The Imaginarium of Rahul Pandita

A few days after we had blessed ourselves with readings of Rahul Pandita’s account of his life and times and the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley, a few of us Mleccha friends had a discussion on the book. The conversation was typically Mleccha: How much does one need to stretch imagination to call the book a memoir; does a mythical account by Abhimanyu on what Arjun had told him about Chakrviews while he was still in the womb constitute a memoir? Why does Mr. Pandita hypothesize that the only way we Mleccha could also have learning, knowledge and the ability to read and understand Sartre in our “blood” is if our mothers, grandmothers and great-grandmothers were impregnated by Kashmiri Brahmins?

But the most important thing we discussed involved a very Mleccha question of philosophy. Since the later middle part of the last century, after the Author was declared dead, authors, artists after all, have stamped their authority by interjecting, ridiculing and precisely explaining the conversation between the narrator and the reader. Rahul Pandita’s memoir is so manifestly self-contradictory that one cannot but think that it is done on purpose and Rahul the narrator is constantly being mocked by Rahul the author.

For starters, Mr. Pandita (re)builds the figure of the Typical Kashmiri Pandit (TKP). All of us have heard from ‘sources’, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist and Christian, that this TKP is sly, cowardly, arrogant and gets back at his enemies through two Chanakyan techniques: Samsraya and Dvaidhibhava. In the discussion group, none had ever actually known a TKP, neither among parents’ nor our own Kashmiri Pandit friends, so the suspicion is that TKP does not exist. Kashmiri Pandits are as sly and as naïve as other Kashmiris, as a matter of fact all human beings, and if there is a marked aspect of slyness or arrogance, it is a social function, not a result of “genes”. Why did Mr. Pandita need to (re)construct a TKP then? In his Imaginarium, if TKPs are genetically programmed to be sly, why does he reveal it to us? Is he not a TKP? Or is he a TKP and reckons that in the present moment, a certain admission of truth is the better part of slyness?

“Kashmiri Pandits have knowledge in their “genes”. Yet they are always powerless, a “mere spectator” in their own lives. How does one build a bridge over the frightening chasm between these assertions?”

Khair, two titular threads run like fangs through the text: The proprietorship of the moon and blood and genes. Mr. Pandita leans back on the old Brahmin idea that Hinduism is a territory. Kashmir is a part of this geography. Islam is foreign in this strict territorial sense. Any Kashmiri, whether ‘indigenous’ or ‘settler’, transforms into a foreigner –Mleccha is the word – once he or she is a Muslim. Thus, the armed insurrection of 1989 in Kashmir, aided by Pakistan but largely comprising of local freedom fighters and an overwhelming support among the general population is presented as a neat extension of the Pashtun raids of 1947. (The crucial raison d’être of the 1947 raids, the genocide of Muslims by the Dogra government in Jammu, is conveniently made invisible, but then facts are never Mr. Pandita’s strong suite. He writes, for example, that the reason uncooked meat used to be brought to his house on Eid-ul-Zuha was because Muslims and Pandits avoided eating at each other’s house.)  This serves another purpose, it is used to slip in an explanation for why the Pandits choose to embed themselves in Indian State structures post 1947.

Not once in 253 pages is a Muslim placed inside a house, they are always delivering the milk, selling pottery, working in the fields, fixing TV antennas and living somewhere nearby when they are not looting, burning and killing. There is an “Ambardar’s house” which looks like a mansion and there are houses which “belonged to Muslims”. The one time Muslims exist inside houses is when Mr. Pandita visits his home for the first time after migration. The family which has bought what used to be his house and the one living in what formerly used to be Razdans’ house next-door have to submit themselves to extrapolation as all Kashmiri Muslims, intruders and occupiers they are.

Within the Imaginarium, Kashmiri Pandits approaching Guru Teg Bahadur in Punjab to save their faith is a commendable fact of history but religious skirmishes in Srinagar after the desecration of the Golden Temple by Indian army is something which cannot be understood, it being an event in which Kashmir had no role to play. Contextually, Kashmiri Pandits are said to have arrived in Kashmir from Punjab some three-thousand years ago.

