The Life of a Kashmiri Woman

Dialectic of Resistance and Accommodation

N. Khan

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137463296
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la India y el sur de Asia

Capturing the history of Kashmir and its cultural and social evolution, Nyla Ali Kahn deconstructs the life of her grandmother and other women of her generation to reconceptualize woman's identity in a politically militarized zone. An academic memoir, this book succinctly brings together the history, politics, and culture of Kashmir.

1

Introduction: Filiation and Affiliation

Abstract: My personal reminiscences telling readers of people and events as I remember them adds the element of memoir to the narrative. Although the weaving of my personal voice into the narrative makes this work autobiographical, my memory and historical interpretation aid the act of writing political events and crises in the life of Akbar Jehan, which is very much the story of modern Kashmir.

Khan, Nyla Ali. The Life of a Kashmiri Woman: Dialectic of Resistance and Accommodation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137463296.0007.

I am not just retrospectively telling a life story, but my aim is to employ a theoretical perspective to better understand the position from which I write.

Through my previous and current work I attempt to recount a peregrination, which still continues, through the agency, volatility, conflict, politics, and history of becoming Kashmiri. I will not deny that I am also trying to make sense of a “personal intellectual trajectory” (Pederson 125). An important part of this work, for me, is the imperative situating of the female subject. It would be remiss of me to posit a hegemonic, North American, white middle-class feminist agenda as the reference point to gauge the import of other feminist concerns. On the contrary, I emphasize a politics of identity that would allow for the recuperation of the heterogeneous Kashmiri subject, which would undermine any attempt at homogenization.

Although I am wary of the construction of a monolithic “Kashmiri” female subject and well-aware of the restrictive politics of a homogenizing cultural nationalism, I do not wish to forestall the possibility of a unified subjectivity as the basis of nationalist politics. I acknowledge the political productivity of the construct of a unified subjectivity, while cautioning the reader against eliding specific, varied, and unique forms of agency deployed by Kashmiri women in times of relative calm, conflict, political turbulence, resurgence of nationalism, and internal critique not just of state-nationalism, but insurgent nationalism as well. Although every instance of the resurgence of nationalism in Kashmir has strategically employed the term “women” to further engender this category of subjects, I reiterate that there is no monolithic “Kashmiri woman.”

I trace my origin to the hegemonically defined “Third and First Worlds.” While I am filiated to the Valley of Kashmir in the State of Jammu and Kashmir (J & K), a unit in the Indian Union, I remain affiliated to the restoration of an autonomous Jammu and Kashmir. My move to the Mid-West complicated my already multilayered identity by adding one more layer to it: my affiliation with the South Asian diaspora in the United States. This affiliation, however, empowers me with an agency to inhabit a space that “slides both geographically and linguistically” (Warley 113). I am positioned in relation to my own class and cultural reality, my own history, which is one among many ways of relating to the past. I am also positioned in relation to my sensitivity to the slippery terrain of cultural traditions and to the questions and conflicts within them. My own struggle not just with the complicated notions of political subjectivity, regionalism, nationalism, but also with the effects of the homogenizing discourses of cultural and religious nationalism, my position as a Hanifi Sunni Muslim woman, and my diasporic position in the West further complicate my position. My concept of the political and sociocultural agency of Kashmiri women in contemporary society and my political interests and ambitions are shaped by how I see my past.

I have learned that a lot of the time cultural praxes exist independently of religious epistemologies. I have witnessed the militarization of the sociocultural fabric of Kashmir. I watch with remorse the clamping down of intellectual freedoms in Kashmir and the growing influence of bigoted elements in that polity. I am saddened by the shutting down of dissenting voices. I mourn the erosion of women’s activism in Kashmir by the reduction of their identities to grieving mother, martyr’s mother, or rape victim. I grieve the relegation of sane voices in civil society to the background. I am pained by the scathed psyches of women suffering psychosomatic illnesses in conflict zones. I question the reductive readings of diasporic positionalities in that society. But the despair and grief do not undermine my constant endeavors to make my diasporic self a politically powerful one.

