Imagining Kashmir: Emplotment and Colonialism (Frontiers of Narrative) - Hardcover

Hogan, Patrick Colm

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080328859X ISBN 13: 9780803288591

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2016

Synopsis

During the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, Kashmir—a Muslim-majority area ruled by a Hindu maharaja—became a hotly disputed territory. Divided between India and Pakistan, the region has been the focus of international wars and the theater of political and military struggles for self-determination. The result has been great human suffering within the state, with political implications extending globally.

Imagining Kashmir examines cinematic and literary imaginings of the Kashmir region’s conflicts and diverse citizenship, analyzing a wide range of narratives from writers and directors such as Salman Rushdie, Bharat Wakhlu, Mani Ratnam, and Mirza Waheed in conjunction with research in psychology, cognitive science, and social neuroscience. In this innovative study, Patrick Colm Hogan’s historical and cultural analysis of Kashmir advances theories of narrative, colonialism, and their corresponding ideologies in relation to the cognitive and affective operations of identity.

Hogan considers how narrative organizes people’s understanding of, and emotions about, real political situations and the ways in which such situations in turn influence cultural narratives, not only in Kashmir but around the world.

 
 


 

About this title

About the Author

Patrick Colm Hogan is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where he is also on the faculty of the Program in Cognitive Science and the Program in India Studies. He is the author of numerous books, including Understanding Nationalism: On Narrative, Cognitive Science, and Identity and Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories (Nebraska, 2011).
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Imagining Kashmir

Emplotment and Colonialism

By Patrick Colm Hogan

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8032-8859-1

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Kashmir, Narrative, and the Complexity of Colonialism, 
1 Understanding Kashmir: Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, 
2 Dominant Ideologies and Their Limits: Four Movies about Kashmir, 
3 Breaching the Ideological Boundaries: Three Films Not (Apparently) about Kashmir, 
4 Kashmiri Alternatives: Rival Ideologies in Three Anglophone Novels, 
5 Colonial Violence and Scapegoating: A Poem about Majorities and Minorities, 
6 Fractured Tales and Colonial Traumas: Disfigured Stories in Kashmiri Short Fiction, 
Afterword: Ending the Trauma: What Can Be Done?, 
Notes, 
Works Cited, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Kashmir

Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown

Anticolonial nationalism is almost always bound up with a myth. In this myth, European powers are the colonizers and (largely) non-European countries are, simply, colonized. Thus, colonialism ends once the non-European countries throw off the political rule and escape the economic exploitation of the European countries. A successful break with European domination, then, successfully ends colonialism. This is the myth of postcolonial emancipation. Of course, everyone acknowledges that European domination may continue after nominal independence of the colony. The point is not that anticolonial nationalists deny neocolonialism. The point is that there is often a tacit presumption that colonialism is confined to Europe and emancipation from Europe (and by extension, the United States) equals emancipation from colonialism. But, in fact, after successfully creating a new nation, a former colony is all too likely to establish its own colonies, its own forms of domination over regions or over minority populations. This postcolonial colonialism may be more local when compared with the global reach of the European powers. But it need not be any less brutal.

Salman Rushdie has been sensitive to this point for many years. In his 1980 novel Midnight's Children he depicted the horrors of West Pakistani colonialism in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). In Shalimar the Clown, he takes up Indian control of Kashmir. But, in its depth of analysis, Shalimar goes well beyond that earlier treatment of postcolonial colonialism. Shalimar begins to suggest that colonialism is always complex, recurrent, multiple. It is found reiteratively, at level after level, like the old story from the American South of the slave owner who beat his wife; the wife in her turn abused the foreman; the foreman in his turn beat the slave; the slave in his turn flayed the horse.