Kashmiri Pandits have knowledge in their “genes”. Yet they are always powerless, a “mere spectator” in their own lives. How does one build a bridge over the frightening chasm between these assertions? Obviously, there is no knowledge-power nexus in the Imaginarium. The Mleccha hordes rule. What if a long-line of Indian Prime Ministers are conscious Kashmiri Pandits — a shorthand for the Brahman elitist nature of the Indian State thankfully provided by Rahul the author. What if there are references galore in the book of this Pandit helping that one in education, business, housing, getting a good job etc. A closed group which does not marry outside itself and which knows the ropes of karkungi –bureaucracy– and Kashmir, as a colony of the Indian State, was always ruled by karkuns. But no, the only ropes in the Imaginarium are those of the genes. A Sheikh Abdullah ought not to tell Kashmiri Pandits “Raliv, Chaliv ya Galiv” because he has KP ancestry and it is not a Kosher thing for him to do so. The husband of the only woman who offers a fleeing Pandit family a jar of milk works in the fields of a Kashmiri Pandit. The lone person helping a Kashmir Pandit hide from raiders in Muzaffarabad is a servant who has worked in a Pandit household at Srinagar. A Saadat Hasan Manto remains a Kashmiri Pandit “by virtue of his disposition, temperament, features and his spirit”. Brahmin jurisdiction is both territorial and personal.

Two incidents sink to the bottom of this pond of pure blood. A Dogra driver in Jammu is in love with a Pandit girl and does the most endearing and anodyne things in the pursuit of his love. He puts mushy stickers on his bus, befriends Mr. Pandita and requests him to write a few cheesy lines on a greeting card he wants to gift the girl. Mr. Pandita consents in the beginning but eventually decides against it and tears the greeting card in the Dogra driver’s face, resulting in a scuffle. This is the only instance in the book where Mr. Pandita feels like a hero. Auxiliary to this, the book is stuffed to the brim with male chauvinism. Pandit women are carriers of Brahmin honour while Mr. Pandita can go about loving older women in Delhi, sending forty-page love-letters, receiving lipstick-marked photographs and ogling at even Pandit women holding relief tomatoes against their breasts. But why can’t the Dogra driver love a Kashmiri Pandit girl? Because he is “illiterate”, he does not have the genes. No doubt Pandit women have had to face a horrible time in Jammu post migration, being harassed, molested and living away from home in a state of fear and humiliation; but what Mr. Pandita describes is not it. The Dogra driver will be the wronged hero for everyone except the most die-hard advocates of chauvinism and casteist and racial purity. It is another stark example of Rahul the author undercutting Rahul the narrator, but the distressing thing is that here, as in numerous other places, such a racist anecdote will be used to justify and negate the real Pandit suffering.

In the second incident, Supriya Bhat, a teenage Kashmiri, tells Mr. Pandita, “Value should be given to life, not materialistic things.” Mr. Pandita approves, feels elated that the next-generation of Kashmiri Pandits is as bright as ever and remembers Sartre (whom he stops just short of terming a Kashmiri Pandit.) What then are we to make of the fact that all through the book Mr. Pandita attaches more value to the turnips cooked at his home than all the Kashmiri Muslims he has ever known? Aes chah gogji?

The net result is that in the Imaginarium, Kashmiri Pandits are what Sartre would call être-pour-soi, they are born conscious –Brahmin– struggle with existence, find a purpose in life and are complete only when they die. (As to the ‘mere spectator in his own life’, Sartre explained that well through the example of a café waiter, didn’t he?) The Mleccha are être-en-soi, they have a predetermined place, purpose, essence and that is what they have to fulfill. If they begin to fiddle with their fetters, then of course ‘hell is other people’. This is the paradigm which allows Mr. Pandita to declare Hinduism as a religion of equality. Now, Hindu philosophies may have certain admirable qualities, with a robust caste system, equality is definitely not one of them. The narrative of equality holds if only Brahmins exist as conscious beings and the Mleccha are inanimate objects to which the idea of equality is not applicable. This paradigm also supplies the crux of the book and its most fundamental self-contradiction: The Mleccha do not have a free will but that means they cannot be held responsible for what has befallen the Kashmiri Pandits. This gives rise to the profound Sartrean nausea in Mr. Pandita. A nausea which is amplified a thousand-fold every time he hears the word azadi. After all, how should a person feel if the inanimate objects around him demand freedom and a right to self-determination?

