An Area of Darkness

  Beyond this open, almost country, road lay the narrow main street. Here the crowd was thick. Many men wore black shirts; one boy was carrying a black flag. Soon we saw some flagellants. Their clothes were stiff with blood. The procession had not yet begun and they walked idly up and down the centre of the road, between the admiring crowds, jostling those who tomorrow might once again be their betters. In the corbelled upper storeys of the narrow houses every crooked window, of Kashmiri tininess, framed a medieval picture: the intent faces of women and girls, the girls fresh-complexioned, the women, from their long seclusion, pallid, all cut out against the sharp blackness of window space. Below, in the choked road, were lorryloads of police. Some boys were tormenting the puppies below the butcher’s stall; we heard the puppies kicked, a surprisingly loud sound to come from such small bodies; we heard the yelps and whines. Hawkers called; stranded cars hooted. Over it all lay the microphone-magnified voice of the mullah – the microphone an Indian inevitability – reciting the story of Kerbala. His voice held anguish and hysteria; at times it seemed he would break down; but he went feverishly on and on. He was reciting from under an awning hung across the street and was hidden by the crowd, some of whom carried coloured pennants.

  More flagellants appeared. The back of one was obscenely cut up; blood, still fresh, soaked his trousers. He walked briskly up and down, deliberately bumping into people and frowning as though offended. His whip hung from his waist. It was made up of perhaps six metal chains, eighteen inches long, each ending in a small bloody blade; hanging from his waist, it looked like a fly-whisk. As disquieting as the blood were the faces of some of the enthusiasts. One had no nose, just two punctures in a triangle of pink mottled flesh; one had grotesquely raw bulging eyes; there was one with no neck, the flesh distended straight from cheek to chest. In their walk was pride; they behaved like busy men with no time for trivialities. I suspected some of the bloody garments. Some looked too dry; they might have been last year’s, they might have been borrowed, or the blood might have been animal’s blood. But there was no denying the integrity of the man whose nearly bald head was roughly bandaged, the blood still streaming down. The glory lay in blood; he who displayed the most was the most certain of attention.

  We left the hot crowded street and made our way into the open. We sat in a scuffed, dusty graveyard, beside some boys playing an incomprehensible medieval game with pebbles. Until that morning religious enthusiasm had been a mystery to me. But in that street, where only the police lorries and the occasional motorcar and the microphone and perhaps the ice-cream sold by hawkers in shallow round tins were not of the middle ages, the festival of blood had seemed entirely natural. It was these American girls now approaching who were inexplicable and outlandish; not content with the attention they would normally attract, they wore body-accentuating garments which would have been outrageous in London. The flagellant who, ignoring them, began to get out of his blood-stained clothes on the canal steps, in full view of everyone, and was presently naked, was of a piece with the setting and the holiday mood of the day. This was his day; today he had licence. He had earned it by his bloody back. He had turned dull virtue into spectacle.

  Religious enthusiasm derived, in performance and admiration, from simplicity, from a knowledge of religion only as ritual and form. ‘Shia not Muslim,’ Aziz had said. The Shia, he added, demonstrating, bowed in this way when he said his prayers; the Muslim, now, bowed in this. Christians were closer to Muslims than to Hindus because Christians and Muslims buried their dead. ‘But, Aziz, many Christians are cremated.’ ‘They not Christian.’ The medical student, explaining the difference between Islam and Sikhism, which he particularly detested, said that Muslims slaughtered their animals by bleeding them slowly to death, uttering prayers the while. Sikhs struck off an animal’s head at one blow, without prayers. He sketched out the gesture, involuntarily shook his head with repulsion, and put his hand over his face. On the day of Id Mr Butt gave us a cake iced Id Mubarak, Id Greetings. The day took us by surprise; shikara-loads of Kashmiris, men, women and children, were ferried about the lake all morning, subdued and stiff and startling in clean clothes of white and blue. It was a day of visits and gifts and feasting; but, too, for the Kashmiri, the year’s solitary day of cleanliness, a penitential debauch of soap and water and itching new cloth. Yet neither the medical student nor the engineer nor the merchant, all of whom came to visit us and offered gifts, could explain the significance of the day. It was only what we had seen; it was a day when Muslims had to eat meat.

