Discovering Kashmir

I have been informed by my sources (read senses), though they may not be as reliable as Times Now and Zee News (read non-senses), that after the JNU kerfuffle, the newsfeed-space has been turned into a bloody Mad Max: Fury Road, in which a particular breed of numpty nuts, chauvinistic pricks, and jingoistic douchebags, for the health of their jumbo-sized egos, leave no chance to pounce on each other with semantic machetes, verbal sledgehammers, and rhetorical chain saws. They virtually slay and lynch each other on every encounter, because they want to show how good they are in their blokeish poppycock when it comes to anything Kashmir. The sources (read senses) told me that on many news sites it is called by a fancy name: nationalism going awry. But, it seems to me, they may be suffering, in an uncanny concoction of sorts, from the disease dyads of Kashmirophobia and Kashmiromania at the same time, which might have given them acute Kashmir-pneumonia. And, as they say in Kashmir, even Hakeem Luqmaan cannot cure this post-Westphalian malady!

If my sources (I know you know!) are to be believed, it seems Kashmir has become a mysterious word, a lethal term, and an inscrutable phenomenon. Some see it as the Helen of Troy, territory of desire, jugular vein, integral part, and some others see it as a political bubble, a semantic babel, a nationalistic trouble, and a lose-lose squabble.

I humbly ask them, what is Kashmir for you—Game of Thrones, Don-Quixote-meets-Billy-Pilgrim or post-colonial Zeitgeist?

I humbly ask them, what is Kashmir for you—Game of Thrones, Don-Quixote-meets-Billy-Pilgrim or post-colonial Zeitgeist?

I would not deny that Kashmir is lethal. It kills and it has killed; it kills ethical spirits and moral anima in any type of people; it even kills the invincible gods of Politika and Diplomatie. Any refined politician or any fastidious diplomat across South Asia, from any background, with any education, from any pedigree, with or without a mop hair, with or without a bald spot, ultimately gets despoiled and drained of all tack and finesse in front of this one word. That is the power of Kashmir: to turn people into political zombies who find themselves but regurgitate all the tired statist shibboleths, despite their own autonomous brains.

As Meghnad Desai said, when bogus history is created, bizarre claims are made and spurious evidence is presented. Yet discursive vigilantism and rambling online khap panchayats masquerade as the Oxford union debate. Perhaps bored of their mundane, humdrum, uncelebrated existence or perhaps sullen over their unfulfilled desires—often heightened by persistent exposure to Sunny Leonesque fantasies—so many people begin to stake a claim over a place and people (i.e., Kashmir and Kashmiris), when in reality they cannot even pronounce Tabakh-natihaen; don’t know if Kalmaaz is a demon or a delicacy; don’t know if Burzahom is a place or a vegetable; cannot tell Poonch from Kisthwar or Budgam from Tral; hardly know who Habba Khatoon was; cannot say if Mughals or the Afghans came first; cannot say how Buddhism disappeared; have no idea who Nagas and Pisachas were; barely know what Nundh Rishi was to Lal Ded; cannot tell when the mass Muslim conversion happened; have no idea about the Poonch rebellion of August but selectively insist on the Tribal Invasion of October; talk about the Kashmiri Pandit tragedy but hardly care to know about the Jammu ethnic cleansing. In a nutshell, despite their abject—and infectious—ignorance about the place and people (i.e., Kashmir and Kashmiris), they stick like arrogant, self-righteous, patronising creeps!

So, should one even engage with them? Any sane person on the road will tell you: reading Chetan Bhagat or watching Johnny Depp’s Mortdecai instead would be lesser of the two evils.

See, fable is not history; legendary stories are not paleontology; myths are not proof enough; and one shouldn’t take the mystical malarkey of the theo-fascists seriously. If there is to be any history of Kashmir to be taught to kids and students, it ought to be a scientifically produced history; it ought to be authentic enough and academically rigorous rather than the elitist specious fantasy of Righteous Republic.

