Kashmir: The Case for Freedom
Kashmir suffered badly under its Dogra rulers. The corvée was reintroduced after the collapse of the Mughal state, and the peasants were reduced to the condition of serfs. A story, unconfirmable, told by Kashmiri intellectuals in the 1920s to highlight the plight of the peasants revolved round the maharaja’s purchase of a Cadillac. When His Highness drove the car to Pehalgam, admiring peasants surrounded it and strewed fresh grass in front of it. The maharaja acknowledged their presence by letting them touch the car. A few peasants began to cry. ‘Why are you crying?’ asked their ruler. ‘We are upset’, one of them replied, ‘because your new animal refuses to eat grass.’
When it finally reached the valley, the twentieth century brought new values: freedom from foreign rule, passive resistance, the right to form trade unions, even socialism. Young Kashmiris educated in Lahore and Delhi returned home determined to wrench their country from the stranglehold of the Dogra maharaja and his colonial patrons. When the Muslim poet and philosopher Iqbal, himself of Kashmiri origin, visited Srinagar in 1921, he left behind a subversive couplet which spread around the country:
In the bitter chill of winter shivers his naked body
Whose skill wraps the rich in royal shawls.
Kashmiri workers went on strike for the first time in the spring of 1924. Five thousand workers in the state-owned silk factory demanded a pay rise and the dismissal of a clerk who’d been running a protection racket. The management agreed to a small increase, but arrested the leaders of the protest. The workers then came out on strike. With the backing of the British Resident, the opium-sodden Maharaja Pratap Singh sent in troops. Workers on the picket line were badly beaten, suspected ringleaders were sacked on the spot and the principal organizer of the action was imprisoned, then tortured to death.
Some months later, a group of ultra-conservative Muslim notables in Srinagar sent a memorandum to the British viceroy, Lord Reading, protesting the brutality and repression:
Military was sent for and most inhuman treatment was meted out to the poor, helpless, unarmed, peace-loving labourers who were assaulted with spears, lances and other implements of warfare . . . The Mussulmans of Kashmir are in a miserable plight today. Their education is woefully neglected. Though forming 96 per cent of the population, the percentage of literacy amongst them is only 0.8 per cent . . . So far we have patiently borne the state’s indifference towards our grievances and our claims and its high-handedness towards our rights, but patience has its limit and resignation its end.
The viceroy forwarded the petition to the maharaja, who was enraged. He wanted the ‘sedition-mongers’ shot, but the Resident wouldn’t have it. As a sop he ordered the immediate deportation of the organizer of the petition, Saaduddin Shawl. Nothing changed even when, a few years later, the maharaja died and was replaced by his nephew, Hari Singh. Albion Bannerji, the new British-approved chief minister of Kashmir, found the situation intolerable. Frustrated by his inability to achieve even trivial reforms, he resigned. ‘The large Muslim population’, he said, ‘is absolutely illiterate, labouring under poverty and very low economic conditions of living in the villages and practically governed like dumb driven cattle.’
In April 1931, the police entered the mosque in Jammu and stopped the Friday khutba which follows the prayers. The police chief claimed that references in the Quran to Moses and Pharaoh quoted by the preacher were tantamount to sedition. It was an exceptionally stupid thing to do and, inevitably, it triggered a new wave of protests. In June, the largest political rally ever seen in Srinagar elected eleven representatives by popular acclamation to lead the struggle against native and colonial repression. Among them was Sheikh Abdullah, the son of a shawl trader, who would dominate the life of Kashmir for the next half-century.
One of the less well-known speakers at the rally, Abdul Qadir, a butler who worked for a European household, was arrested for having described the Dogra rulers as ‘a dynasty of blood-suckers’ who had ‘drained the energies and resources of all our people’. On the first day of Qadir’s trial, thousands of demonstrators gathered outside the prison and demanded the right to attend the proceedings. The police opened fire, killing twenty-one of them. Sheikh Abdullah and other political leaders were arrested the following day. This was the founding moment of Kashmiri nationalism.
At the same time, a parturition was taking place on the French Riviera. Tara Devi, the fourth wife of the dissolute and infertile Maharaja Hari Singh – he had shunted aside the first three for failing to produce any children – gave birth to a boy, Karan Singh. In the Srinagar bazaar every second person claimed to have fathered the heir-apparent. Five days of lavish entertainment and feasting marked the infant heir’s arrival in Srinagar. A few weeks later, public agitation broke out, punctuated by lampoons concerning the maharaja’s lack of sexual prowess, among other things. The authorities sanctioned the use of public flogging, but it was too late. Kashmir could no longer be quarantined from a subcontinent eager for independence.
