A desolation called peace voices from kashmir

Anthropology Paper

Length: paper should be about 3 pages double-spaced, using Times 12-point or equivalent font with 1” margins.

The goal in this assignment is not to summarise the readings—rather, reflect on them and critically analyse. The essay should substantially address and cite ideas/material from the given readings. You will need to organize your thoughts into a coherent essay with an introductory paragraph that lays out your THESIS and main ideas that support it. You need to have a focused deep analysis on one topic and NOT a summary.

Prompt--

how has the Indian government continued to instill fear in the Kashmiris by militarisation? How has Modi contributed to it?

--what larger theoretical point do you see emerging from these readings, beyond their specifics?

--what questions do the readings/discussion leave you with?

Bouquet", and Flashback, which is the narrative history of Kashmir. Currently, he is finishing a book on peoples' history, of Kashmir.

NOTES

1 They are well-known Hurriyat Conference leaders. 2 Handoo, Bilal, 'Batamaloo Blaze', Kashmir Life, 10 August 2015,

http:/ /kashmirlife.net/batamaloo-blaze-issue-2 l-vol-07-2-83161 I (accessed on 6 July 2018).

3 See Bhan, M., H. Duschinski, and A. Zia, "Rebels of the Streets": Violence, Protest, and Freedom in Kashmir', in H. Duschinski, M. Bhan, A. Zia and C. Mahmood (eds), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

4 For more, see Mir, Farhat, 'Governor's Rule in Jammu and Kashmir: Residents recall Jagmohan Malhotra's 1990 reign with fear, horror', Firstpost, 2018. https:/ /www.firstpost.com/india/governors-rule- in-jammu-and-kashmir-residents-recall-j agmohan-malhotras- l 990- reign-with-fear-horror-4602271.html (accessed on 7 July 2018); also see Handoo, Bilal, 'He came as a nurse, but ... ,' The Free Press Kashmir, 2018, https:/ /freepresskashmir.com/2018/01 / 19/jagmohan- he-came-as-nurse-but/ (accessed on 7 July 2018).

5 See AIR 1953, J&K 25 Vol. 40, C.N.17.

4

Of Rooms and Resistance: Prisons, Protests, and Politics

in Kashmir Mona Bhan

I came of age in the 1990s, amidst curfews and crackdowns. Before the 1990s, the situation in Kashmir was by no means peaceful. Not for me, at least. In the 1950s and '60s, my maternal grandfather had spent five years in jail, fighting the tyrannical occupation of a land he loved intensely. Even though the rebellion that swept our land in the 1990s seemed 'erratic' to many, it had been long in the making. The Kashmir issue had divided India and Pakistan and made them bitter rivals. It had also divided my family.

In many ways ours was a conventional Kashmiri Pandit family. And yet my grandfather's politics set it apart from many others. My maternal grandparents lived in separate rooms. I saw them share a life, sometimes their joys and sorrows too, but the bitterness of the conflict and my grandfather's defiant role in it had taken a toll.

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My grandmother single-handedly raised her two children while my grandfather was in jail. Without an income and without much of a formal education, she led a difficult life, made more onerous by her husband's dogged stance on Kashmir.

When our friends or extended relations visited my grandparents, they would spend time in Badimami's (a term of endearment for my grandmother) room and only visited Papa, my grandfather, hesitantly. Even as a young child, it was clear to me that the boundaries between their rooms were no longer easy to cross. The politics of the past forty years had hardened those lines; Badimami, a strong and dignified woman, had to constantly defend her husband's politics while ignoring the slew of insults and offences fr6m her extended relatives. Papa stood by his principles, the only truth he knew and the one he died with.

