[Reader-list] Invisible in the Camps: Women in the Kashmiri Pandit refugee camps.

[meenu gaur]

In this posting I would like to focus on the narratives of the women that I 
interviewed in the course of this research.

When a community encounters a threat, its fears are often expressed through 
discourses on the honour and dignity of the women of the community. The 
narratives of Kashmiri Pandit migrants about 1990 focus on how it had been 
getting difficult for the women from Pandit households to move around in the 
Valley with self-respect and dignity. Many recounted stories of how Pandit 
women were being forced to marry Muslim militants though these incidents and 
stories often took place in an elsewhere which nobody seemed to have been 
much familiar with… all of them had heard of such a thing happening from 
someone else. I make this point not to suggest that atrocities were never 
committed on Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley but that rumour mongering and 
criminal mischief by rogue elements took on an acutely ugly turn for a 
community whose sense of security had already been completely eroded by 
1990. So much so that the militants found willing partners in these 
criminal/rogue elements who did all they could to create confusion in the 
Valley (the former Chairman of the Hurriyat had once called "confusion" a 
desirable goal for the ends of Pakistan in the Valley). The ubiquitous 
posters and the notorious hit lists could be drawn up in a militant hideout 
or by schoolboys in the back alleys of downtown Srinagar…nobody bothered to 
stop anybody in the interests of “confusion”. But a more sinister goal seems 
to have been at work here…to instill fear in the hearts and minds of not 
just the Pandit minority but that of everybody in Kashmir. The State did 
nothing to restore the confidence of the people or allay the fears of the 
Pandit minority, protect them or in the least dispel many of these rumours… 
it already had too much on its hands faced with a complete collapse of civil 
administration and first stirrings of rebellion even in the J&K Police. Even 
then the State wasn’t interested in anything but “national security”.

Someone in the Sultanpuri camp mentioned to me, that though Kashmiri Pandits 
may well now be living impoverished lives in refugee camps of Delhi but at 
least their women live with honour and dignity. However, if you imagine a 
camp such as the South Extension camp in Delhi housed in a “community 
centre”… one large hall… a “baraat ghar”, as these halls are called… 27 
families, which would approximately mean 104-110 people, in this hall or 
“baraat ghar”… each allotted 2 feet X 5 feet minuscule spaces, it is 
difficult to understand the rhetoric about self-respect and dignity…

But the women I spoke with frequently brought up this lack of space in their 
narratives and this is understandable, as it is the women who spend most of 
their time inside these camps (very few are employed outside the camp). The 
refugee camp is a space where the notion of the private is all but 
non-existent and the only available spaces are shared spaces between the men 
and women, the young and the old… and, as is often the case, men dominate 
even these matchbox spaces. The women feel they were better off in a 
traditional society, which at least offered its own spaces for them.

Veena, one of the women I interviewed, told me that most Pandit households 
in Kashmir had segregated spaces for men and women and they did not share 
the same space even with the men from their own families (the reason she 
cited for the existence of this practice was the shared culture between the 
Hindus and the Muslims in the Valley). In the camps, they had to abandon 
their traditional ways of living. The women of the camps see the loss of 
their private space as a loss of dignity. There are small common bathrooms 
in the camp, women have to sleep cramped in corners in their small cubicles 
next to other members of their own family or as was the case in the earlier 
days, in the large unpartitioned halls next to the members of the other 
families.

The complete lack of intimacy between couples and the impossibility of any 
real emotional engagement due to the constant gaze in which each of them 
found themselves every single moment all these years is also spoken of by 
these women to highlight the strain every personal relationship has gone 
through over the last 12 years. Some in the camps speculated about the drop 
in birth-rates and the dangerous implications it carried for the community. 
Many of them often talked about “extinction”. For many women who were 
already married in the 1990s this migration has meant a separation and 
isolation from their parental homes and larger families which were often 
seen by them as support structures (most of the community is getting 
scattered even now as families move out of the camps to resettle into small 
flats in Delhi suburbs and the links with even the camp community have begun 
to weaken).

