“In Search Of A Future:
The Story Of Kashmir”By Mohamad Junaid
04 December, 2007
Countercurrents.orgBook review: “In Search of a Future: The Story of Kashmir” By
Penguin/Viking; New Delhi 2007A 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
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