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Magazine
Summer of discontent
ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR
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The unrest in the Valley reflects the Kashmiri desire to define its collective identity on its own terms.
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Photo: Nissar Ahmad
Flaring up: The streets are deserted, yet again, in Srinagar.
With the Kashmir Valley ablaze with curfews, funeral and memorandum processions, CRPF firing, and sloganeering, there is one comment all Kashmiris I know are making: “It’s like the 1990s all over again”. For the rest of us beyond the Pir Panjal, it is not only like the 1990s — it is actually worse. In 1990, I was a college student caught up in a world of admissions abroad, parties in Calcutta, exams. The momentous events during that period in Kashmir are only faintly etched in my memory as a passing image on the TV screen, a fleeting black and white photo in a newspaper. The young guns of the Azaadi movement back then were my contemporaries, but our worlds could not have been more different. That divergence always struck me retrospectively when I talked to Kashmiris of my age group 15 years on, in the course of my research in the Valley: What contrasting lives we led during our late teens and early twenties!
The great divide
I have been ashamed of that gulf between metropolitan India and Srinagar in the early 1990s. I excused it to technological determinism of sorts: That was the eve of economic liberalisation and the cable TV boom in India. It was the time before NDTV 24x7, before Internet, blogging and YouTube. Could we help not knowing? Nearly two decades have passed, and in the interim, India has changed considerably, as have modes of communication across the world. The Valley’s administrative and infrastructural entanglement with the nation has been tightened by the webs of pleasure and entertainment now thrown across India and diasporic South Asian communities by the seductive worlds of saas-bahu serials, reality TV, cheerleaders and the Twenty20 series... the list could go on. At the same time, while in the 1980s young Kashmiris sought adventure by crossing the LOC and wielding the Kalashnikov, their counterparts in the 2000s have courted the camera for fame.
Thus, between July and October 2005, millions of text messages from across India led Kashmiri Qazi Touqeer to win Fame Gurukul. Qazi, who had grown up mimicking Indian film heroes in the Mughal Gardens of Srinagar in front of a video camera, was ensconced in Mumbai with a fat contract with Sony Television, marketed and adored as India’s new small-town hero. Even his mock-defiant response “hero, main hoon hero” to simulated gunfire and a soldier’s barked orders failed to remind viewers that Srinagar was not the average small town. The President lauded him as the Valley’s “own hero”; commentators hailed him as bringing Jammu and Kashmir into the “national mainstream”. Qazi’s heroism was so much more palatable than that of the angry young men of 1989. Within Kashmir, he catalysed intense public discussions about Kashmiriness, Muslimness, and the basic appropriateness of a Kashmiri winning Fame Gurukul. Did “mainstream” India notice? It was happy to clap Qazi on. Simultaneously, it bayed for the blood of Afzal Guru, a Kashmiri scapegoat to the cause of “security”. We prefer our Kashmiris all-singing, all-dancing: a dubious improvement from when our Bollywood heroes sang and danced on a landscape airbrushed of Kashmiris.
In the U.K., teaching my M.A. class on “representing Kashmir”, writing my book on the same theme, it is far easier to access angry and moving blogs by Kashmiris on these discrepancies, far easier to point out the unseemly contrasts between Indian representations of Kashmir as the land of lakes and shikaras, and Kashmiri representations of Kashmir as a space of nightmare, rumour, and the excesses of power. In Delhi, in Kolkata, in Mumbai, conversely, it is far easier to be caught up by the fever pitch of malls, Louis Vuitton bags, Nach Baliye, and a generally sickening lurch towards high-end consumerism coupled with a smug belief in “India shining”, “team India” and so on. The lack of soul-searching that characterises life in urban India in the 2000s is unedifying in its oblivion to the inequalities and contradictions that lie littered in its wake. In its thirst to be global and cosmopolitan, it embraces the Tiger and Tibet alike, with nary a thought for the dirt in its own backyard.
Ironically, the same forces of globalisation that feed these inequalities and blind spots reveal to Kashmiris everywhere the full extent of India’s inability to grasp their psychological alienation from the mainstream, and the superficial nature of the “peaceful conditions” that have seemingly prevailed through the past decade. Alas! Fame Gurukul and its ilk have not proved sufficient panacea for the deep-rooted problems that traverse the relationship between Kashmir and India. How could it, when, among civil society and government alike, the nature of the traumatised Kashmiri psyche, compounded by the unresolved status of the LOC, has not been comprehended; the historical reasons for the rift between Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims have been blithely read in purely communal terms; the psychological compulsions drawing the original generation of young people towards aazadi hardly even considered, before a new generation casts aside reality TV to chant the word with a passion strange yet familiar.
Right to identity
What is this aazadi that once brought Kashmiris out on to Srinagar’s streets in the thousands, and that does so again? Does it signify political freedom from both India and Pakistan, the freedom to integrate into Pakistan, or greater federal autonomy within India? Undefined its precise meaning may be, but its general thrust is clear: aazadi indicates a yearning for a confident, well-defined Kashmiri identity. It compresses a present-tense denial of the right to identity, memory and history, with a messianic aspiration towards a different future. But aazadi is also a bargaining tool that strikes at the Indian nation’s foundational myth. If adjustment of one’s aspirations to the demands of an overarching structure is the basis of the pluralistic Indian Union, aazadi rejects the demand to adjust. Since the 1990s, its demand may have itself adjusted to everyday needs, but its intensity has lain dormant. If Qazi Touqeer’s success symbolised Indian desire for the Kashmiri who desires India, the Valley today exudes a renewed Kashmiri desire to define Kashmiri collective identity on its own terms. To deny its existence amounts to neo-colonialism. Rapprochement of any kind can begin only by acknowledging its legitimacy.
The writer is Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Leeds. Her book, ‘Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir’ will be published early 2009 by Permanent Black and the University of Minnesota Press.
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