But what would I, a mere Mleccha, know of Sartre and ‘knowledge’. Even being an aborigine (my surname exists nowhere else in the world) will not help because I do not have the good fortune of having known Pandit blood in a thousand generations. Ergo, this review does not exist.

The insinuation goes deeper than this. What kind of a moral position first prescribes that Brahmins exist for pursuit of knowledge and Shudra and Mleccha for doing menial labour and then proceeds to ridicule the Mleccha for not knowing the importance of knowledge and storing onions and garlic in shelves where the Brahmins stored books? Why is a knowledge of the Vedas a higher form of knowledge than, say, a knowledge of agriculture or blacksmithery? Does the former necessarily make you more intelligent, conscious and human?

But perhaps the most exasperating thing about the book is that it seeks, willy-nilly, to make the exodus of Kashmiris Pandits a farce. It is not just a matter of the number of people who migrated, what Mr. Pandita writes as 350000 but is somewhere between 1.6-1.7 lakh. It is the loss of an entire sub-culture, a unique way of living. Kashmiri society was composed of molecules of separate but together atoms of different elements. That stands lost. A community which had made this valley its home for thousands of years is losing its roots and what it has build over all those centuries. After a reading of the book, the very obvious needs to be restated. Pandits had not only build houses, apple orchards and libraries with rare manuscripts in Kashmir, but, in addition to the bonds with the geography of this place, they had also build unique, fragile, loving, hating, ever-changing bonds with their fellow countrymen and countrywomen. This was the real potential of the book. To meditate on home and exile. To exhibit profundity in an understanding of a unique political and cultural history. What Mr. Pandita does is write nostalgically about twenty-two room houses (how many Kashmiris have those?), sharing toilets with no more than a gunny bag guarding one’s privacy (something hundreds of thousands of Kashmiris, including me, have done for the substantial part of our lives), being ashamed of bathing in public, ‘knowledge-genes’ and  ‘learning-blood’, Mr. Pandita’s gods being more powerful than the Mleccha One, Mleccha working for Kashmiri Pandits aish karith (with pleasure), Mleccha begging before them, Mleccha saying that whatever little education they have is the dirt of Pandit shoes; all reeking of classism, casteism, communalism, racism and the sense of privilege which accompanies them. It is all the more sinister because a large section of Kashmiri Pandits neither shared the reality of those privileges in Kashmir nor continue to nurture such fantasies in exile. The only place he comes close to exploring his own idea of home and exile is during his poignant visit to what used to be his house in Srinagar but there too he is so busy formulating charge-sheets against the residents that the opportunity is quickly squandered away.

In particular, it does not behoove a person who claims knowledge as his genetic trait, as Mr. Pandita does, to plead ignorance and a complete lack of understanding of the reasons behind the Pandit exodus. It is a difficult and complex event sitting in the history of this place but then that is the purpose of scholarship; to unravel complex themes and to make manifest difficult issues. Before India occupied Kashmir by chhal-kappat in 1947, Kashmiri Pandits were entrenched in positions of power under the Dogra regime. A movement for democracy was already underway since 1931 and many Kashmiri Pandits, inspired by leftist thought of the time, played an active role in it. After 1947, however, a large section of Kashmiri Pandits began to identify with the Indian State. The reasons need to be examined in detail. Was it only because India was a Hindu country with a Brahmin elite structurally and functionally in power? Was it because Kashmiri Pandits realized that true democracy in Kashmir would mean a loss of privilege to them, as started to happen immediately with such policies as the 1953 land-reforms? Was it because there was always a real possibility that Kashmir would become part of Pakistan and Pandits did not want to be part of that country for the same reasons Kashmiri Muslims did not want to be part of India? Was it good old human greed, Pandits wanting on the one hand to have a home in the Kashmir of the cool, fragrant breezes, the lakes and the blue mountains and on the other hand an office in North and South Block in New Delhi (or whichever new power centers emerged in India from time to time)? Or was it a combination of all these?

In tandem with this, it also needs to be examined, to what extent had Kashmiri Muslims begun to tease, marginalize and exclude all Kashmiri Pandits from their own mainstream politics, the politics of azadi. It was a vicious circle, a samunder manthan where any amrit churned out was appropriated by India and Pakistan and Kashmiris had to drink all the halahal.

