Kashmiri Writing Is Blooming

A Kashmiri shawl weaver told Asha Batra, one of the co-founders of the Kumaon Literary Festival, that he wanted his son to learn the craft of his forefathers rather than venture into mobile repairing. 바카라�My son makes such beautiful shawls,바카라� Batra recalls the man telling her. 바카라�What will he do in mobile repairing? What will happen to the traditional art?바카라�

바카라�These are the stories I want people to write,바카라� adds Batra. The Kumaon Literary Festival was held this year from October 18 to 20 in Srinagar. 바카라�Let people forget the past 30 years and write love stories,바카라� she says.

Yet is it possible to write about Kashmir without inevitably referring to the political turmoil in the region over the past 30 years? Kashmir, sometimes referred to as  바카라�heaven on 바카라� because of its natural beauty, has been a flashpoint between India and Pakistan since 1947. The neighbouring nations govern parts of it but claim the whole, and they have fought at least three major conflicts, and several minor ones, over it.

Modern Kashmiri literature,  in Kashmiri, Urdu, Hindi and English, consistently refracts the conflicts that mark the region, whether in non-fiction (Curfewed Nights by Basharat Peer (English), Prisoner No.100 by Anjum Zamarud Habib (in Urdu and English), Rumours of Spring by Farah Bashir (English), fiction (The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed, The Garden of Solitude by Siddhartha Gigoo (English), Katha Satisar by Chandrakanta (Hindi), Khwaban Khayalan Manz by Asif Tariq Bhat ), graphic novels (Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir by Malik Sajad), or poetry (The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali (English), Serpents Under My Veil by Asiya Zahoor (English), Na Thsay Na Aks by Naseem Shafaie (Kashmiri).

바카라�We are not getting into the politics of this literary event, because politics is something we are not  masters of,바카라� says Batra, draped in a pashmina shawl, sitting on the green lawns of the Sheri Kashmir Convocation Centre, on the banks of the Dal Lake. 바카라�I want people to tell us if they have good stories and how they will find publishers.바카라�

Loss of heritage

Even as Batra spoke passionately about non-conflict writing, a few meters away, Siddhartha Gigoo chaired another panel called 바카라�Heritage Matters: Kashmir바카라�s Forgotten Wonders바카라�. 바카라�The world learned about Kashmir from a film like The Kashmir Files,바카라� he says. 바카라�This is not right.바카라�

Written and directed by Vivek Agnihotri, The Kashmir Files, released earlier this year, dramatises the plight of Kashmiri pandits. The film was a huge box office success in India and abroad, but faced criticism for selectively representing historical facts.

Gigoo says the conflict has resulted in the loss of Kashmiri heritage 바카라� an opinion  which celebrity chef Sanjay Raina echoes. 바카라�If you ask people about Kashmiri food, they will tell you about  wazwan (a multicourse Kashmiri feast comprising mostly meat dishes, along with a few vegetarian ones),바카라� Raina says. 바카라�But over the past 35 years, a whole range of different cuisines have been lost. I have been trying to educate people over the past 10 years about how Kashmiri food is not only  wazwan 바카라� there is also tarami, rista, gushtaba, batta rogan josh, and nadru (lotus stem).바카라�

Ajay Raina, a filmmaker, talks of the fractured imagination of Kashmir and Kashmiris. 바카라�Before the exodus (of Kashmiri Hindus), Kashmir was a beautiful place for us,바카라� he says. 바카라�Since the 1990s, it has turned into a place of conflict and loss. I have tried to understand it through my films.바카라�

Raina, who has been trained at the famed Film and Television Institute of India, Pune, and has won several awards, including a National Award, and has explored the plight of Kashmiri pandits in several of his documentaries, including his debut Tell Them The Tree They Had Planted Has Now Grown (2002) as well as his recent work, Moute바카라�e Rang (2022).

Frozen in conflict

Freny Manecksha, author of Flaming Forest, Wounded Valley: Stories from Bastar and Kashmir, says it was Peer바카라�s Curfewed Night that emerged as a definitive text about ordinary Kashmiris. She adds 바카라�Malik Sajad바카라�s graphic novel Munnu was hailed internationally for its ingenuity,바카라� she adds. 바카라�Farah Bashir바카라�s nuanced gendered take on the 90s, Rumours of Spring, won a literary award. I learned about Kashmir바카라�s unique medical community and the role of hospitals as spaces of suffering and memorialising through Dr Rumana Makhdoomi바카라�s memoir, White Man in Dark.바카라�

She recollects what Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist, Nadine Gordimer, said about conflict and creativity in a 1976 essay, 바카라�A Writer바카라�s Freedom바카라�. Citing examples of persecuted writers such as Thomas Mann, Boris Pasternak, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinua Achebe, Gordimer claims: 바카라�Bannings and banishments are terrible known hazards a writer must face, and many have faced if the writer belongs where freedom of expression, among other freedoms, is withheld, but sometimes creativity is frozen rather than destroyed. 바카라�The integrity of the creative artist survives so long as the artist himself cannot be persuaded, cajoled, or frightened into betraying it.바카라�

Farah Bashir says, 바카라�Our lives go beyond the political landscape.바카라� She adds that to substitute lived experiences with pre-designed templates is not literature or documentation of history but a revelation of farcical attempts to alter it. 바카라�To create non-places from places inhabited by people who have rowed their journeys through turbulent times and appropriate their past and present and their social history, which they바카라�ll never be able to impute nuance to, many writers on Kashmir become representatives of what at best looks like mock-heroism.바카라�바카라�The beleaguered Kashmiri artist will live on,바카라� adds Manecksha.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Rumours of Spring")