[Reader-list] 'Histories, geographies and memories are at war in J&K'

[Shivam Vij शिवम् विज्]

Our way or the highway?

Histories, geographies and memories are at war in Jammu and Kashmir

by Ananya Jahanara Kabir
Posted online: Thursday, August 28, 2008
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/354295.html

An poshi teli, yeli van poshi, or 'while there are forests, there will
be food'. This Koshur proverb attributed to Kashmiri Sufi Nund Rishi
offers uncanny commentary on the present crisis in Jammu and Kashmir,
where controversies over forest land have intertwined with a furore
over an economic blockade, and where environmental concerns have been
bypassed in the clash of religious and political symbols now
demarcating the interests and emotions of Jammu from those of Kashmir.
Yet there exists a widespread inability to analyse the situation as a
battle of symbols and symptoms. This is a psychologically sick state,
but its sickness betokens something rotten in the state of India. To
understand it, we need to understand two sets of symbolic oppositions
that precede 1947, but which have defined the current crisis: the
Valley vs. Jammu; and the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad highway vs. the
Banihal pass route.

The opposition between the Valley and Jammu originates in the colonial
creation of 'Jammu and Kashmir' as a 'princely kingdom', sold by the
British for a song to Gulab Singh and his descendants. The strategic
desire for a buffer zone between the Indian plains and the Central
Asian playing fields of the Great Game soon led to the need for a
prime holiday retreat for the Raj. During the 19th and early 20th
centuries, hunting, fishing, espionage, photography, and summer balls
flourished in the Valley under the gaze of the Dogra maharajas based
in Jammu, even as the rulers ruthlessly exploited the inhabitants of
this prized space. Kashmiris of the Valley were denied the basis of
modern subjecthood such as education, sidelined to promote the Dogra
rulers' self-fashioning as, according to historian Mridu Rai, 'Hindu
rulers of a Hindu state'. Their practice of 'begaar' conscripted
Kashmiri Muslims as unpaid porters for the manual transportation of
goods across the kingdom. Kashmiri Pandits, showcased by European
Orientalists as representatives of a Hindu antiquity, were however
mobilised to enhance Dogra Hindu identity. These are regional memories
not easily forgotten.

Class-based exploitation spearheaded the Valley's mass uprising
against the Dogra rulers led by Sheikh Abdullah in 1931. Though his
socialist manifesto for a Naya Kashmir had room for Kashmiri Pandits
and Muslims, the older privileges of class continued to antagonise the
two groups. These divides resurfaced with the Pandit exodus in 1991,
which quickly fitted into the wider communal polarisation of the
1990s. The Pandits in Jammu's refugee camps had little else left but
their claims on a pre-Sanskritic, Hindu antiquity for Kashmir and
Kashmiri culture, which resonated with Jammu's historical interest in
those claims. Many of their intellectuals gravitated towards the Hindu
right, which eagerly embraced their cause. Conversely, many in the
Valley rejected the much-hyped syncretism of 'kashmiriyat' to assert
an Islamic Kashmiri identity. Physically separated, with new
generations growing up bereft of a composite demography, Kashmiris now
spoke bitterly of one Kashmir 'this side' of the Pir Panjal mountains,
and another on 'that side'. The Pandits' exile in Jammu has
exacerbated and complicated the deep historical tensions between Jammu
and Kashmir that underlie the present détente.

India retained the Dogra juxtaposition of Jammu and Kashmir, but had
to relinquish the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Highway. This was the only
feasible road linking Kashmir to the plains, but the Indo-Pak war of
1948 and the creation of the LOC severed this artery. Nehru had
presciently obtained Gurdaspur district, through which the only
possible alternative road to the valley would need to pass at
Pathankot. But trouble arose immediately after Partition: Indian
troops were airlifted to Srinagar to face the Tribal Invasion in
October 1947, pointing to the urgency for a bypass surgery that would
ultimately blast out of the mountains the Jawahar Tunnel. Kashmiris
still remember a time when the natural route out of the Valley
facilitated the movement of goods as well as people between the Valley
and its markets in that part of the Valley beyond the LOC, including
Muzaffarabad. The Kashmiris who marched towards Muzaffarabad to sell
their rotting fruit struck at the nation's Achilles' heel. But they
were primarily asserting a deep-rooted regional memory of their
relationship to the Valley's geography, their basis for the same
Kashmiriyat that well-meaning secular discourses reduce to
'syncretism'.

The problem lies in Indian ignorance of Kashmiri history, memories,
and self-construction, their equivalent of the 'synthesis between
history, geography and politics' through which scholar Mahmood Mamdani
examined the roots of the Tutsi genocide by Hutus. Kashmiriyat for
Kashmiris is about putting the Kashmiri back into the landscape and
redefining that relationship on their own terms. Pandit and Muslim
Kashmiris commonly identify with the endangered Hangul deer: can't the
deadlock over the forested land be broken by rearticulated its cost in
environmental terms, surely of equal concern to all? But to get there,
the political temperature has to be lowered first. The full re-opening
of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad highway would be the most effective step
in that direction.

The writer is a senior lecturer at the University of Leeds and the
author of 'Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir'