Here are 10 Books to understand the Kashmir Conflict by Kashmiri Authors
Originally published at merrative.com
Heaven on Earth as they say, but not for the residents it ain’t. Even though Kashmir’s mesmerising beauty is a boon for the tourism industry, its decade-long conflict has made it difficult for its citizens to find their identity, families, justice, and dignity in their own country.
Honestly speaking, being a student, when I heard about Jammu & Kashmir being on lockdown in 2019, I was disturbed. I couldn’t understand transparently what the conflict was all about and why some people living there had different views on our country. What was the reason that the government had to take such drastic steps? Living in the 20th century, the media now is so much accessible than before, and as a result, it’s difficult to understand whether the information we get, is true or not. I got so confused. I wondered what’s the actual story behind Kashmir and what is its other side.
If the #BlackLivesMatter movement has taught us something then, we must also initiate ourselves individually to understand the deepest narrative of neglected minorities in our country. There’s so much injustice going on, and it is imperative to have the right understanding from the roots to give them the voice they need before it’s too late.
Here are some books to get a broad view on Kashmir through a Kashmiri’s perspective :
1. Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer
“Srinagar is a medieval city dying in a modern war. It is empty streets, locked shops, angry soldiers and boys with stones.”
This memoir depicts the heartbreaking accounts of Kashmir in the 1990s through the eyes of a Kashmiri Muslim. Peer recounts his adolescence when Kashmir’s separatist insurgency erupted in 1989, followed by the youth’s fascination towards terrorism, and the eventual angry, violent Kashmir, it grows to become.
The Guardian reviews :
“Curfewed Night is filled with many such finely judged details, which quietly detonate on the page.”
Available at: Amazon
2. Our Moon Has Blood Clots by Rahul Pandita
“For most of us, Kashmir means a calendar hanging in our parents’ bedroom, or a mutton dish cooked in the traditional way on Shivratri, or a cousin’s marriage that the elders insist must be solemnized in Jammu.”
If you finish reading Curfewed Night, then this book should be next on your list or vice versa. This is a recommended read on our community as well.
Our Moon has Blood Clots is a gut-wrenching narrative of the author’s life since the 1990s. Rahul Pandita hailing from the community of Kashmiri Pandits sheds light on the exodus of the Hindu minority within a Muslim majority Kashmir that was becoming increasingly agitated with the cries of ‘Azadi’ (freedom) from India.
This memoir is an untold, least-spoken story of the most tragic yet important events that have occurred in the history of Kashmir.
The Hindustan Times reviews:
Perhaps it was the memory of a visit in the mid-nineties to a crowded Pandit transit camp in Andheri East, Mumbai, that made you flip through the first few pages — pages so strong that you keep reading — and arrive at a nuanced understanding of a people in the unenviable position of having been victimised by a more powerful victim.
Available at: Amazon
3. The Half Mother by Shahnaz Bashir
“In this strife-torn valley, I have always been tormented by feelings of indefinite and eternal uncertainty. “The Half Mother” is an outcome of those feelings.”
Haleema has fallen a victim to the aftermath of the “missing people” in Kashmir when her father Ghulam Rasool Joo and son Imran are picked up by authorities. The Half Mother, amidst the chaos, visits torture camps, jails and morgues to avoid her worst fears come true when she realises that she’s just a fish in a sea of the same fate.
The Hindu reviews:
“The novel has those unique strengths so missing in our fiction these days: a sense of location, Kashmir; a sense of inner lives of some of our most neglected people.”
Available at: Amazon
4. A Long Dream of Home by Siddhartha Gigoo and Varad Sharma
“And the tunnel became the tunnel of forgetfulness, not just for him, but countless other elders who were leaving Kashmir for unknown places for the first time in their lives.”
This book spotlights the displaced migrant Kashmiri Pandits who had to move away from their home in the wake of the armed insurgency, through a collection of memoirs. The authors have narrated memoirs of four different generations; those who were born and brought up in Kashmir, those who stayed back in their homes in Kashmir, those who got displaced in their teens, and those who were born in migrant camps in exile. With the restless love for their homeland, this novel makes you feel the pain the Kashmiri Pandits had and are still going through.
The DNA reviews:
“A significant testimony of a community that has been ignored by many state and central governments, the book features haunting memoirs of three generations of Pandits and is divided into four sections.”
Available at: Amazon
5. The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed
“ The dusk here does not arrive on the shoulders of golden sunsets any more, but on the heels of long, encroaching shadows of untraceable trees in the distance, gloomy parallel patterns that cascade over the undulating landscape of unevenly dispersed corpses and other things.”