The viceroy instructed the maharaja to release the imprisoned nationalist leaders, who were carried through the streets of Srinagar on the shoulders of triumphant crowds. The infant Karan Singh had been produced in vain; he would never inherit his father’s dominion. Many years later he wrote of his father:
He was a bad loser. Any small setback in shooting or fishing, polo or racing, would throw him in a dark mood which lasted for days. And this would inevitably lead to what became known as a muqaddama, a long inquiry into the alleged inefficiency or misbehaviour of some hapless young member of staff or a servant . . . Here was authority without generosity; power without compassion.
On their release from jail, Sheikh Abdullah and his colleagues set about establishing a political organization capable of uniting Muslims and non-Muslims. The All–Jammu and Kashmir Muslim Conference was founded in Srinagar in October 1932, and Abdullah was elected its president. Non-Muslims in Kashmir were mainly Hindus, dominated by the Pandits, upper-caste Brahmins who looked down on Muslims, Sikhs and low-caste Hindus alike, but looked up to their colonial masters, as they had to the Mughals. The British, characteristically, used the Pandits to run the administration, making it easy for Muslims to see the two enemies as one. Abdullah, though a Quranic scholar, was resolutely secular in his politics. The Hindus might be a tiny minority of the population, but he knew it would be fatal for Kashmiri interests if the Brahmins were ignored or persecuted. The confessional Muslims led by Mirwaiz Yusuf Shah broke away – the split was inevitable – accusing Abdullah of being soft on Hindus as well as on those Muslims regarded by the orthodox as heretics. From the All-India Kashmir Committee in Lahore came an angry poster addressed by the poet Iqbal to the ‘dumb Muslims of Kashmir’.
No longer constrained by the orthodox faction in his own ranks, Sheikh Abdullah drew closer to the social-revolutionary nationalism advocated by Nehru. He wasn’t the only Muslim leader to do so: Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in the Northwest Frontier Province, Mian Iftikharuddin in the Punjab, and Maulana Azad in the United Provinces all decided to work with the Indian National Congress, but this was not enough to tempt the majority of educated urban Muslims away from the Muslim League.
The Muslims had arrived in India as conquerors. They saw their religion as infinitely superior to that of the idol-worshipping Hindus and Buddhists. The bulk of Indian Muslims were none the less converts: some forced and others voluntary, seeking escape, in Kashmir and Bengal especially, from the rigours of the caste system. Thus, despite itself, Islam in India – as in coastal Africa, China and the Indonesian archipelago – was affected by local religious practices. Muslim saints were worshipped like Hindu gods. Holy men and ascetics were incorporated into Indian Islam. The Prophet Muhammad came to be regarded as a divinity. Buddhism had been especially strong in Kashmir, and the Buddhist worship of relics, too, was transferred to Islam, so that Kashmir is the home today of one of the holiest Muslim relics: a strand of hair supposedly belonging to Muhammad. The Quran expressly disavows necromancy, magic and
omens, and yet these superstitions remain a strong part of subcontinental Islam. Many Muslim political leaders still have favourite astrologers and soothsayers.
Muslim nationalism in India was the product of defeat. Until the collapse of the Mughal empire at the hands of the British, Muslims had dominated the ruling class for more than five hundred years. With the disappearance of the Mughal court in Delhi and the culture it supported, they were now merely a large religious minority considered by Hindus as lower than the lowest Hindu caste. There was an abrupt retreat from the Persian–Hindu cultural synthesis they had created, orphaning the scribes, poets, traders and artisans who had flourished around the old Muslim courts. The poet Akbar Allahabadi (1846–1921) became the voice of India’s dispossessed Muslims, speaking for a community in decline:
The Englishman is happy, he owns the aeroplane,
The Hindu’s gratified, he controls all the trade,
’Tis we who are empty drums, subsisting on God’s grace, A pile of biscuit crumbs and frothy lemonade.