Nevertheless, I want to say something to them. See, fable is not history; legendary stories are not paleontology; myths are not proof enough; and one shouldn’t take the mystical malarkey of the theo-fascists seriously. If there is to be any history of Kashmir to be taught to kids and students, it ought to be a scientifically produced history; it ought to be authentic enough and academically rigorous rather than the elitist specious fantasy of Righteous Republic. And unlike those, who pretend to “discover” what is actually an “imagined community”, I will begin my letter like this:

I am a Kashmiri, that is what I have grown up believing who I am, but after 30 summers of my life, I know that my distant ancestors were not Kashmiris but Africans who had migrated out from Ethiopia around 60,000 years ago as Homo sapiens, and crossing the sea via the Bab el-Mandeb Strait between Yemen and Djibouti, they reached the Central Asian lands and later found their way to a bowl-shaped valley we now call Kashmir. All along this great expedition with thousands of fellow Homo sapiens, my ancestors encountered other human species—Homo erectus and Neanderthals—and possibly fought with them with smarter weapons and possibly inter-bred, producing new gracile hominids; and ultimately they survived all the great challenges of the nature and emerged victorious among all the human species. And, 5000 years ago, my ancestors inside the bowl-shaped valley of Kashmir had learnt to made, out of bones and stones, sophisticated things like chisels, spears, daggers, harpoons, and many other useful tools. They used them to hunt all kinds of animals for sustenance, dug earth to make subterranean dwellings for themselves. And, many years later, they learnt to make mud houses and carve their stories on stone slabs. This was the Burzahom civilisation, and all this was much, much, before anybody called himself or others a Brahmin, a Dalit, a Syed, a Sheikh, a Wattul, a Khan, a Chowdhary, a Mughal, so on and so forth.

Moral of the story: everyone is an outsider, and everyone is indigenous. If you really want to dig in history, dig deeper, dig in your heels and dig through your biases, till you reach the depths of truth.

* * *

A well-meaning Indian had a chance debate with his Kashmiri friend on Facebook. He wanted to use logical reasoning to prove that Kashmir is as “an integral part of India”.

Moral of the story: everyone is an outsider, and everyone is indigenous. If you really want to dig in history, dig deeper, dig in your heels and dig through your biases, till you reach the depths of truth.

Indian Friend: We had the first Prime Minister Nehru, he was a Kashmiri. We had Indira Gandhi, she was a Kashmiri, and we had Rajiv Gandhi, he too was a Kashmiri. So, India was ruled by successive Kashmiris since independence, and hence Kashmir is an integral part of India.

Kashmiri Friend: Well, your argument does not prove Kashmir is an integral part of India, but what it certainly does prove is that India was ruled by the same family for a long, long, time. How bad!

* * *

In the cafe, Ram looked visibly upset. Sham took the seat across the table and said, “What happened, comrade Ram?”

“I don’t know how can he do that!”

“Do what? Who?”

“You know comrade, last night I was watching a YouTube video and on it Anupam Kher was reciting Faiz’s poem. Can you believe that!”

“But, why would that make you upset, comrade? He is an actor, he can do that.”

“This khaki-nikkar was reciting ‘Bol Ki Lab Azaad Hai Tere’ with such passion, as if his government was run by Voltaire himself.” Ram shrugged snidely.

“You see, that is the problem with all fascists, they will appropriate cultural symbols of everyone for their own political ends.”

“Hmm, I can understand that, ironic, no?”

“Of course it’s ironic! Faiz was no right-wing apologist like him, and ‘Bol’ is a revolutionary leftist song and not a theo-fascist anthem hailing the state. You see, that is the problem with all fascists, they will appropriate cultural symbols of everyone for their own political ends.”

“Hmm.” Sham thought for a while and said, “But comrade Ram, I was thinking, in a way we did that too, no?”

“What do you mean?”

“We said to those Kashmiri folks,” said Sham, “that we support your struggle for azadi, as we believe you have been wronged, and we chanted ‘Hum Kya Chahte, Azadi’ song with them, in the context of their right to self-determination. But now, our comrade Kanhaiya Kumar in his post-jail avatar said by azadi we only mean freedom within India, and he also surrendered to the integral part rhetoric. Isn’t that a kind of wrong U-turn for the conscientious left?”

“Well, he is from CPI and the CPI is to the real Left what Govinda is to real fashion.”