of Akhtar Mohiuddin. It needs careful reading to understand how anti-India radicalisation was part of a ‘resistance process’ leading to freedom, paralleling the ephemeral ‘peace process’ that maintains the status quo. These, and all the other stories in the volume, deserve lengthier reviews. They provide intuitive logic for why the simplistic binary that views Kashmir merely as a bone of contention between India and Pakistan has not, and will not, work.
The stories in A Desolation Called Peace are an antidote to the statist mindset, with existential responses to occupation. They are stories that challenge the anachronistic, lazy and increasingly dysfunctional state system. To read them is to understand why the conflicted dispute will not go away by ignoring Kashmir.