For me, crossing those boundaries every day exposed me to two different worlds. In one, some of our bitter friends and relatives spoke grudgingly against Muslims for being hypocrites, for stealing medical or engineering seats that, in their view, belonged to us, the Pandits. Some chastised the Muslims for being ungrateful to India, despite its continued benevolence. In the other world, I read Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jonathan Swift and Premchand. The room was packed with books: the Quran and the Gita stacked on to each other. In this room, languages and worlds blended into each others as Papa could recited couplets in Farsi, which he knew well, and Sanskrit that he had taught himself during his prison stints.

The memory of the two rooms in the upper storey of our rented accommodation in Lal Chowk and the lines that separated them continue to haunt me. The Kashmir dispute had divided our family and its turmoil was etched on the doors and corridors of the house. The curse of a tortured and enslaved land had become our curse too. We couldn't rest in peace. There was no peace.

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There are other rooms and walls that speak of Kashmir's imprisoned history - in the 1950s and '60s, jails across the state, in Srinagar, Jammu, Udhampur and Reasi were filled with political prisoners. The memories persist; they circulate in the confines of Kashmiri homes, in spaces where they find room to live and breathe. There were rooms in our house where these memories had ceased to live. But in some nooks and crannies, between the tall and hefty stack of books and files. It is here that bits and pieces of Kashmir's history, the one we didn't read in school or in officially sanctioned textbooks, thrived. Little did I realize that Papa had struggled hard to build these spaces. It was not easy to keep the history of Kashmir's long political turmoil alive. After all, Kashmir's seductive image as a 'peaceful paradise' came strapped with bombs, bullets and bunkers.

After 1947 and till the mid-1980s Kashmir's peace was manufactured and greedily consumed through voyeuristic depictions of beauty and innocence in the Indian media. Kashmiri bodies were consumed too. Many Kashmiris languished in jails and the state routinely tortured people, physically and psychologically. In 1953, Papa was arrested and sent to a jail in Udhampur. After months of trying to set up a meeting with him, his wife and children were finally granted permission, seven months after he had been lifted off the streets of Suhayar, Safa Kadal, downtown Srinagar. It was December, during the peak of winter that Badimami with their seven-year-old son and nine-year-old daughter travelled to Udhampur for this meeting. They arrived late in the night in brutal cold and waited for Papa outside the prison's gate. Seeing their bedraggled state, Papa requested the warden to house them for the night and postpone the meeting to the next day. They returned to the prison for the meeting at 9.30 in the morning.

Papa writes in his prison diary that he could hardly pay attention to the struggles that his family had endured in the past six months, without any moral or financial support from their friends or

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relatives. On the veranda of the sub-jail where he was meeting them, his mind kept drifting towards the 'threatening patches of reddish clouds [that were] gathering in the sky.' In an impulsive moment, Papa instructed his wife and children to return to Srinagar in a mail bus that was scheduled to leave in a few hours.

For disputing Kashmir's accession to India, Papa was branded a Pakistani butta (Hindu/Pandit), a label that invited state surveillance and incarceration, in addition to ridicule from close friends and relatives. Unwilling to seek refuge in Jammu which was closer to Udhampur, or ask for favours from her embittered (relatives, Badimami, along with her son and daughter, agreed to return to Srinagar the same day, despite clear signs of ominous weather. Papa would often recount how several strands of his hair turned grey that night, as he felt responsible for plunging his family into a death trap. He didn't find a moment's peace until they safely arrived in Srinagar, two days after they had left Udhampur.

During his solitary confinement in the Reasi sub-jail in 1958, Papa's prison cell was a torture chamber. For at least six months, in the rancid air of an enclosed cell, he lived amidst an infestation of bees, snakes and scorpions. In his prison narrative, he writes that each time he was stung by a bee, it 'felt like the touch of a burning coal'. A severe bout of gastroenteritis that lasted several months turned his body frail. Before its torture trails became visible and hard to ignore after 1989, the Indian state had long exercised its brazen will over Kashmiri bodies inside the putrefied and anguished emptiness of prison cells.