Mythic Kashmir: The Loss of Eden

Of course, Shalimar is not a treatise about colonialism generally. It is about Kashmir, which is, as we will see over the following chapters, a clear but highly complex and in some ways atypical colony. In keeping with this, the novel is pervaded by Kashmiri history. As briefly noted in the present volume's introduction, a central idea shared by writers on Kashmiri history is that Kashmiri culture was marked by an unusual degree of intercommunal harmony; Hindus and Muslims loved and respected one another and lived together without religious conflict. The idea is expressed in the poetry of medieval mystic poets who opposed the sectarianism of Hindu and Muslim, favoring instead the unity of all in devotion to God. In this account, the ethnocultural category of Kashmiriyat (Kashmiriness) superseded and rendered innocuous the categories of religion.

This standard idea is also a myth — a myth created around history. As used today, the idea of Kashmiriyat is the converse of emancipation; it is the myth of a lost paradise. The great historical hero of this story is the fourteenth-century ruler Zain-ul-abidin. Before his reign, "officials seized the wealth of Hindu temples, broke idols, imposed the hated jiziya tax [poll tax on non-Muslims]." At this time there was "a vicious anti-Hindu policy" including "forcible conversion" and a ban on the wearing of distinctive Hindu symbols (Akbar 53). Hindus fled (as they did again in the early years of the militancy, when threatened by Islamic militants). But Zain-ul-abidin brought the Hindus back, abolished the poll tax, and practiced reconversion (Akbar 27–28).

Rushdie, it seems, accepts the myth of Kashmiriyat. As he puts it, in the voice of Shalimar, "In the valley these words ['Hindu' and 'Muslim'] were merely descriptions, not divisions" (57). Moreover, he points toward Zain-ul-abidin as a model of Kashmiriyat. Indeed, in his novel, the anticommunal orientation of the indigenous Kashmiri theater group is manifest in part through their performance of the story of Zain-ul-abidin: "To be a Kashmiri, to have received so incomparable a divine gift, was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided. Of all this the story of [Zain-ul-abidin] was a symbol" (83). The version of this story in the novel shows Rushdie's human sensitivity. It would be easy for a Muslim to see Zain-ul-abidin's acts as a simple manifestation of Islamic generosity. But Rushdie presents them as the ruler's gratitude to a Hindu physician (79–80). In this story, then, Hindus are not simply recipients of charity.

There is undoubtedly some historical support for this view of Kashmiriyat. Yet, even so, it remains a myth. Why would mystic poets have had to denounce sectarianism if it were simply absent? Why did Zain-ul-abidin have to call Hindus back and allow reconversion, except that they had been driven away or forced to convert initially? Moreover, conflict did not at all stop with Zain-ul-abidin. Thus, Wajahat Habibullah points out that the term Kashmiriyat was "coined ... to project a common cultural heritage among Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims," thereby "papering over their religious and social dissimilarities" (24–25). Robert Huttenback observes that when political organizations arose in Kashmir they were not, initially, national but "were divided along strictly religious lines" (133). This suggests that perhaps Kashmiriyat was more of an ideological ideal than a practical, political reality. In keeping with this, Ghulam Khan points out, "Apparently the relations between the Hindus and the Muslims were very cordial and peaceful. But in fact there was a deep wave of suspicion, hostility and bitterness running at the bottom of their social relations" (31).

Rushdie, with his characteristic sensitivity to historical complexity, recognizes that the stories we tell about history involve selection and arrangement. We choose where to begin and where to end, what to see as characteristic and what to see as an exception. Thus, when communal violence spreads in the Kashmir Valley, the Hindus in Shalimar begin to question this myth of long-standing communal harmony (239). Nonetheless, Rushdie clearly wishes to maintain this myth of a lost Eden — an Eden that persisted even into the modern period.

Emplotting Modern Kashmiri History

This modern period is, of course, a period where the details of actual (rather than mythic) history matter as well, and it is important to overview a few of these before going on. For centuries, Kashmir was ruled, with greater or lesser incomprehension and exploitation, by non-Kashmiris. For purposes of the novel, the key transition point in this history came in 1846. The British took control of Kashmir, but did not desire to continue directly controlling the territory. They therefore sold it to a Hindu ruler, Gulab Singh, who had aided them at key points (see Akbar 57, 59). Despite this purchase, the maharajas were not entirely autonomous, particularly after 1889 (see Bamzai 626–31). Insofar as they were autonomous, Gulab Singh and his successors were not particularly enlightened rulers. This is evidenced by the fact that, in 1924, Muslims were agitating for, among other things, "abolition of forced labor and the restoration of all mosques seized by the state government" (Akbar 69).

