Kashmir: The Case for Freedom

  Certainly, as Arundhati Roy’s near-imprisonment for ‘sedition’ proves, anyone initiating a frank discussion of Kashmir in India risks not only the malevolence of Hindu nationalists but also a storm of vituperation from the Indian understudies of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. The choleric TV anchors, partisan journalists, and opinion-mongers of India’s corporate media routinely amplify the falsehoods and deceptions of Indian intelligence agencies in Kashmir. Blaming Pakistan or Islamic fundamentalists, as The Economist pointed out after massive peaceful demonstrations in Kashmir in 2010, has ‘got much harder’ for the Indian government, which has ‘long denied the great extent to which Kashmiris want rid of India.’ Nevertheless, it tries, and as the political philosopher Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the few fair-minded commentators on this subject, points out, the Indian media now acts in concert with the government ‘to deny any legitimacy to protests in Kashmir.’

  This effective censorship reassures those Indians anxious not to let mutinous Kashmiris sully the currently garish notions of India as an ‘economic powerhouse’ and ‘vibrant democracy’ – the calling cards with which Indian elites apply for membership in the exclusive clubs of the West. In Kashmir, however, the net effect is deeper anger and alienation. As Parvaiz Bukhari puts it, Kashmiris hold India’s journalists, as much as its politicians, responsible for ‘muzzling and misinterpreting’ them.

  ‘The promise of a liberal India’, Mehta writes, ‘is slowly dying.’ For Kashmiris, this promise has proved as hollow as that of the fundamentalist Islam exported by Pakistan. Liberated from political deceptions, the young men on the streets of Kashmir today seem simply to want to express their hatred of the state’s impersonal brutality and to commemorate lives freshly ruined by it. As the Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer wrote in his moving ‘Letter to an Unknown Indian’, Indian journalists might edit out the ‘faces of the murdered boys’ and ‘their grieving fathers’, they may not show ‘the video of a woman in Anantnag, washing the blood of the boys who were killed outside her house’, but ‘Kashmir sees the unedited Kashmir.’

  And it remembers. ‘Like many other Kashmiris,’ Peer writes, ‘I have been in silence, committing to memory the deed, the date.’ Apart from the youth on the streets, there are also those with their noses in books, or pressed against window bars. Soon this generation will make its way into the world with its private traumas. Life under political oppression has begun to yield, in the slow bitter way it does, a rich intellectual and artistic harvest: Peer’s memoir Curfewed Night was followed in 2011 by The Collaborator, a searing novel by Mirza Waheed. There are more works to come; Kashmiris will increasingly speak for themselves. One can only hope that their voices will finally penetrate our indifference and even occasionally prick our conscience.

  Tariq Ali

  The Story of Kashmir

  Only graveyard breezes blow in the valley of Kashmir. Murder tours the region in different guises, garbed sometimes in the uniform of the Indian army or in the form of bearded men, armed and infiltrated by Pakistan, speaking the language of jihad—Allah and Fate rolled into one. The background presence of nuclear missiles offers a ghoulish comfort to both sides. Kashmir, trapped in this neither–nor predicament, suffocates. Depressed and exhausted by the decades of violence, many Kashmiris have become passive: the beauties of spring and summer pass unnoticed by listless eyes. Yet, fearful even of medium-term possibilities, Kashmiris prefer to live in the present. Oppressed by neither–nor, they are silent in public, speaking the truth in whispers. They fear that old Kabul might move to Srinagar and, in the name of a petrified religion, ban all poetry and music, outlaw the public appearance of unveiled women, close down the university and impose a clerical dictatorship. It is difficult to imagine a Talibanized Kashmir, but it was once equally difficult to imagine a Talibanized Afghanistan. A complicated and unpredictable combination of circumstances does sometimes enable the enemies of light to triumph. Unless . . .

  I was thinking about this on a balmy October evening in New York during the dying days of the Clinton presidency, wondering if there was an alternative to neither–nor and what, if anything, the Empire had in store for its South Asian satrapies. Provincial at the best of times, the country was immersed in its own election campaign.