Too many voices were suppressed; many people were brutally incarcerated or exiled from their homes, their resolve for demanding Kashmir's political settlement broken, or co-opted. In the 1950s and the '60s, such was the state of Indian democracy in Kashmir that people were either sentenced to solitary confinement for resisting the suppression of their rights and sentiments or, on the whims of a

police officer, exiled and banished to Pakistan, without the slightest hope of ever being reunited with their families.

In one of his journal entries from the 1950s, Papa writes that 'Kashmiri freedom fighters were lifted during the darkness of the night and kicked into dark cells without knowing the grounds of their imprisonment. Orders of arrest of the National Conference (NC) opponents, mainly Muslim Conference workers and any other political bigwigs who did not see eye to eye with the NC were issued from the headquarters. The jail officers unquestioningly obeyed to put the arrested person behind the prison gates. But there were other methods of terror and fear, which the NC volunteers were allowed to resort to in order to see the silence of the grave did not suffer any vibration on account of dissent or political difference with the powers that held the sway. The local media was thoroughly gagged.'

The armed rebellion of the 1990s ushered in a new phase in Kashmir's resistance against Indian rule. I saw it enacted on the keyboard of an old and rusty typewriter, day after day. I remember Papa waking up very early in the mornings - sometimes before the crack of dawn - to write. Often he would me to read the typed version out loud. I was happiest when I could point out typos in the text or lines that he might have skipped while typing. After collating and organizing the sheets of paper, he would walk to the post office, a few miles from the house, to mail it to people he thought could weigh in on Kashmir: Indian and Pakistani ministers; national and international leaders, diplomats, writers, activists and scholars. This was part of his everyday routine and my starkest childhood memories are of him sitting in his chair, in front of his typewriter, either reading or writing while sifting through the stacks of documents that cluttered his table. Recently, a colleague of his from the Political Conference said to me: 'Pt Vaishnavi ki kalam bahut cha/ti thi' (a remark on his prolific writing). His pen, his typewriter, faded words

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on yellowed paper, frayed edges of newspaper articles, loose sheets of paper with finished and unfinished sentences that filled his room form the bulk of my memory, my history.

I came of age in other rooms too; rooms that filled my life with love, laughter and friendship. Rooms in which I learnt discipline and also learnt to contest it if it was stifling. The neatly arranged rows of wooden tables and chairs in our classroom, located on the second storey of our school in Srinagar, seemed unusually empty after our three-month winter vacation in 1990. The room seemed stark despite the warm rays of the spring sun that filteretl through the tall glass windows. In hushed whispers, we discussed our missing Pandit friends and classmates. Nobody seemed to know how long they would be gone. Occasionally, the hush of our whispers was interrupted by loud and sonorous slogans of 'Hum kya chahtay, azadi, 'which filled the narrow street outside our school. On normal days, the street was filled with gol-gappa, cotton candy and ice cream vendors, who, at the end of school day, were thronged by groups of young students. But now calls for freedom (azadi) overwhelmed the street. We guessed that a large group of boys from our neighbouring school had gathered outside and were waiting for us to join the protest march.

With bated breath, we waited for our next move. The teacher hadn't arrived yet. In the meantime, a senior student walked into our classroom. She instructed us to assemble downstairs, where several girls from our school had gathered to join the angry and defiant young boys, who were bravely marching the streets of Srinagar city. Our teacher walked in as we prepared to leave the room. After she had failed to convince us to stay indoors, she angrily bolted the door from the inside. A classmate of mine opened the door and walked out. Most of us followed suit.

