[Reader-list] The Home of Memories

[meenu gaur]

Independent Research


The Home of Memories

Zuv Chum Braman
Gara Gatshaha
(My life brims over
I want to go home)
                         : - Lal Ded


One of the focuses of this research project is to witness the multiple 
memories of Home in the Kashmiri Pandit refugee camps. These memories of 
home often construct the space of the Camp as the Other of that lost object 
of fantasy which is Kashmir. In this posting I’d like to discuss the ways in 
which people’s imaginings of home determines the way they construct the 
narratives on their experience of the Camps. It needs to be remembered 
though that when the Kashmiri Pandit migrants remember home, they do not 
necessarily or only speak of Kashmir in the 1990s. The Kashmir of their 
memory is amorphous and in their memories of Kashmir as home they often turn 
to a treasured and more personal past.

A middle-aged man narrated to me the story of how he had revisited the 
Valley a few years back and how the thing that signifies to him an 
experience of his homeland is this image he carried from Kashmir of a man 
drinking water from a small stream. Even in the Camps at Delhi, hawa-paani 
(air+water) is an obsession: Delhi’s hawa-paani intensifies longings for a 
Kashmir with its singularities of hawa-paani. Yet another old man remembered 
that when he returned to Kashmir a few years back on a short visit; the 
first thing he did is that he went straight to his house, opened the tap in 
his house and drank the water. For many of the people in the Camps, Home is 
as elementary as Water.

Often enough in the Camps, life in Kashmir is also remembered as being full 
of prosperity. The people in the Camps maintain that they might not 
necessarily have enjoyed material prosperity in Kashmir but there they owned 
something, they weren’t so dispossessed. Most of the Kashmiri Pandit 
migrants had to move from their own houses in Kashmir to a small cubicle 
(lesser than a room in size) in a large hall which they had to share with 
many other families. The Camp is thus often constructed as the Other of an 
ideal and idyllic homeland where there always seemed to be enough for 
everybody. The enduring image of the Camp, to one inhabitant who has moved 
out of the camp now to a flat in East Delhi, is that of Pigs.  He narrated 
how he had never seen a pig in his whole life in Kashmir and when he landed 
in Sultanpuri, the memory of the early days in the Camp has remained forever 
etched in his mind as an image of the “Pigs”: “Maybe it was the heat. I had 
not seen a Delhi summer before that but believe me after a few days in the 
Camp, when I saw people on the roads… toh sab aadmi aurat mujhe suar nazar 
aate the (the men and women on the roads started looking like pigs to me)”.  
Someone else in the Sultanpuri Camp talked about how she remembered the days 
of happiness, well-being and even modest luxury in Kashmir: “Kashmir mein 
toh hum aise seb torte the aur chakh ke phek dete the…ki yeh theek nahin 
hain…aur yahan seb khareedne ke pehle sochna padta hai…” (We used to take a 
bite off such apples in Kashmir and then throw them away but now here you 
have to think many times before you buy an apple”.) The chaos of the Camp 
experience is mastered through the order of the memories of home. These 
memories are intrinsically about open spaces, orchards, abundance… a sense 
of comfort and general well-being.

When they look at their experience in the Camps, it is through jokes …one of 
the more popular jokes is that if any of the camp resident or ex-resident 
suffers from insomnia, the only antidote is to soak a clean handkerchief in 
the sewage drain outside the camp and place it next to his pillow…the 
familiar smell is sure to lure him to sleep. Sensations matter in these 
memories. The other obvious points of reference for any conversation on the 
life in the Camps are mosquitoes, pigs, the drain and the criminals. Nobody 
talks about things such as the supply of electricity in the camps, for 
instance, which might be many times better than in Kashmir, where one may 
get electricity for merely an hour in a whole day in the bitter winters.

The Kashmiri migrants carry a miniaturized, idealized Kashmir in their 
hearts. The memory of Kashmir is also a ritual of remembrance. Some of these 
narratives stemming out of personal experiences might seem suspect when 
measured up to certain facts about the life of these migrants in Kashmir but 
nonetheless they hint at a complex reality. A complex reality which involves 
a rejection of what the French historian Pierre Nora calls “the terrorism of 
historicized memory”.

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