*"In Search Of A Future:
The Story Of Kashmir" *
*A book review by Mohamad Junaid*
04 December, 2007
*Countercurrents.org*
*Book review: "In Search of a Future: The Story of Kashmir" By
Penguin/Viking; New Delhi 2007*
*A* few decades ago, an academic process began, which put much of the 19th
and early 20th century Western writings on the orient under close scrutiny.
Critics like Edward Said found in these writings a highly prejudiced program
of describing alien cultures in a bid to eventually control them. Describing
and defining the Other embodied a discourse through which European culture
also defined itself by attributing radically opposite tendencies to the
Other. The Other, obviously, exhibited irrational as well as morally
inferior characteristics. Control of such knowledge production was to
supplement total military and economic control by the colonial powers of
many parts of Asia and Africa.
The process of decolonization left awkward territorial constructions in its
trail. Boundaries were drawn through traditional bonds of community,
societies were ripped apart, and many communities were thrown into new
systems of hierarchy in this melee. India and Pakistan were imposed on a
subcontinent full of diverse aspirations for freedom and self-rule. As Nehru
cleverly called his invention "The Discovery of India", Jinnah, without
thinking much about the geographic and cultural diversity of the Muslims in
the subcontinent, grafted the two parts of his 'Land of the Pure' farthest
from its most vehement votaries, and also from each other. India chose to
write its history in a teleological form of progress and interruptions; one
which naturally had to culminate in the formation of the present-day India;
a point where the history itself would stop. Pakistan remained torn in its
identity, as in its geography: while it saw its roots in the subcontinent,
it kept looking westward to forge a larger Islamic identity. Either way, its
history only started in 1947. India popularized an organic story of how it
was a body, and Kashmir was its head (Many in India readily agreed,
unfortunately because of the general cartographic bias of thinking north as
up—glancing at the map upside down will put Kashmir in its proper place:
Crushed under India's foot.) Pakistan, on the other hand, first put premium
on Kashmir's rivers and then its people; it saw Kashmir as its jugular vein.
Kashmir, a place with more plausible claims to unique historical experiences
and more or less a geographical continuity over ages, than both India and
Pakistan, did not have to do much to imagine itself as a nation. True, it
insisted that people of Jammu and Ladakh be part of that nation. But unlike
India, which used aggressive power to force a union on the diverse peoples
of the subcontinent, Kashmir only wished to achieve it. Its dream of
independence, however, was not necessarily hinged to the continuity of that
union.
Sixty years have passed since India and Pakistan snuffed out the best
chances for the realization of an independent democratic Kashmir. Without
any feeling of remorse, or putting the blame on their own houses, India and
Pakistan are putting the entire burden of the sub-continental peace on the
bruised Kashmiri shoulders. Kashmiris can formalize peace between the two
giant colonial remnants by giving up their own 'ambivalent' aspirations to
independence. They must learn the language of their conquerors. Or at least
this is what David Devadas is suggesting in his book "In Search of a Future:
The Story of Kashmir".
Even as we celebrate the thirtieth year of Said's canonical work, Devadas,
reminiscent of laid-back colonial travelers of yore, has passed his casual
judgment on all Kashmiris: They are sly, ambivalent, dissembling, cruel,
irresponsible, and full of histrionics (and, yet, they are manipulated by
their own leaders). They have a false 'sense of superiority that emerges
from a feeling of insecurity', and possess 'a hateful contempt-ridden past'.
Only Kashmiris themselves, and no one but Kashmiris, are to be blamed for
their miseries. He even goes on to say that Kashmiris are hugely
caste-conscious. The last one sounds especially funny for he comes from a
country where still entire villages of Dalits are burnt down, and their
women are gang-raped by the upper castes; and where the upper castes believe
violently that they alone have all claims to merit. Since he is positing
Kashmir's 'separatism' against India's 'inclusiveness', Said would have
instantly understood from Devadas' maneuvers that he is assigning these
negative values to Kashmiris to fashion a positive image of India as honest,
clear, responsible, inclusive and non-melodramatic. Devadas, without pausing
to tell us about India's attitude in Kashmir, calls Kashmiri attitude
'imperial and dominating'!
In Search of a Future is a (though the book's subtitle suggests that it is
"the") story of Kashmir's political history from 1931 up to 2006. It is
well-paced, and manages to hold together. That all his respondents seem to
tell him the same seamless story, for he cross checks no ones account with
other historical material, raises early fears of the run-away journalist
taking over a more restrained historian in him. The fears are proved right.
The book claims to be written in a novelistic style, but Devadas seems to
have missed the most essential point about the art of the novel: A novel
doesn't ossify the meaning of an action or an event but opens possibilities
for their multiple interpretations. The book is based on a thin ethnography,
building on interviews of former militants, and leading politicians both in
India and in Kashmir. Since his canvas is spatio-temporally very large, it
ignores the fine-grained interpretative explorations of the rich content of
everyday Kashmiri life. Instead of thinking of culture as a context in which
social events, behavior, institutions and processes can be intelligibly
described, he is adamant on seeing the 'common-behavior patterns' of
Kashmiris as their culture. Ergo, he finds, from his interviews with these
former militants and leading politicians, that the common-behavior pattern
of all Kashmiris is characterized by venality and narrow self-interests.
Using his blinkered stencil, or template, as Devadas prefers, Kashmiris
don't pass his test of morality or potential for selfless collective action.