In my interviews in the camps, most women were nostalgic about marriages, 
festivals, Shivratri celebrations, frequent visits to neighbours and the 
rest of the family, shopping in bazaars, close friendships with Muslim 
women, when they spoke of their life in Kashmir. The younger women recalled 
their days in high school and college, and contrasted it to their present 
life, which is constrained and often surrounded by unfriendly neighbours. 
One of the women explained to me, using the allegory of birds building a 
nest that however far and wide the birds may travel, in the evening they 
must 'return' to their nests and that the Pandits have no nests anymore, “we 
can never return home in the evening”.

Also, there are no interactions for them outside the camp, all social and 
festive occasions mean hopping over to the next cubicle in the camp. Veena‘s 
marriage took place in the very camp she now lives in, though she stressed 
that there aren’t any intra-camp marriages (meaning marriages between people 
of the same camp, this being a necessary invention to act as a safeguard and 
deterrent for young people in the camp). She also spoke of how all the 
promise and potential in the younger women was not realized, their education 
and all other career opportunities were throttled as there was so much 
paranoia about honour of the community with which the Kashmiri Pandit women 
found themselves burdened. Thus most girls were married in their teens 
because of the fear of things “spiralling out of control” (to express the 
gravity of the situation Veena went to the extreme of saying that the 
practice of “baal vivaha” or child marriage has been revived by the 
community). However, she was also quick to point out that in many cases like 
herself the migration provided a much needed exposure to new worlds and 
opportunities. Even though her own education had been disrupted for some 
years, today Veena has a good career in a multinational corporation. She 
mentions how the quotas and reserved seats in various institutions like 
medical colleges, engineering colleges devised by various state governments 
for the Kashmiri Pandits such as by the government in Maharashtra has been 
the biggest boon for the young in the community. She narrated a story about 
the Karbala massacre…in order to speak about a community building their 
lives after displacement… “kehte hai jab shiao pe zulm hua tha, unka paani 
roka gaya tha, unhe ghar se beghar kiya gaya tha, at that time Prophet 
Muhammad ki ma ne, unhone ek dua dee thee ki jo bhi beghar hoga bhagwaan 
usko bahut jaldi settle bhi kar dega, jisko zulm ki wajah se apni zameen 
chornee paregee, unka bahut jaldi settlement hoga, aur who dua sach hui.” ( 
It is said that when the Shias were facing oppression and were forced to 
leave their homes, the Prophet’s mother prayed that all those who lose their 
land and home due to oppression should find resettlement… and that prayer 
was answered). Interestingly Prophet’s mother had died long before Karbala 
when Prophet Muhammad himself was very young…but what I wanted to emphasize 
through this story is the threads, which often come up through such cultural 
references which still connect the Pandits in the camps and the Muslims in 
the Valley.

Veena remembered the night of 16th January 1990 when they left the Valley 
vividly. She remembered the exact objects they had carried with them that 
night… “chaar bartan, petromax, ek chula…” familiar objects…this is the home 
they carried with them to the cubicles in these camps…She remembered how as 
a young girl, she and her siblings were most excited at the prospect of 
travelling on a truck, unaware of the seriousness of the situation when they 
were leaving the Valley. She remembers that the older members of the family 
cried throughout the journey while she fought with her siblings as to who 
would occupy the window seat. Most people left their houses with very little 
as they were sure that they would be able to return home that spring…

Geeta, from the Hauzrani camp, in response to my query about the memory of 
home, pointed to a young adolescent boy and said that he was only a year old 
when they had left the Valley, but he often tells his friends in school “Hum 
Kashmir mein baraf se khelte the…” (We used to play with snow in Kashmir) 
and all the older members in the camp tease him and ask him, “lekin aap 
kabhi Kashmir gaye hain?” (But have you ever been to Kashmir?) … In many 
ways, she said, they are all like him carrying their fragile identity and 
memories of home in their hearts and minds.

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