  Religion was a spectacle, and festivals, women veiled (‘so that men wouldn’t get excited and think bad things,’ the merchant said), women bred and breeding like battery hens; it was the ceremonial washing of the genitals in public before prayers; it was ten thousand simultaneous prostrations. It was this complete day-filling, season-filling mixture of the gay, the penitential, the hysterical and, importantly, the absurd. It answered every simple mood. It was life and the Law, and its forms could admit of no change or query, since change and query would throw the whole system, would throw life itself, in danger. ‘I am a bad Muslim,’ the medical student had said at our first meeting. ‘How can I believe that the world was made in six days? I believe in evolution. My mother would grow mad if I said these things to her.’ But he rejected none of the forms, no particle of the Law; and was more of a religious fanatic than Aziz who, secure in his system, inspected other systems with tolerant interest. The sputniks had momentarily shaken some in their faith, for the upper atmosphere had been decreed closed to all but Mohammed and his white horse. But doctrine could be made to accommodate this – what the Russians had done was to send up their sputniks on the white horse – and the faith could survive because doctrine was not as important as the forms it had bred. The abandoning of the veil was more to be feared and resisted than the theory of evolution.

  These forms had not developed over the centuries. They had been imposed whole and suddenly by a foreign conqueror, displacing another set of forms, once no doubt thought equally unalterable, of which no trace remained. The medieval mind could assess a building as five thousand years old, and do so casually; with like facility it buried events three and four hundred years old. And it was because it was without a sense of history that it was capable of so complete a conversion. Many Kashmiri clan names – like that of Mr Butt himself – were often still purely Hindu; but of their Hindu past the Kashmiris retained no memory. In the mountains there were cave-dwellers, thinly bearded and moustached, handsome, sharp-featured men, descendants, I felt, of Central Asian horsemen; in the summer they came down with their mules among the Kashmiris, who despised them. Of their first arrival in Kashmir there was a folk memory: ‘Once, long, long ago they lived beyond the mountains. Then there was a king of Cabul who began killing them, and so they left and walked over the mountains and came here.’ But of the conversion of the Valley to Islam there was no memory at all. Aziz, I know, would have been scandalized if it had been suggested to him that his ancestors were Hindus. ‘Those?’ the engineer said, driving past the Awantipur ruins. ‘Hindu ruins.’ He was showing me the antiquities of the Valley, and the ruins lay just at the side of the main road; but he didn’t slow down or say any more. The eighth-century ruins were contemptible; they formed no part of his past. His history only began with his conquerors; in spite of travel and degrees he remained a medieval convert, forever engaged in the holy war.

  Yet the religion as practised in the Valley was not pure. Islam is iconoclastic: the Kashmiris went mad when they saw the hair from the Prophet’s beard; and all around the lake were Muslim shrines, lit at night. I know, though, what Aziz would have said if I had told him that good Muslims did not venerate relics. ‘They not Muslim.’ Should another conversion now occur, should another Law as complete be imposed, in a hundred years there would be no memory of Islam.

  *

  It was in politics as it was in religion. The analyses of the Kashmir situation which I had been reading endlessl
y in newspapers had no relation to the problem as the Kashmiris saw it. The most anti-Indian people in the Valley were Punjabi Muslim settlers, often in high positions; to them Kashmiris were ‘cowardly’, ‘greedy’; and they often came to the hotel with rumours of troop movements, mutinies and disasters on the frontier. To their politics the Kashmiris brought not self-interest but their gifts of myth and wonder; and their myths centred on one man, Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, as Mr Nehru had called him. He had made the Kashmiris free; he was their leader; he had been friendly to India but had ceased to be friendly, and since 1953 had been, except for a few months, in jail. From Kashmiris I could get no more; I could get no glimpse of the leader’s achievements, personality or appeal. Over and over I was told, as if in explanation of everything, that when he came out of prison in 1958, there were crowds along the road from Kud to Srinagar, and red carpets everywhere.