  Strolling down Eighth Avenue in search of sustenance, I was halted between 40th and 41st streets by a tacky, twinkling, neonlit sign: K-A-S-H-M-I-R. An adjacent, non-twinkling arrow signalled a fast-food dive in the basement below. I decided to risk the food. Attached to the austere eating zone was an extension in the shape of a raised wooden platform. A slab on the wall proclaimed this to be Jinnah Hall, inaugurated in 1996 by Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of Pakistan. I asked the young Kashmiri woman sitting behind the cash desk underneath the slab whether this could possibly be the same Nawaz Sharif who was sitting at the time in a Pakistani prison on charges of corruption and attempted murder. She smiled, but did not reply. Instead she turned her eyes to the ‘Hall’, where a meeting was in progress. The place was nearly full. About twenty or so South Asian men and a single white woman. The top table was occupied by an assortment of beards dressed in traditional baggy trousers and long shirts. I felt for one of them. Afflicted with the dreaded dhobi’s itch, he was engaged in his own private jihad, scratching away at his testicles throughout the evening.

  At the lectern, next to the top table, a clean-shaven white American was already in full flow. His gestures and rancid rhetoric suggested a politician, who could have belonged to either party. He turned out to be a Democratic congressman, ‘a friend of the people of Kashmir’. Recently returned from a visit to the country, he had been ‘deeply moved’ by the suffering he had witnessed and was now convinced that ‘the moral leadership of the world must take up this issue’. The beards nodded vigorously, recalling no doubt the help the ‘moral leadership’ had given in Kabul and Kosovo. The congressman paused; he didn’t want to mislead these people. What was on offer was not a ‘humanitarian war’ but an informal Camp David. ‘It needn’t even be the United States,’ he continued. ‘It could be a great man. It could be Nelson Mandela . . . or Bill Clinton.’

  The beards were unimpressed. One of the few beardless men in the audience rose to his feet and addressed the congressman: ‘Please answer honestly to our worries,’ he said. ‘In Afghanistan we helped you defeat the Red Army. You needed us then and we were very much loyal to you. Now you have abandoned us for India. Mr Clinton supports India, not human rights in Kashmir. Is this a good way to treat very old friends?’

  The congressman made sympathetic noises, even promising to tick Clinton off for not being ‘more vigorous on human rights in Kashmir’. He needn’t have bothered. A beard rose to ask why the US government had betrayed them. The repetition irritated the congressman. He took the offensive, complaining about this being an all-male meeting. Why were these men’s wives and daughters not present? The bearded faces remained impassive. Feeling the need for some fresh air, I decided to leave. As I went up the stairs the congressman changed tack once again, speaking now of the wondrous beauty of the valley he had recently visited.

  Damn the beauty, I thought, stop the killings. Were the congressman or attendant beards aware of Kashmir’s turbulent past, Islamic and pre-Islamic? Did they know that the Mughal kings had never regarded religion as a cornerstone of empire-building? Were they aware of the strong women who had resisted rulers in the past, or why Kashmir had been sold for a pittance by the East India Company to a corrupt local ruler? And why it had all ended so badly? Could the beards seriously imagine that the Empire would intervene and transform Srinagar into Sarajevo, occupied by Western troops while India and China watched calmly from the sidelines? Or did they believe that one day a totally bearded Pakistan would use nuclear missiles to liberate them?

  ‘The buildings of Kashmir are all of wood,’ the Mughal emperor Jehangir wrote in his memoirs in March 1622. ‘They make them two, three and four-storeyed, and covering the roofs with earth, they plant bulbs of t
he black tulip, which blooms year after year with the arrival of spring and is exceedingly beautiful. This custom is peculiar to the people of Kashmir. This year, in the little garden of the palace and on the roof of the largest mosque, the tulips blossomed luxuriantly . . . The flowers that are seen in the territories of Kashmir are beyond all calculation.’ Surveying the lakes and waterfalls, the roses, irises and jasmine, he described the valley as ‘a page that the painter of destiny had drawn with the pencil of creation’.

  The first Muslim invasion of Kashmir took place in the eighth century and was defeated by the Himalayas. The soldiers of the Prophet found it impossible to move beyond the mountains’ southern slopes. Their victory came unexpectedly five centuries later, as a result of a palace coup carried out by Rinchana, the Buddhist chief from neighbouring Ladakh, who had sought refuge in Kashmir and embraced Islam under the guidance of a Sufi with the pleasing name of Bulbul (‘Nightingale’) Shah. Rinchana’s conversion would have been neither here nor there had it not been for the Turkish mercenaries who made up the ruler’s elite guard and who were only too pleased to switch their allegiance to a co-religionist. But they swore to obey only the new ruler, not his descendants, so when Rinchana died, the leader of the mercenaries, Shah Mir, took control and founded the first Muslim dynasty to rule Kashmir. It lasted for seven hundred years.

