Kashmiri Writing Is Blooming

A Kashmiri shawl weaver told Asha Batra, one of the co-founders of the Kumaon Literary Festival, that he wanted his son to learn the craft of his forefathers rather than venture into mobile repairing. “My son makes such beautiful shawls,” Batra recalls the man telling her. “What will he do in mobile repairing? What will happen to the traditional art?”

“These are the stories I want people to write,” adds Batra. The Kumaon Literary Festival was held this year from October 18 to 20 in Srinagar. “Let people forget the past 30 years and write love stories,” she says.

Yet is it possible to write about Kashmir without inevitably referring to the political turmoil in the region over the past 30 years? Kashmir, sometimes referred to as  ‘heaven on ‘ because of its natural beauty, has been a flashpoint between India and Pakistan since 1947. The neighbouring nations govern parts of it but claim the whole, and they have fought at least three major conflicts, and several minor ones, over it.

Modern Kashmiri literature,  in Kashmiri, Urdu, Hindi and English, consistently refracts the conflicts that mark the region, whether in non-fiction (Curfewed Nights by Basharat Peer (English), Prisoner No.100 by Anjum Zamarud Habib (in Urdu and English), Rumours of Spring by Farah Bashir (English), fiction (The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed, The Garden of Solitude by Siddhartha Gigoo (English), Katha Satisar by Chandrakanta (Hindi), Khwaban Khayalan Manz by Asif Tariq Bhat ), graphic novels (Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir by Malik Sajad), or poetry (The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali (English), Serpents Under My Veil by Asiya Zahoor (English), Na Thsay Na Aks by Naseem Shafaie (Kashmiri).

“We are not getting into the politics of this literary event, because politics is something we are not  masters of,” says Batra, draped in a pashmina shawl, sitting on the green lawns of the Sheri Kashmir Convocation Centre, on the banks of the Dal Lake. “I want people to tell us if they have good stories and how they will find publishers.”

Loss of heritage

Even as Batra spoke passionately about non-conflict writing, a few meters away, Siddhartha Gigoo chaired another panel called “Heritage Matters: Kashmir’s Forgotten Wonders”. “The world learned about Kashmir from a film like The Kashmir Files,” he says. “This is not right.”

Written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri, The Kashmir Files, released earlier this year, dramatises the plight of Kashmiri pandits. The film was a huge box office success in India and abroad, but faced criticism for selectively representing historical facts.

Gigoo says the conflict has resulted in the loss of Kashmiri heritage — an opinion  which celebrity chef Sanjay Raina echoes. “If you ask people about Kashmiri food, they will tell you about  wazwan (a multicourse Kashmiri feast comprising mostly meat dishes, along with a few vegetarian ones),” Raina says. “But over the past 35 years, a whole range of different cuisines have been lost. I have been trying to educate people over the past 10 years about how Kashmiri food is not only  wazwan — there is also tarami, rista, gushtaba, batta rogan josh, and nadru (lotus stem).”

Ajay Raina, a filmmaker, talks of the fractured imagination of Kashmir and Kashmiris. “Before the exodus (of Kashmiri Hindus), Kashmir was a beautiful place for us,” he says. “Since the 1990s, it has turned into a place of conflict and loss. I have tried to understand it through my films.”

Raina, who has been trained at the famed Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, and has won several awards, including a National Award, and has explored the plight of Kashmiri pandits in several of his documentaries, including his debut Tell Them The Tree They Had Planted Has Now Grown (2002) as well as his recent work, Moute’e Rang (2022).

Frozen in conflict

Freny Manecksha, author of Flaming Forest, Wounded Valley: Stories from Bastar and Kashmir, says it was Peer’s Curfewed Night that emerged as a definitive text about ordinary Kashmiris. She adds “Malik Sajad’s graphic novel Munnu was hailed internationally for its ingenuity,” she adds. “Farah Bashir’s nuanced gendered take on the 90s, Rumours of Spring, won a literary award. I learned about Kashmir’s unique medical community and the role of hospitals as spaces of suffering and memorialising through Dr Rumana Makhdoomi’s memoir, White Man in Dark.”

She recollects what Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist, Nadine Gordimer, said about conflict and creativity in a 1976 essay, “A Writer’s Freedom”. Citing examples of persecuted writers such as Thomas Mann, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinua Achebe, Gordimer claims: “Bannings and banishments are terrible known hazards a writer must face, and many have faced if the writer belongs where freedom of expression, among other freedoms, is withheld, but sometimes creativity is frozen rather than destroyed. …The integrity of the creative artist survives so long as the artist himself cannot be persuaded, cajoled, or frightened into betraying it.”

Farah Bashir says, “Our lives go beyond the political landscape.” She adds that to substitute lived experiences with pre-designed templates is not literature or documentation of history but a revelation of farcical attempts to alter it. “To create non-places from places inhabited by people who have rowed their journeys through turbulent times and appropriate their past and present and their social history, which they’ll never be able to impute nuance to, many writers on Kashmir become representatives of what at best looks like mock-heroism.”“The beleaguered Kashmiri artist will live on,” adds Manecksha.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Rumours of Spring")