As I write the biography of a Kashmiri woman, Akbar Jehan Abdullah, at a geographical and physical remove from my land of origin, the Valley of Kashmir, it is not the time or days of cornucopia, languid beauty, and mysticism of the Valley of Kashmir that haunt my memory, but the disintegration of that world and the subsequent dispossession and dislocation for some, which has had a profound impact on my subjectivity. My personal reminiscences telling readers of people and events as I remember them adds the element of memoir to the narrative. Although the weaving of my personal voice into the narrative makes this work auto/ biographical, as I note in the Preface, my memory and historical interpretation aid the act of writing political events and crises in the life of Akbar Jehan, which is very much the story of modern Kashmir. There are times, however, when I am wracked by nostalgia for a past when political repression, jeopardized cultural emancipation, bigotry breeding intolerance, militarization stunting growth were not even specks on the horizon. Perhaps, I speak from a position of privilege, which I examine in my work, previous and current.

To better fathom my nostalgia, I quote from Leila Ahmed’s memoir, A Border Passage, here. The groundbreaking work of Leila Ahmed, Professor of Women’s Studies and Religion at Harvard Divinity School, has influenced Muslim women scholars to critically engage with Islamic religious traditions and Islamic feminism. She writes

In the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, the classic master-poet of Sufism, the song of the reed is the metaphor for our human condition, haunted as we so often are by a vague sense of longing and of nostalgia, but nostalgia for we know not quite what. ... We too live our lives haunted by loss, we too, says Rumi, remember a condition of completeness that we once knew but have forgotten that we ever knew. The song of the reed and the music that haunts our lives is the music of loss, of loss and of remembrance. (5)

Is nostalgia a dangerous emotion? Removed from the economic depredations of my country of origin, will nostalgia lead me to romanticize a constructed Kashmiri past? Does physical distance from the ground realities of Kashmir cause the diasporic subject to see the narrative of Kashmir as either one of seamless normalcy or one of seamless atrocities and lamentations?

I began to analyze in my academic work the issues of autonomy, self-determination, integration, armed insurgency, counterinsurgency, and militarization in Kashmir in 2005. That was when I came to realize that it was absolutely necessary for me to look into my consciousness to understand the political and sociocultural perspectives that had been inscribed on it. I grew up in a world in which my parents, Suraiya and Mohammad Ali Matto, were fiercely proud of their cultural and linguistic heritage (despite the onslaught of an enlightenment modernity), and honored their Islamic heritage, faithfully observing religious practices, while maintaining unflagging conviction in a pluralistic polity.

My parents, with their reserved dignity, integrity, unassuming pride, and unabated love for Kashmir, have been my role models. They have always explicitly cherished their heritage, while keeping themselves at a distinct distance from those who seek to impose a History on the landscape of Kashmir. Now that I look back with insight, I see that my parents, although well-educated and well-read professionals, did not internalize colonial beliefs about the superiority of European civilization or biased notions about the “degraded” status of Kashmiri Muslims, who had emerged from the swamp of illiteracy, poverty, and bonded labor in the 1940s. Their unremitting loyalty to the land of their dreams and hopes, Kashmir, despite the post-1989 militarized ethos and rabidity of bigotry has validated my admiration for their integrity and open-mindedness. They did not jump either on the bandwagon of statism or ethno-religious nationalism.

Raised in Kashmir in the 1970s and the 1980s, I always knew that I, like my parents, would receive a substantial education and would have a professional life. I instinctively knew that they would protect me from the shackles of restrictive traditions and from the pigeonholes of modernity. My own wariness of statism, perhaps, stems from my mother’s fraught childhood and youth. Her father, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, reigned as Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir from 1948 to 1953.

When the pledge to hold a referendum in Jammu and Kashmir was not kept by the governments of India and Pakistan, his advocacy of the right of self-determination for the state led to his imprisonment. He was shuttled from one jail to another until 1972 and remained out of power until 1975. Despite tremendous changes in the world order, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah did not lose faith in the international system which was premised on Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination, post-World War 1. The Sheikh, I argue, sought self-determination for Jammu and Kashmir as a territorial unit, not as a Muslim nation. He wanted Kashmir to be an international polity. I posit that he perceived the evolution of Kashmiri nationalism in world-historical terms, as opposed to a domestic and local issue.