Rushdie's story of the Noman and Kaul families begins during the reign of the Singhs. It is significant that this period is encompassed in Rushdie's romantic vision of the lost Eden. Part of that Eden is the panchayat system of local self-government in Indian villages, which was praised by writers such as Farooq Abdullah (son of the preeminent Kashmiri political leader, Sheikh Abdullah) as a way "to ensure the political participation of masses" (vii). Rushdie maintains this highly benevolent view through his representation of Pachigam's panchayat, with its multiethnic, multireligious membership (Muslim, Hindu, and Jewish [118]), its deep rationality and compassion (as shown by its decision regarding the interfaith marriage of the Hindu Boonyi and the Muslim Shalimar), and its healthy and productive relation to the society at large.

Here, too, Rushdie's account appears to have been overly positive. Riyaz Punjabi reports that panchayats were "comprised of the lower level functionaries of the Maharaja," which is to say, "village heads, landlords and other influential people" (37). Far from being autonomous, they "were manipulated by autocratic rulers" (38). Moreover, state manipulation of panchayats continued into the period of independence (42).

Why, then, is Rushdie adopting a romantic myth of a fall from paradise and why is he elevating the panchayat system? It seems unlikely that he is unaware of the complexities and contradictions in Hindu-Muslim relations in the past, since he explicitly notes that one might take communal conflict to be the norm and harmony to be the deviation (239). As to the governance system, it is possible that he simply thought too well of panchayats. But this, too, seems unlikely — if for no other reason than the deep naïveté of such a view. Rather, it seems that Rushdie is trying to create an effective story, and the story effect he wishes to produce is horror at the ongoing devastation of Kashmir. Virtually all politically engaged writers try to do something along these lines. Most do so by increasing the evil of the enemy, making them into demonic hordes that perpetrate unspeakable evil. That option is not open to Rushdie, whose humane view of the Kashmir conflict recognizes the humanity of the Indian soldiers and the militants, as well as that of civilians, and of Hindus and Sikhs, as well as that of Muslims. In order to communicate the hell of Kashmir today, he does not populate it with demons. Rather, he contrasts it with heaven.

Again, this happy view of Kashmiriyat is not simply made up. But it is highly selective. This sort of selection is part of the "emplotment" of history, which is to say, the creation of a story out of historical events. In such emplotment, it is not uncommon for historians and novelists to shape conflicting social tendencies by reference to a few weighty characters — for example, political leaders whose personal confrontations come to stand in for (and perhaps partially explain) larger social oppositions. In the case of modern Kashmir, this emplotment commonly involves two figures — Hari Singh and Sheikh Abdullah.

Singh was the maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir when India and Pakistan became independent from England. At the time of independence, there were many semi-independent, "princely" states, such as Kashmir. They had a choice of joining Pakistan or India. One would expect that a Muslim ruler of a predominantly Muslim state would opt for Pakistan, while the Hindu ruler of a predominantly Hindu state would opt for India. The complication in the case of Jammu and Kashmir was that Singh was Hindu, while Jammu and Kashmir was primarily Muslim, though with a significant Hindu minority.

Roughly two months after the birth of India and Pakistan, Hari Singh had not signed the articles of accession to either nation. At this time, an uprising occurred in western Kashmir (see Whitehead 46), followed by an invasion that included Pathan tribals. There was also Pakistani involvement (see Whitehead 51). M. J. Akbar reports that the militants followed "a trail of horror, raping and abducting women, looting, and murdering civilians" (106). Opinions differ on the extent of the violence (see Whitehead for a judicious consideration of the evidence), but in any case the destruction was considerable. For example, Andrew Whitehead refers to looting, rape, and abduction, as well as "Sikhs and Hindus ... killed in large numbers" (61). This armed challenge led Singh to accede to India, if with provisions for partial autonomy. Kashmiri nationalists have often remarked that the deal struck by Singh with the Indian government is not unrelated to the agreement struck by his ancestor with the British. In keeping with this, Whitehead observes that "at least in some parts of the Kashmir Valley, Indian troops were seen from the start as an occupying force" (184). (A striking literary expression of this view may be found in the poem "Our Heritage" by the Pakistani-Kashmiri writer Taos Banihali.)

