[Reader-list] Kashmiri identity and Indian neo-colonialism

[Shivam Vij शिवम् विज्]

Summer of discontent

The unrest in the Valley reflects the Kashmiri desire to define its
collective identity on its own terms.

by ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR
http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/08/31/stories/2008083150020100.htm

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.