Her mother, my maternal grandmother, Akbar Jehan, supported her husband’s struggle and represented Srinagar and Anantnag constituencies of Jammu and Kashmir in the Indian parliament from 1977 to 1979 and from 1984 to 1989, respectively. It is paradoxical that although she was a determined political and social activist, “according to biographical-genealogical conventions, the (lives of the) fathers are known and largely accounted for, while the (lives of the) mothers are unknown, unrecorded, and, until relatively recently, little explored” (Beizer 3). Akbar Jehan was also the first president of the Jammu and Kashmir Red Cross Society from 1947 to 1951. But during her husband Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah’s incarceration, she had been burdened with the arduous task of raising five children in a politically repressive environment that sought to undo her husband’s mammoth political, cultural, legal attempts to restore the faith of Kashmiri society in itself.

Mother, perhaps unbeknownst to herself, had grown up with the fear of life’s tenuousness and an acceptance of the harsh demands of public life. It took her a while to realize that it is impossible to please everyone all the time, unless one willingly relinquishes one’s individuality. She has found, to her despair, unpalatable motives attributed to her parents and grotesque misinterpretations of their political, religious, and socioeconomic ideologies. So, she has learned that it is naive and detrimental to expect to have everyone comprehend what one says and attribute the right motives to one’s cause. But her faith in the “New Kashmir” that her father’s socialist agenda sought to fashion remains unshaken till now, despite the tribulations and upheavals that she has witnessed. She, like the rest of us, carries the burden of her own history.

After the rumblings and subsequent explosion of armed insurgency and counterinsurgency in Kashmir in 1989, a few of those organizations that advocated armed resistance to secure the right of self-determination for the people of Kashmir, in accordance with the United Nations Resolutions of April 21 and June 3, 1948, of March 14, 1950, and March 30, 1951, blamed the nationalist leader, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, for having, purportedly, succumbed to pressures brought on by the government of India in 1975. He had given the clarion call for Kashmiri nationalism. After 1975, the allegation leveled against the Sheikh was that he had, purportedly, capitulated to the insistence of the government of India to relinquish the struggle for autonomy or self-determination. It was a heart-rending period for Mother to see reductive readings of her father’s ideology and the attempted erasure of the political and sociocultural edifice of which he had been the primary architect. In one of those few and far between moments of unburdening herself, mother recalled that the Sheikh had remained clear headed about his political ideology during his time in internment and even until he breathed his last. All that while Akbar Jehan had stood like a rock beside him. Not once had she buckled under pressure or tried to weaken his resolve. Although mother maintains a tenacious bond with family, friends, and acquaintances, and laments the innocent loss of lives in Kashmir over the past two decades, the rhetoric of revolution spouted in the early 1990s had a different undercurrent for her. Connecting to this rhetoric, for her, entailed a much more complex negotiation than it did for most people in Kashmir at the time.

It would be relevant to mention that the partition of India in 1947 into the dominions of India and Pakistan along religious lines enabled divisive forces of violence and brutality to rip the common anti-colonial, cultural legacy to pieces.¹ At the time, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah harbored the mirage of an independent Jammu and Kashmir. But he believed, in the interests of expediency, that provisional accession to predominantly Hindu India was a better option than unconditional accession to predominantly Muslim Pakistan. He felt that the political voice and socioeconomic interests of Kashmiris would be greatly threatened and diminished by the plutocracy of Pakistan, which was predominantly feudal. The successful implementation of the land to the tiller program by the Sheikh Abdullah-led state government in Jammu and Kashmir would have been a pipe dream in a country like Pakistan, which was ruled by the feudal aristocracy.