Speaking to former militants can sometimes give you that impression. For
him, Kashmiris, while seeking independence, are only playing histrionics to
squeeze more resources out of both India and Pakistan. The demand for the
right to self-determination is 'ambivalent'. Kashmiris are not clear in what
they want. In any case, it would not matter to him even if they did know,
for the right to self-determination is morally untenable for him in a
postmodern age. He attributes the start of uprising in 1989 to trans-border
Islamic winds, individual suffering of polling agents during 1987 assembly
elections, and a week-long screening of the film 'Lion of the Desert' at a
Srinagar talkie. For him, Kashmiri militants felt like Bombay cinema heroes,
and that is how they wanted to feel. Since the book's characterization of
militancy is based on the interview of a few former militants, Karl Popper
would have jumped up, and objected to this inductivist farce. Vast
generalizations about 'Kashmiri character' are not only phony, but are
frequently sneaked into the text to gloss over his lack of proper
explanation. He accepts fables of how Kashmiris used guile to escape
physical pain in the past to paint their character, but his own descriptions
of Kashmiris' undergoing inhuman torture in India's interrogation cells are
allowed to say nothing about the same character.
Devadas, despite his stated desire not to write a quickie, overlooks major
historical inaccuracies in his account. Only a few examples: The elephant
story that Kalhana attributed to Mihiragula (6th century), Devadas
attributes to the Mughal Empress Nurjahan (16th century). He insists that
the last Kashmiri king was Sahadeva who decamped in 1320 in the face of a
Mongol invasion. In this, he trusts only the Kashmiri Hindu narrative. That
most Kashmiris believe the last Kashmiri king was Yusuf Shah Chak, whose
poet-queen Habba Khatun's songs still ring in Kashmiri homes, is
conveniently ignored. His eagerness to indict Muslims of Kashmir, to fit the
stereotype he has forged for them, pushes him to make misplaced accusations,
like: Muslims heaved insults on Hindus by calling them 'Bhattas' behind
their back. T N Madan, in his ethnographic work on Kashmiri Hindus, points
out that 'Pandits refer to themselves, and are referred to by other
Kashmiri-speaking people, as the Bhatta. The word is of Sanskrit origin and
means a learned person.' Or, for that matter, Dar's a common Muslim and
Hindu surname, and the word 'Dar' is not pejoratively used against Hindus,
as Devadas suggests. What historian Jerome Bruner once said looks apt here:
How much are we to bend the paradigmatic truth to fit the believability of
the narrative mode? Especially when Devadas claims that 'every bit of the
book is fact'.
Devadas loves characterizations. In his account, Abdullah's 'bile never
takes long to rise'; while a 'solicitous Nehru' gets concerned if Abdullah
has toilet paper in the prison to which he has sent him. His book is peopled
by a wily Masoodi, a loutish Zargar, a radiant Guga, an effeminate Yasin, a
scheming Geelani, and many Pakistani spooks. But Indira is invincible.
Bakshi becomes Budshah sani—Great King II, (first being Sultan
Zain-ul-Abidin). His two purported main characters, Aftab and Ali Sheikh,
keep leaping out of the text, and soon become an appendage to the main
story. Whenever they come in, their extraordinary lives are turned into a
vignette for entire Kashmir's 'frustration' and 'depravity'.
Falling into a familiar narrative trope, Devadas uses terms like 'smoldering
Id rage', 'smelting Islamic fervor', etc. to describe the mood of Muslim
peasants agitating against their oppressive Hindu overlords. But when Hindus
attack Muslims it passes of innocently in his text, without any polemic. In
a similar vein, when a militant kills an innocent civilian, the entire
Kashmiri character, along with its history, is put to trial; but when Indian
troops kill people it is quietly swept away as individual aberration. The
politics of partial and farcical assigning of culpability is, thus, revealed
quite openly in the pages of his book.
Speaking of tropes, Devadas' book does not move away from the apocryphal
rhetoric of foreign powers using Kashmir against India. This narrative
strategy is used to evoke sympathy for India's state-building project, even
if it romps oppressively over the demands of independence of other
politically-conscious communities, like the Kashmiris or the Nagas. This
brings us to an ironic realization of how post-colonial academic and
political world unwittingly creates the illusion that decolonization is
complete. It makes easy for India, a former colony, to label Kashmiris,
still occupied, agents of the ex-colonial powers. Their human rights get a
short-shrift for no international guarantors dare speak for them. As while
India bares its teeth to the colonized nationalities in its own backyard, it
cries foul in front of the erstwhile colonial powers.
Devadas puts the burden of safety of India's 160 million Muslims on Kashmiri
Muslims. This is not the first time, and he is not alone in this. Indian
analysts like Kanti Bajpai, Sumit Ganguly, and Ashutosh Varshney, too, speak
of an impending apocalypse for Indian Muslims if Kashmir were to separate.
Along with its much touted secularism, Kashmir is also the hinge on which
India's federalism rests. Balkanization is invoked in response to a demand
for the right to self-determination. One needs to seriously question the
legitimacy of this discourse. If the safety of Indian Muslims rests on which
way Kashmir goes, then it is bad news for secularism. And Muslims must be
told how precariously their lives hang in balance in India.
Devadas' book is full of bitterness. In his black and white world, he comes
to loath Kashmiris, and isn't very subtle about it. After a 'detailed
research conducted over the past nine years', what dawns on him, about a
people 'who converted to Mir Ali's syncretistic Islam' six centuries ago, is
that they can never be happy, because contentment has always eluded them.
Devadas is not willing to go to the root itself: question the legitimacy of
Indian rule in Kashmir.
Mohamad Junaid
Research Scholar
International Politics
JNU
New Delhi—110067
--
Jogesh
ay ri sakhi more khwaja ghar aaye
bhag lage more aangan ko
...
jis aangan ko khwaja na aaye
aag lage us aangan ko
- amir khusrau