The angry and embittered leaders of the Muslim community asked believers to wage a jihad against the infidel and to boycott everything he represented. The chief result was a near-terminal decline in Muslim education and intellectual life. In the 1870s, Syed Ahmad Khan, pleading for compromise, warned Muslims that their self-imposed isolation would have terrible economic consequences. In 1875, in the hope of encouraging them to abandon the religious schools, where they were taught the Quoran by rote in a language they couldn’t understand, he established the Muslim Anglo-Oriental College in Aligarh, which became the pre-eminent Muslim university in the country. Men and women from all over northern India were sent there to be educated in English as well as Urdu.
It was here, at the end of the 1920s, that Sheikh Abdullah had enrolled as a student. The college authorities encouraged Muslims to stay away from politics, but by the time Sheikh Abdullah arrived in Aligarh, students were divided into liberal and conservative camps and it was difficult to avoid debates on religion, nationalism and communism. Even the most dull-witted among them – usually those from feudal families – got involved. Most of the nationalist Muslims at Aligarh University aligned themselves with the Indian National Congress rather than the Muslim League, which had been set up by the Aga Khan on the viceroy’s behalf.
To demonstrate his commitment to secular politics, Sheikh Abdullah invited Nehru to Kashmir. Nehru, whose forebears were Kashmiri Pandits, brought with him Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the Frontier Gandhi. The three leaders spoke at consciousness-raising meetings and addressed groups of workers, intellectuals, peasants and women. What the visitors enjoyed most, however, was loitering in the old Mughal gardens. Like everyone else, Nehru had a go at describing the valley:
Like some supremely beautiful woman, whose beauty is almost impersonal and above human desire, such was Kashmir in all its feminine beauty of river and valley and lake and graceful trees. And then another aspect of this magic beauty would come into view, a masculine one, of hard mountains and precipices, and snow-capped peaks and glaciers, and cruel and fierce torrents rushing to the valleys below. It had a hundred faces and innumerable aspects, ever-changing, sometimes smiling, sometimes sad and full of sorrow . . . I watched this spectacle and sometimes the sheer loveliness of it was overpowering and I felt faint . . . It seemed to me dreamlike and unreal, like the hopes and desires that fill us and so seldom find fulfilment. It was like the face of the beloved that one sees in a dream and that fades away on wakening.
Sheikh Abdullah promised liberation from Dogra rule and pledged land reform; Nehru preached the virtues of unremitting struggle against the empire and insisted that social reform could come only after the departure of the British; Ghaffar Khan spoke of the need for mass struggle and urged Kashmiris to throw fear to the wind: ‘You who live in the valleys must learn to scale the highest peaks.’
Nehru knew that the main reason they had been showered with affection was that Abdullah had been with them. There was now a strong political bond between the two men, unlike as they were. Abdullah was a Muslim from a humble background whose outlook remained provincial and whose political views arose from a hatred of suffering and of the social injustice he perceived to be its cause. Nehru, a product of Harrow and Cambridge, was a lofty figure, conscious of his own intellectual superiority, rarely afflicted by fear or envy, and always intolerant of fools. He was a left-wing internationalist and a staunch anti-fascist. Yet the ties established between the pair proved vital for Kashmir when separatism took over the subcontinent in 1947.
In a hangover from Mughal days, and to make up for their lack of real power, the Muslims of India had developed an irritating habit of inflating their leaders with fancy titles. In this scheme, Sheikh Abdullah became Sher-i-Kashmir, the Lion of Kashmir, and his wife, Akbar Jehan, Madri-i-Meharban, the Kind Mother. The Lion depended on the Kind Mother to impress famous visitors, to receive them during his frequent absences in prison, and to give him sound political advice. Akbar Jehan was the daughter of Harry Nedous, an Austro-Swiss hotelier, and Mir Jan, a Kashmiri milkmaid. The Nedous family had arrived in India at the turn of the last century and had invested its savings in the majestic Nedous Hotel in Lahore – later there were hotels in Srinagar and Poona. Harry Nedous was the businessman; his brothers, Willy and Wally, willied and wallied around; his sister, Enid, took charge of the catering, and her pâtisserie at their Lahore hotel was considered ‘as good as anything in Europe’.
