Sunday, July 21, 2019

From ‘In the Valley of Mist. One Family’s extraordinary story from peace to war in Kashmir. As read on BBC Radio 4’ by Justine Hardy



The artisan traditions of Kashmir are customarily male; another vestige from another empire, the Mughals.

Kashmir’s beauty is the stuff of eulogy and big movies: a great sage who begged a god to strike a cleft in the Valley so that a demon could be slain. It was done, they say, and most of the water drained away leaving a fertile land, a soft green place in the midst of the world’s youngest and crudest mountain range, lunatic peaks ……

…….a potent expression that implied a sense of kinship and togetherness that transcended the parameters of differing religions and rituals – Kashmiriyat. ……… Kashmiriyat had barely been in use before 1947

The houseboat next door…….was going to be unseasonably full, with four couples flying in from Gujarat ……….. ‘They make so much mess, these Indians. All they do is eat fried dhal all the time, and sit in front of TV. They cannot even notice when they drop it……….When you are staying I don’t have to clean the boat so much. When Indians staying I have to clean the whole boat every day, maybe sometimes two times.’
‘But there’s only one of me,’ I said. ……….They are grateful for the business. Without the domestic tourists who have come in dribs and drabs over the past twenty years many of the houseboat owners would have had no business at all.…………
Caricatures are so easily created, and these then become the received version, repeated enough times to become accepted knowledge. In private many houseboat owners and their workers portray the Indian guests as loud, rude, heavy-drinking idol-worshippers who do not understand the meaning of silence and prayer, who come to Kashmir and crash around as though they own it. But then many Kashmiris, even the educated, believe unwaveringly that the attacks on America in September 2001 were a Jewish conspiracy, that all the Jews who worked at the World Trade Centre had been warned to stay at home on September 11 ………Caricature and urban myth are usually best left alone by the outsider…….

The school journey in the mornings was once one of the enchanting sights of the lakes: scrubbed children paddled in small shikaras, laughing or squabbling, sometimes splashing each other with their paddles as their parents shouted from the bank, telling them to stop, to hurry to school

‘……….We are all so tired of it, you cant imagine how tired. It is a malaise that all the young people have ………What can the government have expected? They gave us all that education, lots of degrees on pieces of paper, but nothing to back it up, no experience to find jobs, no jobs to find. Why were they surprised when young people joined the militancy? It wasn’t about being martyrs, it was about earning bucks.’

On Martyrs’ Day each July it is mostly women who gather at the graveyards. Many of them have no graves over which to mourn. These are the mothers, wives and sisters of ‘the disappeared’. They cannot grieve fully because they do not know what has happened to those they want to be allowed to mourn. In almost all cases the security forces picked up their men during crackdowns or house searches. Some off those taken were involved in the militancy; some were taken because of mistaken identity; some because a quota of arrests had to be met in order for a police or paramilitary officer to achieve promotion, or a financial bonus.....are referred-to as half-widows…….They have no status. They cannot remarry or receive the government compensation given to women whose husbands have been killed in the conflict……..In desperation some of these people put their trust, and money that they had begged and borrowed, into the hands of mukhbirs (police informers). These parasitic middlemen always promise to find the whereabouts of ‘disappeared’ family members, charging high prices up front, and then dangling only bitter hope and red herrings in exchange, or simply disappearing as soon as they have the money.
It is just one of the many ugly little businesses that have grown out of the insurgency.

Among ordinary Kashmiris the world of women starts with the family they are born into, and then becomes the family that they marry into. Female friendship is confined within the family structure, except when the girls are younger, and if they have the chance to go to school and make friends there. The conflict has brutalized women but they do not turn to each other in their pain. They turn inwards, into silence, and away from the calls for their men to pick up the gun; from the sounds of rifle butts against their door demanding entry; from the cry of a neighbor telling them that their boy has gone; from the extremist throwing acid in their face for not wearing the veil…………until they cannot take any more. Then the sad journey is made to Room 19 [psychiatry clinic] at the Shri Maharajah Hari Singh Hospital.
The women of Kashmir are not like other women. They do not come together, seeking to share their pain with other women. They turn away.

……….night of Friday, 22 February 1991……soldiers rounded up the men of Kunan Poshpura……..soldiers then ransacked each house they searched, and they raped indiscriminately……..At first the Government of India and the army denied the reports………A fact-finding group was sent. It was reported that the group spent just half an hour in Kunan Poshpura. A 300-page report was produced from the visit that concluded that all the women in the village had lied.
Two years after the mass rape the village was divided: many of the women had been deserted by their husbands and families; young girls could not find husbands, regardless of whether they had been raped or not; one seventy-year-old woman had been thrown out by her son for bringing ill fortune on her family because of her rape. Young girls told visitors that they were taunted by the men of the village: ‘Did you enjoy it, do you want some more?’ it appeared that the men of Kunan Poshpura seemed united in their condemnation of the women for having brought this brutality to their village.
Seventeen years latere Kunan Poshpura is still referred to as the raped village.