This international bestseller is a devastating story of a young boy from a village close to the Pakistan border called Nowgam. He is forcefully made to collaborate with the Indian Army to count the corpses in the valley.
The story bleeds blood through the eyes of this teenage boy who fears each day, that he will find one of his friends lying among the dead.
The Guardian reviews:
“Waheed is too subtle a writer to draw an explicit connection between the isolation of the 19-year-old and the isolation of Kashmir as it enters the third decade of a war forgotten or distorted by the rest of the world, but the boy’s situation can’t help but reverberate beyond his individual story.”
Available at: Amazon
6. Future Tense by Nitasha Kaul
Recently published, Future Tense is a cross over of three different paths of Kashmiris in the present era.
Fayaz, the son of a former militant whose marriage with his wife Zeenat is under rocks.
Imran, Fayaz’s nephew who hopes to join a new kind of spectacular resistance.
Shireen, the granddaughter of a spy, finds how her family inheritance is intertwined with the history of Kashmir.
The Hindu reviews:
“Kaul’s depiction of contemporary Kashmir and its troubles is affecting and detached by turns.”
Available at: Amazon
7. Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir by Malik Sajad
“There was once a kid who grew up in war, who thought that the end of the battle was only a few months away.”
Munnu is an impressive graphic novel by Malik Sajad which highlights contemporary Kashmir through the perspective of a young boy named Munnu. Munnu, the youngest of the four, loves two things the most — sugar and art.
This important novel consists of beautifully drawn graphics, some based on Malik’s own life instances and leave you with a heavy-heart metaphor in the end.
Independent reviews:
“The author brings his experience to Munnu in fruitful ways; a nuanced reflection of the politics of life under occupation, though the novel does take the side of the Kashmiris who deal with daily brutality and restriction.”
Available at: Amazon
8. Gul Gulshan Gulfam by Pran Kishore, Shafi Shauq (Translator)
A revival of the TV series, Gul, Gulshan, and Gulfam are the three houseboats of Malla Khaliq on Dal Lake, who despite the ongoing ‘90s tumult in Kashmir, is optimistic that his business is going to survive and lift one day. Whereas, his three sons don’t share the same optimism and each has their own ways to curb their delusional hopes of the future.
Kishore takes you on a tour in Srinagar, its people, culture, the good memories of Dal Lake, and ambitions with this touching story.
The Millenium Post reviews:
“As much as this story is a delight to read for its presentations of Kashmir in all its splendour, darkness, gloom, and glee, it must be acknowledged that this is a brilliant translation, and to a reader alien to Kashmir, Kashmiri ways and language, it is like walking into an ornate houseboat!”
Available at: Amazon
9. The Night of Broken Glass by Feroz Rather
“And how dare you think of paradise when Kashmir still exists on earth. Why the fuck don’t you understand that the occupation itself is the deepest circle of hell and there is no hell beyond it”
The Night of Broken Glass is a poignant collection of thirteen intertwined short stories that reflect the repurcussions of the ’90s insurgency on the inhabitants through fiction.
Firoz Rather has vividly portrayed the mental aftermath of the natives; the lack of humanity, the brutal loss of the dear ones — Showkat, who is made to wipe off graffiti on the wall of his shop with his tongue; the love story of Rosy, a progressive, jeans-wearing ‘upper-caste’ girl and a ‘lower-caste’ Jamshid; Jamshid’s father Gulam, who never finds his son’s body; even the barbaric Major S, who has to live with his own internal chaos.
The Hindu reviews:
“Rather’s lyricism evokes the scarred landscape beautifully. His sense of place is so strong, it reminded me of Banville and Nabokov.”
Available at: Amazon
10. The Book Of Gold Leaves by Mirza Waheed
“There are a thousand quiet heartbreaks, amid the loud ones that we hear about. She sometimes thinks. Some carry on quietly, over a lifetime.”
Waheed takes us away again with a love story of two young souls in a war-scarred Kashmir.
Roohi, a beautiful and courageous girl falls in love with Faiz, a young paper-mâché artist who is on the cusp of painting his masterpiece. But in a time of war and rebellion, Srinagar, where they were destined to meet, erupts in violence, making the two lovers’ fate and everything valuable vulnerable.
The Guardian reviews:
“The effect of this tense novel is cumulative, its sense of dread rising until the nightmarish finale; a communal outpouring of grief in which Waheed locates an incredible defiance.”
Available at: Amazon