I was drawn to participate in Kashmir's freedom rallies. There was revolution in the air of a kind that I had only read about in

OF ROOMS AND RESISTANCE 9 1

books. It was a heady mix of hope, excitement and anticipation for a future in which Kashmir could decide its destiny, In the school compound, hundreds of young girls chanted the slogan in sync with the boys who were still waiting outside the gate. The synchronous calls for azadi filled the space, forcing our principal to come out of her office. She ordered us to gather in the basketball field, chiding us to stay inside, safely ensconced within the sturdy walls of our school. We were asked to write an essay on azadi instead of marching for it. But the walls had lost their strength. They could no longer hold us back. Hundreds of girls, ranging from thirteen to eighteen, stared her in the face. In that moment of deep uncertainty, as we readied to march on the streets, the veil became a symbol of resistance, offering us courage but .also anonymity. Like my peers, I covered my face with a long scarf revealing only my eyes. And I got up to muster enough courage and respond: 'We will write an essay on azadi when we get it.' There was tremendous applause from my peers. An unending stream of slogans followed. In no time, we were out on the streets with our school bags positioned on our backs to protect us from the sting of military batons, in case we were fated to experience them that day.

After exiting from the narrow street, we arrived on the main street in Lal Chowk, a space heavily fortified by India's security forces. The CRPF, outfitted in riot gear, barricaded the street. Their trucks loaded with guns and armour were stationed in the middle of the road to prevent students from marching forward. With batons in their right hands and defence shields in their left, the soldiers waited for the slightest provocation to come after us. The Jammu and Kashmir police, sympathetic to our cause, tried to form a loose ring to shield us. But many of us, driven by the desire to taste freedom, found the shield too constraining. We were ready to reclaim the streets as young Kashmiri women, fearlessly expressing our aspirations for freedom. I had long resented the indignities of

....l

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being subjected to the gaze of soldiers who would randomly stop public buses, force all the men and young boys to get off and walk several hundred feet. Simultaneously, a few armed men would enter the bus to search for hidden weapons. The slight winking of the eye, a sexually charged gesture emboldened by an outright difference in power, or endless questions of what I carried in my school bag were routine.

On this day, it was Rabia, my feisty classmate, who took the first step to express her sedimented rage. She defiantly broke the ring, walked towards a military vehicle and started chanting slogans for azadi. In no time, the situation turned chaotic and we saw a bunch of soldiers charging towards us with their batons. The scattered group of girls ran for cover. A bunch of us sprinted towards the bund, a picturesque lane by the Jhelum, famous for its fancy clothing and handicrafts stores. Those days, shopkeepers would routinely keep their shutters half-open and close them immediately after students sought shelter from the military during student-led protests. We ran into a store and sat huddled in a corner behind closed shutters. After the usual antics of marching and hiding from the military in half-shuttered shops, I, along with some of my friends, went back to school, tired but not defeated. At home that night, I nervously called my friends to ask about Rabia. To my utter dismay, I heard she lay unconscious in the biggest bone and joint hospital in the city.

Those were strange times. We attended school sparingly. On most curfewed days, we played cricket in our neighbour's yard or stole apples from nearby orchards. My friends and I knew that our familiar world was collapsing. There were killings every day, shootings, encounters and crackdowns. Kashmiris had to quickly learn an entirely new vocabulary to grasp the dramatic events of the times. Strangely enough, our games too became morbid. Routinely, my friends and I played spirit of the coin, enjoining

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spmts and djinns to share our moments of distress; often, we called them to solicit their perspectives on the names of killers when too much uncertainty surrounded the events of the day. When unidentified gunmen killed Moulvi Farooq, the religious head of Kashmir, the mystery consumed everyone. My parents and our neighbours played the speculation game, sometimes blaming the government forces and at other times holding the armed rebels responsible for the killing. But my friends and I wasted no time. We asked the spirits of the dead, the jinn, to settle the query. We then ran excitedly to the backyard where our neighbours had gathered for their afternoon tea, to contribute our unsolicited opinion. In a war zone, where too many organizations, too many agents were hired purposefully to create chaos, turning to spirits for clarity was our only hope.