  ‘Listen,’ said the college student, ‘and I will tell you how Sheikh Abdullah won freedom for the people of Kashmir. For many, many years Sheikh Abdullah had been fighting for the freedom of the people. And then one day the Maharaja became very frightened and sent for Sheikh Abdullah. He said to Sheikh Abdullah, “I will give you anything, even up to half my kingdom, if only you let me keep my throne.” Sheikh Abdullah refused. The Maharaja became very angry and said, “I will throw you in oil and make it hot.” And you know what the result of that would be. That only a heap of ashes would remain. But Sheikh Abdullah said, “All right, boil me in oil. But I tell you that out of every drop of my blood will grow another Sheikh Abdullah.” When the Maharaja heard this he was very frightened, and he gave up the throne. That was how Sheikh Abdullah won the freedom for the people of Kashmir.’

  I objected. I said that people didn’t behave like that in real life.

  ‘But it’s true. Ask any Kashmiri.’

  It was an account of the events of 1947 that ignored Congress, Gandhi, the British, the Pakistan invasion. And this was at the high level of literacy in English. Below this there were people like Aziz, who almost daily regretted the Maharaja’s repressive rule because things were so much cheaper then. Recent history was already sinking into medieval legend. Aziz and the khansamah had served the British; they knew them as people of certain tastes, skills and language (‘padre’ for priest, and to Aziz ‘bugger’ was an affectionate word for a dog) who had departed as unaccountably as they had come. But there had grown up a generation of students who had learned of the British only from their history books, and to them the British intervention was as remote as the Mogul glory.

  Bashir told me one day that the ‘East India Company went away in 1947’; and this, in our political discussions, was his sole reference to the British. Bashir was nineteen, college-educated. ‘I am best sportsman,’ he had said, introducing himself to me. ‘I am best swimmer. I know all chemistry and all physics.’ He detested the Kashmiri and Indian habit of wearing pyjamas in public; and he told me he never spat in the street. He regarded himself as educated and emancipated: he ‘inter-dined’ (one of the English locutions of the subcontinent) with everyone, regardless of religion or sect. He wore western-style suits, and he spoke English as well as he did because ‘I come from an unusually intelligent family’.

  It might be that Bashir’s ignorance of history was due to his stupidity, or to his education in a language he did not fully understand (when he said best he only meant ‘very good’), or to bad teachers and bad textbooks. (I examined one of his history books later. It was a typical Indian textbook; it was in question-and-answer form and gave the preservation of purity as one of the virtues of the caste system and gave miscegenation as one of the reasons for the decline of Portuguese power in India.) Or it might simply have been that Bashir and his friends took no interest in politics; and indeed, without newspapers and the radio, it was possible to be in Kashmir for weeks without realizing that there was a Kashmir problem. But Kashmir was being talked about on every side. All-India Radio was carrying detailed reports of the annual United Nations debate; Radio Pakistan tirelessly warned that in Kashmir as in the rest of India Islam was in danger, and Radio Kashmir as tirelessly retaliated. Mr Nehru came to Srinagar, and Radio Pakistan reported that a public meeting he addressed broke up in disorder. (He was in fact convalescing after an illness.) Whatever might be said, Bashir’s ignorance of the recent history and situation of his country was startling. And he was privileged. Below him were the grimy, barefooted, undernourished primary-school boys in blue shirts who had no chance of going to college; below them were those who didn’t go to school at all.

  I was in bed one afternoon with an inflamed throat when Bashir brought Kadir to see me. Kadir was seventeen, small, with soft brown eyes in a square gentle face; he was studying engineering but wanted to be a writer.

  ‘He is best poet,’ Bashir said, interrupting his prowling about the room, sinking across my feet on the bed, and grabbing my cigarettes. He had brought Kadir to see me; but his purpose was also to show me off to Kadir, and this he could do only by this hearty familiarity which he had never before attempted with me. He could not be rebuffed. I merely wiggled my toes below his back.

  ‘When Bashir told me I was going to meet a writer,’ Kadir said, ‘of course I had to come.’

  ‘Best poet,’ Bashir said, lifting himself off my feet and supporting himself on his elbows.

  The poet’s shirt, open at the neck, was dirty; there was a hole at the top of his pullover. He was small and sensitive and shabby: I yielded to him.

  ‘He is great drinker,’ Bashir said. ‘Too much of whisky.’

