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.
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