The “defining moment in Jammu and Kashmir’s post-Indian independence history” came in 1950 when disenfranchised peasants “were freed from the shackles of landlords through a law that gave them ownership rights on the land they tilled. ... The sweeping land reforms under the Big Landed Estates Abolition Act passed on July 13, 1950, changed the complexion of Kashmiri society. The historical image of the emaciated local farmer in tatters, with sunken faces and listless eyes, toiling to fill the granaries of landlords changed overnight into one of a landowner who expected to benefit from the labor he had put in for generations” (Ahmed, F.). This program emphasized the necessity of abolishing exploitative landlordism without compensation and enfranchising tillers by granting them the lands they worked on. Many policy makers in the Indian subcontinent, political scientists, and economists have acknowledged the effectiveness and rigor of land reforms in Jammu and Kashmir.

A large part of Jammu and Kashmir, post-1947, is administered by India and a section by Pakistan. China annexed a segment of the land in 1962, through which it has built a road that links Tibet to Xiajiang (see Rahman 5–6). As I underline in my monograph on Kashmir, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan, the strategic location of Jammu and Kashmir renders it a covetous region for both India and Pakistan. The state borders on China and Afghanistan (Khan 7).

Before I proceed any further, it would be pertinent to briefly digress on the pluralistic polity of Jammu and Kashmir. The various ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups in Jammu & Kashmir, Kashmiri Muslims, Kashmiri Pandits, Dogra Hindus, Ladakhi Buddhists, and Shi’ite Muslims, comprise the pluralistic population of the state. According to the Census of India, 2001, Muslims constitute the predominant religious group of the state at 67.0%, Hindus at 29.6%, Sikhs at 2.23%, Buddhists at 1.16%, Christians at 0.14 %, and others form the remaining part. The reality of Kashmir was vacillating even in 1947, because the Sheikh tried to create unity where none existed. The disparate groups have been unable to nurture a shared cultural and historical legacy that would enable them to fashion a cultural alterity to that of the Indian or Pakistani nationalist ones. But due to the regional sentiments that are becoming increasingly religionized, the ideology and rhetoric of a shared cultural and historical past have been unable to garner public support and mobilization for reconstruction and nation-building. The signifiers of nationhood in Jammu and Kashmir, flag, anthem, and constitution, have thus far not been able to move beyond a nebulous nationalist self-imagining. Now more than ever, the three regions of the state are at daggers drawn about the future political configuration of the state. This doleful truth was forcefully brought home to me at several conferences held in India and the United States.

A group of Kashmiri Pandits, for example, advocates the creation of a separate homeland for its community within the Kashmir Valley. The predominantly Hindu province of Jammu sees its unbreachable assimilation into the Indian Union as the only way to safeguard its future. However, of the original six districts of Jammu, the three predominantly Muslim ones, Poonch, Rajouri, and Doda, would, in all likelihood, align themselves with the predominantly Muslim Kashmir Valley. In the Ladakh region of the state, predominantly Buddhist Leh, which has always been critical of the perceived discrimination against it, has zealously been demanding its political severance from the rest of the state and pushing its demand for Union Territory status within the Indian Union, where-as the predominantly Shi’ite Kargil district in the Ladakh region does not perceive a jeopardized cultural and linguistic identity and advocates retention of its political alignment with the rest of the state.

In 1989 several armed separatist groups that owed allegiance to Pakistan surfaced in the Kashmir Valley as well, and for them the Sheikh’s political ideology was anathema, which they sought to raze to the ground. There remains, however, a contingent in Kashmir that continues to believe in the efficacy of the Sheikh’s policies and apotheosizes him as the symbol of Kashmiri nationalism. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, anti-India sent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Filiation and Affiliation
• 2  Lineage and Coming into Her Own
• 3  Political and Social Activism
• 4  Perseverance in the Face of Political Persecution
• 5  Kashmir Conspiracy Case and World Opinion
• 6  Banishment and Trauma
• 7  Significance of Alliances and Shifting Balance of Power
• 8  Reminiscences of a Granddaughter of the Electoral Battle of 1977
• 9  Home and Hearth
• 10  End of an Era
• 11  I Witness That Faith Is the Legacy of Ones Upbringing
• 12  My Memories of Akbar Jehan: Orator, Parliamentarian, Woman of the Soil
• 13  A House Divided against Itself
• Conclusion
• Appendix: Reminiscences about Womens Agential Roles or Lack thereof, 1947
• Bibliography
• Index