By the early 1990s, most of my Pandit relatives, friends and neighbours had left the Valley. Our neighbourhood, like many others in Kashmir, wore a deserted look. Caged inside the Pandits' empty and abandoned homes were memories of our childhood. I spent most of this time with my remaining friends, family and the helpful jinn. Despite the mayhem that engulfed us and the sudden departure of Pandits from the Valley, I wanted to stay in Kashmir where the ongoing war had collapsed the distance between life and death, the living and the dead. As a young teenager, I had desired other places - places that made it to the national news. Kashmir never did. It never felt important. Perhaps other teenagers experience the same emotion of feeling trapped in a place that seems static, unchanging. Papa's stories of resistance seemed from a distant time and place. During those years, the numbing effects of an enforced calm were hard to see but much easier to experience. I wanted to always see the other world, one where time moved and things happened. And while I lamented the non-passing of time, it was moving faster than any of us could anticipate.

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Despite the seemingly slow and laboured passage of time, Kashmir gave me an abundance oflove and hope. When I didn't live with Papa and Badimami in the city, I spent time with my parents in locations across the Valley. My mom's patient in Pulwama, roughly my grandfather's age, brought me chicken and roti every Saturday. I always gobbled it up so greedily that it lit up his deeply wrinkled face. In the villages, I enjoyed the freedom to explore and learn from friends who knew the best spots for fun and play. Weather permitting, they would shed their clothes without inhibition and swim in the river, effortlessly.

In Tral, where my parents were posted for several years, I often thronged the streets with my friends Nasreen, Rosy, Kaki and Minu, looking for candy or maatam pheal. Unlike the sweets I bought at my school canteen in Srinagar, these came without a cover and in motley colours. I loved accompanying my friends to the local fair on Eid-ul-Fitr to buy cheap jewellery and trinkets. I still have a picture of the five of us dressed up in our finest clothes, taken in a village studio. I am in a new outfit, imprinted with light blue almonds that stand out against the deep blue background of my sleeveless dress. My friends are in their newly stitched salwar-kameezes. Our outfits fail to hide differences of class and wealth, but the games we played and the reckless fun we had often trumped such distinctions.

Our differences did not vanish entirely, though. For instance, I was once invited to attend a class in the village school where students sat on the Boor on dirty and tattered mats. After brief introductions, the teacher shoved me in front of the classroom. I was instructed to teach my peers the hackneyed essay on 'cows', an essay that most kids in India are forced to memorize. I was happy that my friends didn't seem too bothered to see me flaunt my English-medium education. Soon after, my friends made it clear to me that my Kashmiri sounded like pairim (a foreign language) and Minu, the youngest of the lot,

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was assigned the task of teaching me 'better accented' Kashmiri. Such moments of mutual embarrassment ~ere rare. For the most part, we were too engrossed in our games, many of which, like cricket, we played with competitive zeal, attempting to mimic the high-intensity that was routinely on display during cricket matches between India and Pakistan. We also played adolescent games in which I would pretend to be Rosy's coy wife, who, in turn, played the part of a doting husband exceedingly well.

Only in the village could I play such games. The missionary school in the city had socialized us differently and such naive plays would be severely discouraged. Even though the school organized treks and camps across the Valley to instil in us a spirit of curiosity and adventure, the Victorian legacy to groom us into 'ladies' remained: when we were six or seven, the school staff regularly assembled us in the prayer hall and, one by one, our female teachers would lift our tunics to confirm whether or not we wore underpants. Not wearing one would invite punishment from teachers and days of ridicule from classmates.