  The population, however, was not easily swayed, and despite a policy of forced conversion, it wasn’t until the end of the reign of Zain-al-Abidin in the late fifteenth century that a majority of Kashmiris embraced Islam. In fact, Zain-al-Abidin, an inspired ruler, ended the forced conversion of Hindus and decreed that those who had been converted in this fashion be allowed to return to their own faith. He even provided Hindus with subsidies to enable them to rebuild the temples his father had destroyed. The different ethnic and religious groups still weren’t allowed to intermarry, but they learned to live side by side amicably enough. Zain-al-Abidin organized visits to Iran and Central Asia so that his subjects could learn bookbinding and woodcarving and how to make carpets and shawls, thereby laying the foundations for the shawl making for which Kashmir is famous. By the end of his reign a large majority of the population had converted voluntarily to Islam; the ratio of Muslims to non-Muslims—85 per cent to 15 per cent—has remained fairly constant ever since.

  The dynasty went into a decline after Zain-al-Abidin’s death. Disputes over the succession, unfit rulers, and endless intrigues among the nobility paved the way for new invasions. In the end, the Mughal conquest in the late sixteenth century probably came as a relief to most people. The landlords were replaced by Mughal civil servants who administered the country rather more efficiently, reorganizing its trade, its shawl making and its agriculture. On the other hand, deprived of local patronage, Kashmir’s poets, painters and scribes left the valley in search of employment at the Mughal courts in Delhi and Lahore, taking the country’s cultural life with them.

  What made the disappearance of Kashmiri culture particularly harsh was the fact that the conquest itself had coincided with a sudden flowering of the Kashmiri court. Zoonie, the wife of Sultan Yusuf Shah, was a peasant from the village of Tsandahar who had been taken up by a Sufi mystic enchanted with her voice. Under his guidance she learned Persian and began to write her own songs. One day, passing with his entourage and hearing her voice in the fields, Yusuf Shah, too, was captivated. He took her to court and prevailed on her to marry him. And that is how Zoonie entered the palace as queen and took the name of Habba Khatun (‘Loved Woman’). She wrote:

  I thought I was indulging in play, and lost myself.

  O for the day that is dying!

  At home I was secluded, unknown,

  When I left home, my fame spread far and wide,

  The pious laid all their merit at my feet.

  O for the day that is dying!

  My beauty was like a warehouse filled with rare merchandise,

  Which drew men from all the four quarters;

  Now my richness is gone, I have no worth:

  O for the day that is dying!

  My father’s people were of high standing,

  I became known as Habba Khatun:

  O for the day that is dying.

  Habba Khatun gave the Kashmiri language a literary form and encouraged a synthesis of Persian and Indian musical styles. She gave women the freedom to decorate themselves as they wished and revived the old Circassian tradition of tattooing the face and hands with special dyes and powders. The clerics were furious. They saw in her the work of Iblis, or Satan, in league with the blaspheming, licentious Sufis. While Yusuf Shah remained on the throne, however, Habba Khatun was untouchable. She mocked the pretensions of the clergy, defended the mystic strain within Islam and compared herself to a flower that flourishes in fertile soil and cannot be uprooted.

  Habba Khatun was queen when, in 1583, the Mughal emperor Akbar dispatched his favourite general to annex the kingdom of Kashmir. There was no fighting: Yusuf Shah rode out to the Mughal camp and capitulated without a struggle, demanding only the right to retain the throne and strike coins in his image. Instead, he was arrested and sent into exile. The Kashmiri nobles, angered by Yusuf Shah’s betrayal, placed his son Yakub Shah on the throne, but Yakub was a weak and intemperate young man who set the Sunni and Shia clerics at one another’s throats, and before long Akbar sent a large expeditionary force, which took Kashmir in the summer of 1588. In the autumn the emperor came to see the valley’s famous colours for himself.

