[Reader-list] Fwd: The New Kashmiri Wave

[Inder Salim]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Amjad Majid <amjito at gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 4:10 PM
Subject: The New Kashmiri Wave
To:


The New Kashmiri Wave:

For the last 20 odd years of exile (within and without), a new wave of
Kashmiris is dominating a cultural movement from outside of Kashmir.
The youth in the valley is slowly integrating with this New Wave.  The
university system as we know it is not adept (enough), yet the
aspirations of many for a better/further education has slowly led them
to inquire about the present position of our Kashmiri identity, inside
and outside of Kashmir.

I come back after 20 years of living outside India, outside Asia, back
to the Motherland of motherlands, to find a cultural movement in the
happening as a direct response/reaction to the 20 years of exile
amidst that scorching painful silence that has (had) muted us all.

I have been a spectator-reader and perhaps an average critic of this
movement.  It is happening NOW, right NOW and it is being lead by many
of those who left after 1990.  Some of them are consistent figures
from press and journalism, some come from the corporate world and many
an industry, and others are highly involved in academia.  Overall, it
is a New Wave of young educated Kashmiris who are old enough to
remember the happenings and the circumstances of the past 20 years.

This group (Saariy Samav Aksey Razi Lamav) precisely reflects such a
multitude which forms this New Wave which in turn will create a
tsunami of humanization and cultural reintegration in the Dal Lake all
across the Jhelum, leaving no body of water untouched.

I am reluctant to mention the cynicism of a our numerable sages who
passively mumble on and on that "Kashmiri unity is near impossible,
Kashmiri culture is dying, how will the Kashmiri Pandits make it back?
Their children are walking on a thin tiny thread that barely binds
them back to the homeland, how will they be able to adapt and adjust
in the future?"

To this, my response is rather personal: I left at the age of 8, I
still speak Kashmiri like a verbose and fervent 'groos' (farmer).  The
only reason I reside at the outer gates of Kashmir is because I have
witnessed the death of our institutions (clearly unable to fulfill my
need for further education), and I find likeminded Kashmiris out here,
out here in exile with me, waiting, watching, speculating, calculating
and envisioning the moment when a generation of passive Kashmiris who
have lost faith and hope, finally retire, by stepping aside and
letting us take care of ‘business’.

I have had the pleasure of meeting the most culturally enriched
people, PhD scholars who have come from prestigious foreign
universities and settled back in Kashmir.  I have met journalists,
educators, artists, teachers, scientists, doctors, writers, corporate
managers, professors, technical professionals, researchers, poets, who
share one thing in common: the art of reading and the craft of
writing.  Naturally, most of their writing and reading is closely tied
to the subject of Kashmir.  There is much isolation involved and
solitude is perhaps our best friend, only until we find that others
are engrained in the same melancholy and unrest, irrespective of class
and religious affiliation.

As far as I can recall from my readings, all matters regarding
identity and language are preserved through reading and writing.  All
nation building and culture empowering feats have had their manuals,
their books, their texts of genesis.  I doubt that people like
Basharat Peer, Najeeb Mubarki, Siddharta Gigoo, among so many others
of my generation (I have yet to meet a majority of you) will put their
pens down.  In fact, from what I have observed, they are merely
warming up their paper and their ink.  To others, these might be
employed Kashmiris with healthcare benefits, to me they are the
productive (producing) subjects of our (k)/(c)ultural (k)/(c)apital.

That said, yes truly there are many challenges to face in the coming
future, but to actually see a cultural movement slowly taking off is a
great start.  We are not here merely to read and write about Kashmir,
we are here to govern through writing.  Writing creates legislation,
it provides platforms of expression, it exercises a "will to truth",
it upholds and debacles, it shifts notions of identity, preconceptions
of power and alters the everso (de)stabilizing schematics of hegemony,
subalternity, and otherness. Writing brings about agency, our Kashmiri
agency.  In turn, our reading pervades it.

As such, we shall leave the politics and the bias to others, because
beyond all politics is the realm of the humanity and ‘that’ culture
within us all, the hunger for a common culture, the taste of our
language at the tip of our tongues, the trace of our gestures, the
resonance of our proverbs, a mutual point of origin, the source of our
grief and love; our beloved Kashmir.

My personal engagement through writing is that of seeking Otherness,
giving voice to that which (and those who) seem unfamiliar, distant,
absent.  As a start, I aim to write a Kashmiri Pandit ‘better than’ a
Kashmiri Pandit can write himself/herself such that the gap between
the One and the Other is non-existent (always keeping in mind the
difference between writing from experience and writing from inquiry).
This for me, is the only way to bring about the common Kashmiri
identity that we all share and fight to preserve regardless of the
pain and suffering of so many during these last two decades.  If we
are able to close all gaps and rekindle broken ties, even if it is
through writing, we will all have won a significant battle over this
war and conflict which seem to never end.

I leave you all with a set of quotes from “The Location of Culture” by
Homi K. Bhabha (I follow and understand him 100% even though many are
unwilling), God bless and keep on reading and writing!:

http://members.iinet.net.au/~narrator/Quotes/Quote12.html



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