Village women have never travelled too much around the Valley, and since the beginning of the insurgency it has been even less.

So many of the deaths in Kashmir have not been the result of a planned attack, or at a given command, but because of the terrified jabbing of a shaking finger on a trigger made slippery with the sweat of fear.

His generation were the first to take up arms when the insurgency began, the separatist dream their fuel. Their children inherited the damage of those early years, the fighting, crackdowns, intimidation, curfews, their fathers, brothers and cousins taken during searches, many never to return. The anger was passed on with no economic buffer to soften it. There were no new jobs for the next generation to go into. Militancy was the main employer through the 1990s. The Jammu and Kashmir Police recruited from the local people too, but it was not a job that most wanted, almost to be part of the great booted occupying force as it was seen – unpatriotic to many, un-Kashmiri.

During the first few years of easy recruitment to the insurgency, up until the mid-1990s, boys would just stick their hands in the air at the end of a meeting outside a mosque, or after a speech at one of the militant group’s safe houses. They had not necessarily planned to volunteer, or even thought about it. They just saw their friends sticking up their hands to volunteer, and so they did the same.

Like most of the villagers of the Valley he was a man who was not comfortable in the company of women he was not related to.

Penetration in sodomy is not regarded by some as being a homosexual act in parts of North India and Pakistan. But the one who is penetrated is derided as a ‘donkey boy’, the one who is ridden, subjugated, humiliated.


From ‘The Saint of Gondawali. The Life and Sayings of Shri Brahmachaitanya’ by K V Belsare



Reality is Ananda. Ananda is the experience of supreme harmony. It corresponds with the highest degree of integration of self. It produces equanimity and brings profound peace…..Divine experience cannot be communicated in the form of neat logical propositions. It is conveyed through symbols, myths and parables. Shankaracharya calls it Samyak Jnana, i.e. Perfect Knowledge. Spinoza calls it Scientia Intuitiva i.e. Intuitive Knowledge.

Introversion means a turning of the mind inwards……involves a gathering together of the senses from the world of sensory objects. Manana or meditation and Manas Puja or Inward worship are a great help in introversion. However, it needs an untiring and strong effort of the will. Many seekers fail in this first step of contemplative life……the state of vacancy or stillness in the mind. It is the consequence of success in introversion. ……..The self……can withdraw herself completely from the noise of the flesh for some time………The self has to move out of the ease and quiet of the second stage…..She has ….to become afire with a longing to see God……..She must open herself through complete surrender and wait silently for an influx of divine love. This period of suspense is hard to bear and so it is called the Dark Night of the soul. …….When the longing for God becomes consuming enough, there is the moment of total surrender…..When the contemplation comes to stay, the mystic becomes one with God for all time. He becomes a free person in every sense. He is a Jivanmukta. …..It is the state of Moksha or Liberation. Such a man lives in an inward poise and remains undisturbed among the ups and downs of life……Such a man who enjoys Freedom and Beatitude is called a saint.

The Master answered, “Desire is the cause of birth. Desire again becomes the cause of death. When a child is born, it comes to satisfy some desire. The common man does not know who comes to him as a son or a daughter. The saints know it. Sometimes it happens that some spiritually advanced souls fall a prey to some petty desire. This desire dominates at the time of death during the previous birth. Then it forces them to be born again preferably in the family of a seeker or a saint. They satisfy the desire and soon depart from this world. That is why many gifted children die young.”

The common man is conscious of the words he speaks. He becomes the knower who knows the object which is the known. But there is a state of super-consciousness in which the knower becomes one with the known and knows it by identity. The man who attains that state is called a Rishi or a seer. The Rishis are…. So deeply united with God that sacred hymns flow out of them. They honestly and truly believe that God composes the hymn and they become merely the channel for its expression. In this sense the Vedas and the Upanishads are called Shruti, i.e. what the Rishis heard from God.

Nanasaheb Peshwa was one of the leaders of the Indian Revolution of 1857. The Master had met him before. After the British viceroy, the Indian leaders sought refuge in various unknown quarters. Nanasaheb became a Bairagi and entered the Nepal territory. The Master advised him to stay in the dense forests called Nimisha Aranya at the foot of the Himalayas……..The Master convinced him of the great changes which had come about in the political situation in the country and pointed out that the political role of kings was receding in the background. He initiated the ex-King into the mysteries of the Divine Name and …..promised him to be by his side in his last moments. …………Nanasaheb had an attack of influenza. His lungs were badly affected. …….Nanasaheb breathed his last in the Master’s arms.

“….Of all the animals, the cow is the only one which possesses human emotions.”