  Habba Khatun’s situation changed dramatically after Akbar had her husband exiled. Unlike Sughanda and Dida, two powerful tenth-century queens who had ascended the throne as regents, Habba Khatun was driven out of the palace. At first she found refuge with the Sufis, but after a time she began to move from village to village, giving voice in her songs to the melancholy of a suppressed people. There is no record of when or where she died – a grave thought to be hers was discovered in the middle of the last century – but women mourning the disappearance of young men killed by the Indian army or ‘volunteered’ to fight in the jihad still sing her verses:

  Who told him where I lived?

  Why has he left me in such anguish?

  I, hapless one, am filled with longing for him.

  He glanced at me through my window,

  He who is as lovely as my ear-rings;

  He has made my heart restless:

  I, hapless one, am filled with longing for him.

  He glanced at me through the crevice in my roof,

  Sang like a bird that I might look at him,

  Then, soft-footed, vanished from my sight:

  I, hapless one, am filled with longing for him.

  He glanced at me while I was drawing water,

  I withered like a red rose,

  My soul and body were ablaze with love:

  I, hapless one, am filled with longing for him.

  He glanced at me in the waning moonlight of early dawn,

  Stalked me like one obsessed.

  Why did he stoop so low?

  I, hapless one, am filled with longing for him!

  Habba Khatun exemplified a gentle version of Islam, diluted with pre-Islamic practices and heavily influenced by Sufi mysticism. This tradition is still strong in the countryside and helps to explain Kashmiri indifference to the more militant forms of religion.

  The Mughal emperors were drawn to their new domain. Akbar’s son Jehangir lost his fear of death there, since only Paradise could transcend the beauties of Kashmir. While his wife and brother-in-law kept their eye on the administration of the empire, he reflected on his luck at having escaped the plains of the Punjab and spent his time smoking opium, sampling the juice of the Kashmir grape, and planning gardens around natural springs so that the reflection of the rising and setting sun could be seen in the water that cascaded down specially constructed channels. ‘If on earth there be a paradise of bliss, it is this, it is this, it is this,’ he wrote, citing a well-known Persian couplet.
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  By the eighteenth century, the Mughal empire had begun its own slow decline, and the Kashmiri nobles invited Ahmed Shah Durrani, the brutal ruler of Afghanistan, to liberate their country. Durrani obliged in 1752, doubling taxes and persecuting the embattled Shia minority with a fanatical vigour that shocked the nobles. Fifty years of Afghan rule were punctuated by regular clashes between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

  Worse lay ahead, however. In 1819, the soldiers of Ranjit Singh, the charismatic leader of the Sikhs, already triumphant in northern India, took Srinagar. There was no resistance worth the name. Kashmiri historians regard the twenty-seven years of Sikh rule that followed as the worst calamity ever to befall their country. The principal mosque in Srinagar was closed, others were made the property of the state, cow-slaughter was prohibited, and once again the tax burden became insufferable – unlike the Mughals, Ranjit Singh taxed the poor. Mass impoverishment led to mass emigration. Kashmiris fled to the cities of the Punjab: Amritsar, Lahore and Rawalpindi became the new centres of Kashmiri life and culture. (One of the many positive effects of this influx was that Kashmiri cooks greatly improved the local food.)

  Sikh rule didn’t last long: new conquerors were on the way. What was possibly the most remarkable enterprise in the history of mercantile capitalism had launched itself on the Indian subcontinent. Granted semi-sovereign powers – that is, the right to maintain armies – by the British and Dutch states, the East India Company expanded rapidly from its Calcutta base and, after the battle of Plassey in 1757, took the whole of Bengal. Within a few years the Mughal emperor at the fort in Delhi had become a pensioner of the Company, whose forces continued to move west, determined now to take the Punjab from the Sikhs. The first Anglo-Sikh war, in 1846, resulted in a victory for the Company, which acquired Kashmir as part of the Treaty of Amritsar, but, aware of the chaos there, hurriedly sold it for seventy-five lakh rupees (ten lakhs = one million) to the Dogra ruler of neighbouring Jammu, who pushed through yet more taxes. When, after the 1857 uprising, the East India Company was replaced by direct rule from London, real power in Kashmir and other princely states devolved on a British Resident, usually a fresh face from Haileybury College serving an apprenticeship in the backwaters of the empire.