An ongoing conversation of hope and despair amidst the continuum of violence in Kashmir

Introduction

The valley of Kashmir, since its inception, has been kept synonymous with beauty and trouble. In its beauty, lay hidden dark realities; tormented and tortured natives by the  powerful.  The valley has seen many regimes, benefited  from none.  People long for peace amidst the beauty of meadows in green and snow, but to no avail. Killings, enforced disappearances, abductions, torture are  common words heard and spoken by the natives of the place. Families split in trauma, longing for their loved ones to return, is the kind of hope they have.

Amidst this, the valley, which has been named after its spiritual richness “Resh Waer” (The Valley of Saints), has always found its peace in the shrines of Sufis. While men and women accustom themselves with the legalities of fighting tyranny and injustice, the women in the valley specially, look for miracles through these saints. Hence, the sufi shrines to them act above any agency in power, who they can ask for help. This narration below is the pedagogy of narrating lives of a common Kashmiri household, filled with hope and despair.

In an early winter morning of Kashmir, a young lady veiled in her burka (veil) is seen walking on the edge of a footbridge in the Shahr e Khas^[1] area of Srinagar. It’s a time when either dogs are howling, at the sight of the sun, or humans are consciously doing rounds in parks, to burn the calories from the previous night. Silence is creeping in  all those stagnant mud holes, which are left uncovered by the absence of governance, just like the big stories hidden inside the veil of law and order. The rooster’s voice being one and a mother’s shriek of her son being disappeared into thin air, the other.

This is how alarms work in our little valley of strays, a place where human lives mean nothing but just an addition of flesh and blood with some burdened air. Chants of durood shareef^[2[  reverberate with the stabs of lathis on the young and innocent. A story of hope and despair is lit in the bar of the human mind.

Parallelly, an old in grief but otherwise young lady veiled in the cover of faith is out to buy vegetables for her and a picture of her ‘lost in the air’ son. The body of her shareeq e hayat ^[3] lies dug deep beneath the 6 ft surface of the earth. His body wasn’t clad with the whites of kafan^[4], rather it was all coloured in the memory of bullets, blasts and bombs. Her small steps aren’t accounted for with the tunes of music, but of the chants in disturbance “naest nabud kaernakh myoun khodai” (Let my God perish the tyrants being). As she walks towards her home, she remembers the Glory of God, her sole reason for  living.

The daily chores of this mother, like yours and mine, are different. Her day starts with cooking a meal for two, in hope of her only son coming back home, but almost always ending up giving it to a hundred mynas and sparrows in his name, because he does not return. Her job is to yearn for a sight and plead to the only rescuer while those in power refuse to even acknowledge her pain, let alone act on it . Her Supreme Court of help is the Creator of Beings and his human friend in form – wali ullah^[5]. Her resting place is not in the confines of home – a home of hopelessness, a home of no members but a house of bricks – it is on the stairs of the shrine of Bani e Islam, Ameer e Kabeer, Shah i Hamdan^[6], the helper of the helpless and the rescuer of the lost.

The chants resonating and echoing within the walls of khanqah, a home of resonating chants of  pir and murid, echo with the joy of her union with the nur^[7] of her eyes, her lakht e jigar ^[8], her son. It is there that the rhythm of her continuity with despair breaks. Her place of family is with all those women who sit with her, sharing the same grief, waiting in memory of their ears being pleased with the footsteps of the return of their family members who have ‘disappeared’.

Home means many things for everyone, but the single most important thing that it signifies for a mother in Kashmir is the aura of human faces ornamented in exquisite smiles of her loved ones, far away from fears and distress. Her smile rests in the hope of seeing the only face she longs for, that of a young boy with the hint of black on his upper lips, a fuzz of hair, which might have now exalted his face with the beard of a stereotypical religious criminal. Her castles rested on peace and harmony and no big dreams. Her adornment is not in the colours of fabric, but in the smile that hides beneath a pile of endless sorrows, of which she wasn’t deserving of. Her brevity doesn’t come from the name of mouj ^[9] associated with her but of the innumerable atrocities her identity has been subjected to. An oppressed woman is seen everywhere, but an oppressed, sunken in sorrows, clueless of her fate, rests deep in the valley of saints and that of waters.

In wyeth ^[10] lie all her pains and examples of how she has endured miseries. A family picture rests in the imagination of a home that this mother builds one day. Her home is the place of many like her, in communion with the absolute authority, one that is foreseen and yet unforeseen, one who rests in every human heart, but is invisible, one who narrows miseries and broadens solutions – the sufi.

[1] Shahr e Khaas is the city of Srinagar, Kashmir. It attributes to it many stories of enduring violence in the most vulnerable days in Kashmir.

[2] Prayers for the verses of holy Quran

[3] Shareek e Hayat – Life Partner

[4] A white shroud used for wrapping the dead body

[5] The beloved of god

[6] Names attributed to Shahi Hamdan, Syed Ali Hamdani (R.A) of the Kubrawi Silsila of Sufis

[7] Urdu word of light – brightness

[8] The most beloved

[9] Kashmiri name given to a mother

[10] Wyeth is a name given to Kashmir valley on behest of it being largely surrounded by waters

References

Ahmed, Khalid Bashir. Kashmir: Exposing the Myth Behind Narrative. SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd; First edition (5 July 2017)

Bashir, Shahnaz. The Half Mother: A Novel. Hachette India Local (15 June 2014)

Waheed, Mirza. The Collaborator. Penguin UK (19 January 2012)

Noorani, A. G. “’Disappearances’ in Kashmir.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 38, no. 26, 2003, pp. 2592–2593. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4413722. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.

Qutab, Soudiya. “Women Victims of Armed Conflict: Half-Widows in Jammu and Kashmir.” Sociological Bulletin, vol. 61, no. 2, 2012, pp. 255–278. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23620967. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.

Fazili, Gowhar Ashraf. “Familial Grief, Resistance and the Political Imaginary in Kashmir.” Indian Anthropologist, vol. 46, no. 2, 2016, pp. 53–74. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26493882. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.

https://www.efsas.org/publications/study-papers/kashmir%E2%80%99s-composite-culture-sufism-and-communal-harmony-kashmiriyat/

(The views expressed in this article are the author’s own. Content can be used with due credit to the author and to ‘Zariya: Women’s Alliance for Dignity and Equality’)