By 1989, the situation had reached a point where most Kashmiri Pandits were considered an extension of the Indian State by Kashmiri Muslims. This Mr. Pandita has pointed out in some of his interviews but not in the book. What he fails to point out though, is that the Indian State was not just a nondescript party to the Kashmir conflict. It had already presented itself as the most ugly, devious and treacherous of systems, one which had promised us plebiscite in return for us agreeing to be temporarily part of it but never fulfilled that promise, one that had rigged all elections in Kashmir so that it could maintain its rule over us, one that jailed, killed and economically ruined all Kashmiris who were vocal in their demand for the right to self-determination, all the while singing paeans in praise of its own democracy, rule of law and justice. For its hypocrisy, it was seen as worse than the Dogra despotism before it. Like Mr. Pandita does in the book, by 1989 most Kashmiri Pandits had so ingrained themselves in the status quo that it had made them indifferent to the life and politics of their Muslim neighbors. The BSF camp behind their colony had become their Durgasaptashati, their mantra; it was going to protect them no matter what.

So when the guns started to blaze from the Kashmiri side in 1989, as they had always done from the Indian side, of course the first aim of the insurrection was to disrupt the nerve centers of the occupation. Many Pandits were killed because they were part of the occupation’s nervous system but so were an even larger number of Kashmiri Muslims for the same reasons. However, it is never to be presumed that this was the only reason. Some Pandits might have been killed for purely ideological or communal reasons, and there are strong oral narratives that many might have been killed by the disconcerted maze of Indian State agencies themselves. Leaflets containing threats and hit-lists were dropped into many Pandit neighborhoods and there was a general khauff ka mahoal (state of fear) for them. The question Rahul the narrator cannot engage with, for the genetic reasons mentioned earlier, is how much was this state of fear a result of these threats, how much was it a recognition of which side Pandits had chosen (Indian State over their neighbour’s/countrymen’s) and how much was it the nausea of passing into être-pour-autrui vis-à-vis the Mleccha (‘Why did these Muslims need to insurrect and spoil my perfect struggle with existence?’) But Rahul the author leaves us enough clues.

Two important questions of justice are involved here: Who (or what) killed whom and how do we bring the killer(s) to book. To again state the obvious, even in its heyday, the armed insurrection was never as organized as the Indian State. There was no unified programme and there were numerous largely independent units which had the most slack of coordination with each other. Crucially, they never had the infrastructure to administrate and govern, to run their writ and maintain records. The Indian State, even at a point where its control was the weakest, retained these faculties. Mr. Pandita says in one of his interviews that he would prefer to be a citizen of a country which is “secular in word if not in spirit”. Shall we extend this spirit to the present discussion? None of the many programmes professed by the various Kashmiri armed groups contains a clause that Kashmiri Pandits have to be killed for being Hindus, or just for desiring to be a part of India. The Indian system, on the other hand, condemns all Kashmiris who want azadi to death via Indian Constitution’s Article 21’s deprivation of life and liberty according to the procedure established by law. This procedure of law is established under IPC/RPC (sedition, waging war against the country etc), CrPC, AFSPA, PSA and such methods of control and social engineering as Doctrine of Sub-Conventional Warfare of the Indian army. In the last twenty-three years, to add to its already shameful history of deceit and hypocrisy, the Indian State has let loose a reign of terror leaving more than 70,000 Kashmiris dead, nearly ten thousand disappeared and tens of thousands of women raped. (The reason why India’s National Anthem to Kashmiris is what the Nazi salute is to the Jews.) If we go deeper into this, we soon arrive at the conclusion that while Pandits were threatened and killed by individuals and small groups in Kashmir, the existence of Kashmiris as a whole is systemically threatened by the Indian State. Yet, what Mr. Pandita gives us is this: All Kashmiris are responsible for the exodus of Pandits but Kashmiris themselves were not killed by Indian soldiers and agencies in pursuit of stated legal goals of the Indian State but were victims of the “monster of violence”, “grave human rights violation” against which there “needs to be zero tolerance”. What does the monster of violence look like; is he somehow related to Jaludbhav? What happens if Kashmiris tell Mr. Pandita not to worry, he has been a victim of this monster of violence and there will be zero tolerance against such crimes in the future? You know what will happen; his memoir will have to be unwritten.