In 1988, for the first time in their medical careers, my parents were posted to Srinagar. For me, it meant being confined to the city, where I could no longer bathe in running rivers or paint my hands red with the colour of raw walnuts. But not long afterwards the mood in the city changed too. The events of the 1990s, scary, chaotic and uncertain as they seemed, were strangely also about new beginnings. It was a new revolution. A long night filled with deceit and collaboration had passed, and Kashmir awaited its new dawn. I too hoped for Kashmir's just future, a future where the thin veneer of 'Kashmiriyat' would peel away to make way for truth, trust and solidarity; where garlic and asafoetida would lend their distinct flavours to Kashmiri food without being persistently othered; where difference would be embraced and encouraged and not just

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tolerated. 1 Sadly, the situation on the ground looked altogether different. The empty rhetoric of Kashmiriyat was shred to pieces, only to be replaced by even more vicious narratives and counter- narratives in which Kashmiri Pandits (KPs) and Kashmiri Muslims (KMs) were now pitted against each other as the worst of enemies. By the mid-1990s, the horrific killings ofKashmiris made front-page news every day. There were raids and killings by Kashmiri rebels. But many Kashmiris were killed while crossing the LoC, and many died fighting for freedom or in violent raids and encounters by the Indian Army. Young men were shoved into prisons indefinitely and without trial, while mothers and wives awaited the news of their disappeared sons and husbands.

In the meantime, in wretched rooms and makeshift tents in Jammu and Udhampur, which now housed many Kashmiri Pandits, the sun blazed viciously. It melted people's pride and identities. For many, the indignities of survival in unfamiliar places, where they were unwelcome strangers, was too much to bear. Most died without ever returning to their homes. A future of justice and dignity became even bleaker as the politics between KPs and KMs turned venomous.

The venom was everywhere, but it was soaked up most rapidly by young boys and girls who grew up elsewhere, estranged from their homelands. The violent disconnection between a place and people was hard to suture. It affected everything - even the food we ate carried the venomous hint of politics. In Kashmir, during Shivratri, the smell of my grandmother's fish and nadru (lotus stems) used to waft through the corridors of the house days after the festivities were over. We couldn't warm the leftover fish. There were strict rules of eating it cold. In Udhampur, where my parents were posted for six years in the 1990s, the urgencies of drawing stricter boundaries between Hindus and Muslims consumed

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everyone. Our Pandit kin and neighbours routinely discussed the sanctity of eating fish on a Hindu religious festival. Posters emblazoned with the words 'Garv se kaho hum Hindu hain,' ('Proudly claim that we are Hindus') summed up the politics of the 1990s. The right-wing conservative politics in India had made inroads into Kashmir too. It was framed as a palliative to the emasculated politics of secular India.

But even before the 1990s, the state had played its part in turning people against each other. It had used surreptitious ways to induct people into its intelligence network. A year or so before the start of the armed rebellion, my mother worked in a major hospital in the city where, in addition to her medical duties, she performed a variety of administrative tasks. One day, a Kashmiri Muslim man of medium height and build walked into her office, introducing himself as someone who had worked with the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) during her posting in Pulwama as a block medical officer. She barely recognized him although the face, she claims, seemed familiar. At the time, his association with the CID did not concern her much, perhaps because the days when the CID officials actively tracked her father and the rest of the family had passed. She might have briefly wondered about the reason for his visit. But her curiosity was drowned out by the idle chatter about her glorious days in Pulwama and the challenges of working in a city hospital.

In recent months, my mother had been dealing with a number of disciplinary issues: after 6.00 p.m., outsiders would assemble inside the hospital to gamble, and patients and staff often complained about the noise and ruckus in the night. On hearing her complain, the man asked her if she could provide him this kind of information on a weekly basis and help the department rout out miscreant elements from the city. He also assured her that she would be paid two

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thousand rupees a month for the task. If the quality and consistency of her work exceeded their expectations, she could earn even more. My mother was puzzled. Sensing her hesitance, he assured her of his credentials. He now worked for the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), he said. He had moved up in life. Mom didn't know much about the RAW then and had heard the name only in passing. But because the idea of being paid by an external organization made her uncomfortable, she politely rejected his offer.

I was sitting in Papa's room when she came home that day. Over tea, she casually described her meeting with the agent. Papa was staring at the tea kettle but at the mention of RAW he looked up, alarmed. 'I hope you said no to him,' he said nervously. I did not fully understand the dangers of the seemingly innocuous offer, but a brief lesson on RAW convinced me that Mom had done the right thing.