Harry Nedous first caught sight of Mir Jan when she came to deliver the milk at his holiday lodge in Gulmarg. He was immediately smitten, but she was suspicious. ‘I might be poor,’ she told him later that week, ‘but I am not for sale.’ Harry pleaded that he was serious, that he loved her, that he wanted to marry her. ‘In that case,’ she retorted wrathfully, ‘you must convert to Islam. I cannot marry an unbeliever.’ To her amazement he did so, and in time they had twelve children (only five of whom survived). Brought up as a devout Muslim, their daughter Akbar Jehan was a boarder at the Convent of Jesus and Mary in the hill resort of Murree. Non-Christian parents often packed their daughters off to these convents because the education was quite good and the regime strict, though there is evidence to suggest that the students spent much of their time fantasizing about Rudolph Valentino.
In 1928, when the seventeen-year-old Akbar Jehan had left school and was back in Lahore, a senior figure in British Military Intelligence checked in to the Nedous Hotel on the Upper Mall. Colonel T. E. Lawrence, complete with Valentino-style headgear, had just spent a gruelling few weeks in Afghanistan destabilizing the radical, modernizing and anti-British regime of King Amanullah. Disguised as ‘Karam Shah’, a visiting Arab cleric, he had organized a black propaganda campaign designed to stoke the religious fervour of the more reactionary tribes and thus provoke a civil war. His mission accomplished, he left for Lahore. Akbar Jehan must have met him at her father’s hotel. A flirtation began and got out of control. Her father insisted that they get married immediately, which they did. Three months later, in January 1929, Amanullah was toppled and replaced by a pro-British ruler. On 12 January, Kipling’s old newspaper in Lahore, the imperialist Civil and Military Gazette, published comparative profiles of Lawrence and ‘Karam Shah’ to reinforce the impression that they were two different people. Several weeks later, the Calcutta newspaper Liberty reported that ‘Karam Shah’ was indeed the ‘British spy Lawrence’ and gave a detailed account of his activities in Waziristan on the Afghan frontier. Lawrence was becoming a liability, and the authorities told him to return to Britain. ‘Karam Shah’ was never seen again. Nedous insisted on a divorce for his daughter, and again Lawrence obliged. Four years later, Sheikh Abdullah and Akbar Jehan were married in Srinagar. The fact of her previous marriage and divorce was never a secret: only the real name of her first husband was hidden. She now threw herself into the struggle for a new Kashmir. She raised money to build schools for poor children and encouraged adult education in a state where the bulk of the pop
ulation was illiterate. She also, crucially, gave support and advice to her husband, alerting him, for example, to the dangers of succumbing to Nehru’s charm and thus compromising his own standing in Kashmir.
Few politicians in the 1930s believed that the subcontinent would ever be divided along religious lines. Even the most ardent Muslim separatists were prepared to accept a federation based on the principle of regional autonomy. In the 1937 elections the Congress Party swept most of the country, including the Muslim-majority North-West Frontier Province, where Ghaffar Khan’s popularity was at its peak. The Muslim-majority provinces of the Punjab and Bengal remained loyal to the raj and voted for secular parties controlled by the landed gentry. Contrary to Pakistani mythology, separatism wasn’t at this stage an aim so much as a bargaining tool to ensure that Muslims received a fair share of the post-colonial spoils.
The Second World War changed everything. India was included in Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, and the Congress Party was livid at His Majesty’s government’s failure to consult them. Nehru would probably have argued in favour of participating in the anti-fascist struggle provided the British agreed to leave India once it was all over, and London would probably have regarded such a request as impertinent. As it was, the Congress governments of each province resigned. Gandhi, who despite his pacifism had acted as an efficient recruiting sergeant for the British during the First World War, was less sure what to do this time. A hard-line ultra-nationalist current within the Congress, led by the charismatic Bengali Subhas Chandra Bose, argued for an alliance with Britain’s enemies, particularly Japan. This was unacceptable to Nehru and Gandhi. But when Singapore fell, in 1942, Gandhi, like most observers, was sure that the Japanese were about to take India by way of Bengal and argued that the Congress had to oppose the British empire, whatever the cost, in order to gain a position to strike a deal with the Japanese. The wartime coalition in London sent Stafford Cripps to woo the Congress back into line. He offered its leaders a ‘blank cheque’ after the war. ‘What is the point of a blank cheque from a bank that is already failing?’ Gandhi replied. In August 1942, the Congress leaders authorized the launch of the Quit India movement. A tidal wave of civil disobedience swept the country. The entire Congress leadership, including Gandhi and Nehru, was arrested, as were thousands of organizers and workers. The Muslim League backed the war effort and prospered. Partition was the ultimate prize.