This brings us to the second question. How do we bring the killers to book? (A Mleccha question here: How does one punish a constitution? By not submitting to it, no matter what, no?) To punish crimes, we need evidence, witnesses. The Indian State, before and during the armed conflict in Kashmir, has been destroying evidence, keeping only that part which suits its purpose. It has threatened, killed and destroyed through other means any witness brave enough to come forward. (Isn’t destruction of evidence and coercion of witnesses in itself the most damning evidence?) All this has been done to make Kashmiris except the impossibility of justice. How are we to arrive at the truth then? The only channel Kashmiris are left with is their own collective memory and its transcriptions. In the Supreme Court of their collective memory, Kashmiri Muslims have not forgiven killers of innocent Kashmiri Pandits. It is impossible for somebody to say that he killed a Pandit who was not directly part of the Indian State apparatus and retain any legitimacy among the people of Kashmir.

Of course, Mr. Pandita is not one to put his trust in Mleccha mnemonics. So what does he do? He closes his eyes, recites Durgasaptashati, and suddenly it is as clear as day to him who carried out the massacres at Wandehoam, Naedmarg, Chittisinghpur and other places as also every single detail of every single act of 1989. It is them Mleccha hordes.

If Kashmiri Muslims in general are responsible for anything vis-à-vis Pandit migration it is silence and a certain degree of schandenfreude. Despite the context of the history we have briefly outlined here there is a certain ethical framework within which a majority is expected to operate. Engaging with this moral and ethical responsibility takes our notion and movement for azadi a pedestal higher. Nevertheless, there is no clinching framework to invalidate another equally mainstream position in Kashmir, i.e., we need to engage with patently legal questions before we can go on to engage with moral and ethical questions. This position sees the Indian State responsible for Pandit migration, one because Pandits totally relied on it; two because it would obviously benefit from Pandit migration; three, it made no serious effort to stop the migration (For example, when a group of concerned citizens met Wajahat Habibullah, who was then posted in Islambad/Anantnag, and asked him to stop their Pandit neighbours from leaving, Jagmohan’s government’s response was most lukewarm); four, it has neglected and purposefully destroyed crucial evidence vis-à-vis the exodus and after; and five, its post-migration Pandit policy has been skewed, e.g., generous reservation in top educational institutions throughout India but a totally disregard for basic amenities in the camps.

The position one cannot engage with, however, is the one Mr. Pandita takes in his book. It is OK for States and established systems to flout international legal norms, their own laws, even those which will not pass any test of legality, to destroy a people and break their spirit of independence, badhe badhe mulkoon mein aise choti choti galtiyaan hoti rehte hain, big States keep making such small mistakes; but if you can somehow show that a people demanding azadi could not always maintain perfect moral and ethical standards, then they deserve nothing, they can rot in hell. This position neither underlines the role power plays in garbling morality and ethics nor recognizes that legality is a stop on the way to morality and ethics. All detours will always be lost in the morass of more injustice.

The way Mr. Pandita puts it, Kashmiri Pandits can live in Kashmir only under two conditions, a state of permanent militarization and bringing ‘India’ into Kashmir. Nothing needs to be said about the first but if the second condition is fulfilled, where does the whole narrative of the cultural, historical and lingual moorings Pandits have lost because of the exodus stand? Is the solution to exile to make your home a strange place?

Or is the solution to exile to make it a soldier for the Indian State to subdue the aspirations of azadi in Kashmir? In one of his auto-reviews, Mr. Pandita wrote after the hanging of Afzal Goor, “So Kashmir is on the simmer. Not that it matter much in any case.” This paradox keeps bringing the book down, if Kashmir matters enough to hold a moral responsibility for the Pandit exodus, it matters enough to have azadi; but if its struggle for freedom does not matter, Mr. Pandita should not worry about a recognition of his travails by Kashmiris, it does not matter. The scaffolding of ‘pure blood’, ‘knowledge genes’, mendacious and exaggerated historical and personal narration should be seen as a symptom of trying to disentangle the narrative from such paradoxes it has been caught in.

From personal observation and for collective hope, not many Kashmiri Pandits live in Mr. Pandita’s Imaginarium. So the account will be more useful for Indian Dalits and Muslims to understand how certain powerful narratives in Indian statecraft run almost seven decades after its supposed independence. As for Kashmiris, we will have to wait some more time for an account of Pandit exile which does not need such scaffolding. In the meantime, Kashmiri Muslims will do well not to make it easy for themselves by pronouncing Mr. Pandita’s account as definitive and representative.