  This was a proof of his talent. In India poets and musicians are required to live the part: it is necessary to be sad and alcoholic.

  But Kadir looked so young and poor.

  ‘Do you really drink?’ I asked him.

  He said simply, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Recite,’ Bashir ordered.

  ‘But he wouldn’t understand Urdu.’

  ‘Recite. I will translate. It is not easy, you understand. But I will translate.’

  Kadir recited.

  ‘He says,’ Bashir said, ‘and he is talking of a poor boatman’s daughter, you understand – he says in his poem that she gives colour to the rose. You get it, mister? Another man would say that the rose gives her the colour. He says that she gives colour to the rose.’

  ‘Very beautiful,’ I said.

  Kadir said wearily, ‘Kashmir has beauty and nothing else.’

  Then Bashir, his large eyes shining, recited a couplet which, he said, I would find in some Mogul building in Delhi. He became sentimental. ‘An Englishman went walking in the hills one day, you know,’ he said. ‘And he saw a Gujjar girl sitting under a tree. She was very beautiful. And she was reading Koran. The Englishman went up to her and said, “Will you marry me?” She looked up from Koran and said, “Of course I will marry you. But first you must give up your religion for mine.” The Englishman said, “Of course I will change my religion. I love you more than anything in the world.” So he changed his religion and they were married. They were very happy. They had four children. One became a colonel in the army, one became a contractor, and the girl married Sheikh Abdullah. The Englishman was very rich. Too much of money. He owned Nedou’s Hotel. You know Nedou’s Hotel? Best in Srinagar.’

  ‘Oberoi Palace is best,’ Kadir said.

  ‘Nedou’s is best. Best hotel. So you see, she is English.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Sheikh Abdullah’s wife. Pure English.’

  ‘She couldn’t be pure English,’ Kadir said.

  ‘Pure English. Her father was an Englishman. He owned Nedou’s Hotel.’

  So, often and in this manner of legend, the talk turned to Sheikh Abdullah. Why had Sheikh Abdullah fallen out with New Delhi? One man said that the Indian Government had wanted to buy over the Post Office but Sheikh Abdullah wouldn’t sell. The implication was clear: there had been a tussle over a demand for greater autonomy. To my informant, however, the Post Offi
ce was the post office on the Bund, a type of super-shop, doing brisk business every day, which the Indian Government wanted to steal from Kashmir. He was an educated man; and doubtless the fact of a demand for greater autonomy had undergone further distortion and simplification before it had passed down to the peasants. Propaganda needs to find its level; and medieval propaganda was as simple-clever and as fearful as any technique of hidden persuasion. Radio Pakistan could claim that the large sums of money being spent on education in Kashmir were a means of undermining Islam and the Law; and it was more effective propaganda than the Kashmir Government’s boards giving development facts and figures.

  ‘But Sheikh Abdullah was Prime Minister for more than five years. What did he do?’

  ‘Ah, that is the beauty. He did nothing. He wouldn’t take help from anyone. He wanted the people of Kashmir to learn to stand on their own feet.’

  ‘But if he did nothing in five years, why do you think he is great? Give me an example of his greatness.’

  ‘I will give you an example. One year, you know, the rice crop failed and the people were starving. They went to Sheikh Abdullah and said to him, “Sheikh Abdullah, we have no rice and we are starving. Give us rice.” And you know what he said to them? He said, “Eat potatoes.” ’

  Humour was not intended, and the advice was sound. Indians are willing to eat only what they have always eaten; and staples vary from province to province. In the Punjab they ate wheat. In Kashmir, as in the South, they ate rice. It was rice alone, enormous platefuls of it, moistened perhaps with a little tomato sauce, which energized Aziz’s active little body. When there was no rice the Kashmiris starved; they might have potatoes, but potatoes were not food. In this lay the point of Sheikh Abdullah’s advice. Needless to say, it had gone unheeded and had instead been transformed into a piece of almost prophetic wisdom, to be relished and passed on as such. Once there was no food in the land, and the people went to the leader and said, ‘We have no food. We are starving.’ The leader said, ‘You might think you have no food. But you have. You have potatoes. And potatoes are food.’