In less than a year, the situation changed dramatically. Lives were taken; lives were lost. Some were mukhbirs (informers), some were not; perhaps some were unwittingly so. Nothing seemed certain although one thing was obvious: the state had long spun a web of deceit and paranoia to ensnare Kashmiris, both Pandits and Muslims, civilians and otherwise, and use them as mukhbirs/inforrners against each other. Many Kashmiris were unwittingly made surrogates of the state. My mom was saved. Others weren't as fortunate.

Indeed, state paranoia had a long history in Kashmir. The state cultivated suspicion to tear communities apart. But it also feared those who refused to act as state surrogates - those who wrote. And those who dared to speak.

Recently, a historian friend emailed me two documents that she came across during her archival research in Srinagar. One was the government's letter to the assistant superintendent of police (ASP), CID, a letter written in response to Badimami's request to

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start a newspaper, the Kashmir Humanist. 1?is request came soon after Papa's Urdu newspaper, jamhoor, was banned in 1952 for its anti-NC reporting only a few months after it was launched. The government had instructed the ASP (CID) to check Mrs Vaishnavi's credentials in order to determine whether or not she was a suitable candidate to run the paper. The ASP (CID)'s letter is worth quoting at length: 'The applicant is reported to be the wife of Rughonath Vaishnavi, an advocate of Srinagar. The lady is not much qualified but knows Hindi. She has not come to our notice for any subversive activity. Her husband . . . has been contributing articles to the ]amhoor criticizing the government.'

Nothing about this letter seems dramatic; nothing is out of the ordinary. Perhaps it is the routinized nature of this exchange that I find deeply troubling, the ease with which allegations of subversion were levelled against people to silence their views and crush their non-violent dissent. People who refused to collaborate were constantly tracked and monitored. During one of Papa's prison stints, a CID lurked in the shadows of his rented accommodation on Residency Road, right across from the white house that is now enclosed in a shopping complex. Badimami nabbed him one night and asked him to leave at once, reminding him that her household had nothing to hide because whatever her husband believed was known to all. There was nothing in the house for him, only books and papers.

Papa died in Udhampur in 1996, in his daughter's medical quarter, which was located right across from the jail in which he had spent many lonely months in 1953. On our long walks, he would stare at the jail, hoping that the walls and chains that had long stifled Kashmir's history would someday crumble and fall apart.

This is yet to happen. So, the resistance for azadi continues.

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Dr Mona Bhan is associate professor of anthropology at DePauw University, Indiana, and co-editor of Himalaya, the journal of the Association of Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Bhan is a political and environmental anthropologist. Bhan is the author of Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare?, and is the co-author of Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene and Resisting Occupation in Kashmir. She is a founder member of the Critical Kashmir Studies Collective.

NOTES

Asafoetida (heeng) was exclusively used in Pandit cuisine while Muslims used garlic. Thus, the two condiments represented the mutual otherness of the two communities [editors].

5

The Calm and Early Signs of Conflict

Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal

BRIGHT flowery printed salwar-kameez on her slightly plump frame, black Bata school shoes, and plaited, oiled, jet-black hair that ended in blood-red, thick nylon ribbons, dilated pupils, slurring lips slightly frothy, twigs in hand- this image of Suraiya is one of the most defining ones from my childhood in Jammu. Children were intimidated by her presence, and some pelted stones from behind as she trudged from her three-storey red-brick house in Dalpatian locality towards the junction between Karbala Grounds and Wazarat Road. She would chase the kids, shout incomprehensible gibberish and return to collecting twigs, stopping people, or letting them pass only if they gave her a stick. Suraiya kept chasing children, shouting and collecting twigs till her grey-haired mother came to take her home. Mostly, Suraiya would return with one of her shoes lost, a ribbon undone and sometimes with a bleeding wound.

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