These events are recalled in Shalimar. For dramatic effect, they are collapsed into a single night — the night Shalimar and Boonyi are born. This is, in effect, the moment when the new Kashmir is born, with the violence of the uprising, the accession to India, and the partition of Kashmir (since Pakistan retained control of part of western Kashmir). In other words, these events are what define the difference between the old Kashmir of (Shalimar's father) Abdullah and (Boonyi's father) Pyarelal, on the one hand, and the new Kashmir of their children on the other. Indeed, Boonyi's mother — the freest and most defiant spirit in the novel — cannot survive that night.

The mention of Abdullah leads us to the other weighty character in this political drama — Sheikh Abdullah. Sheikh Abdullah was the most popular leader in the valley. He was known for his progressive politics (e.g., with respect to land reform and women's rights) and his opposition to Muslim-Hindu communalism. His prominent role in the history of the valley — and his close, semiallegorical relation to Rushdie's character, Abdullah Noman — are articulated directly by Rushdie: "there were two lions in Kashmir. One was Sheikh Abdullah, of course, Sher-e-Kashmir [Lion of Kashmir] himself, the unquestioned leader of his people. Everyone agreed that Sheikh Abdullah was the valley's real prince, not that Dogra maharaja" (59).

Rushdie's account may simplify the historical record. For example, Chitralekha Zutshi argues that popular views of Abdullah and, even more, his National Conference party were more complex. Quoting the Kashmiri political activist Prem Nath Bazaz, she indicates that the National Conference's progressive program, articulated in Naya Kashmir (New Kashmir), was opportunistic. She maintains that it was an "attempt ... to boost [the party's] flagging popularity among Kashmiris" even at this early date (Naya Kashmir was set forth in 1944). She writes that "the National Conference regime was ... an installation of the Indian government." Indeed, "The National Conference regime systematically suppressed papers and periodicals that did not agree with Sheikh Abdullah," and even "promulgated an ordinance ... allowing for the arrest and summary trials of those suspected of pro-Pakistan leanings" (313; Habibullah presents a similar portrait of Abdullah's rule).

On the other hand, to represent Abdullah as too narrowly aligned with the Indian government would be misleading. He vacillated significantly in his relations with India over the years (a point discussed by Swami, among others). As Rushdie summarizes, the Indian government "kept putting ... Sheikh Abdullah ... in jail, then doing secret deals with him, then reinstalling him in power on the condition that he supported the union with India, then getting irritated all over again when he started talking about autonomy in spite of everything" (247). He presents a similar, if more consistent change in the character Abdullah Noman and his wife Firdaus: "Up to now they had tried to believe that their beloved Kashmiriness was best served by some kind of association with India. ... But now the mood had changed" (131).

The problem was that the initial accession had been premised on two conditions: first, the relative autonomy of Kashmir within India; second, the holding of a plebiscite to ascertain the people's will regarding the final disposition of the state (see Akbar 124; on the reiteration of the pledge guaranteeing a plebiscite, see Roy, "Seditious Nehru"). Over the years, autonomy was almost entirely eroded. (In Article 370, Noorani documents the process in detail; see also Bose, Kashmir.) Moreover, the possibility of a plebiscite became increasingly remote. Spontaneous popular discontent was almost inevitable, particularly in conditions where basic democracy was undermined (as happened repeatedly in Kashmir; see Bose, Kashmir). That discontent was exacerbated by the regional power rivalry of India and Pakistan, leading to Pakistani involvement in Kashmiri politics. Unsurprisingly, independence movements arose, some militant. Incidents such as the 1971 hijacking of an Indian airliner show the seriousness of these groups (see Malik 282).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080328859X
• ISBN 13: 9780803288591
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 294