Aditi Phadnis engages author Basharat Peer in a conversation about his book on Kashmir and on, well, Kashmir.
Basharat Peer was born in 1977. He must have been just a toddler when Sheikh Abdullah, in his famous “crown of thorns” speech in Iqbal Park, Srinagar in August 1981, gave his son Farooq to the people of Kashmir and dazzled by the roar of endorsement from Kashmiris, the younger Abdullah promised with characteristic bombast: “I will give my life before I play with the honour of this community (qaum).”
Peer is not old enough to have witnessed what was arguably a milestone in the history of Kashmir and is too well-trained a journalist to pass a value judgment on what Abdullah did at work and play. But his book — written in unadorned prose — does record What Happened in Kashmir.
For Peer, the story begins in the early 1990s, when young men began leaving Kashmir to study. Those with affluent parents went abroad; others, to universities in India. Life was not easy for a Kashmiri even then: the police were apt to detain you first and ask questions later if they came to know you were a Kashmiri. But in Aligarh, which is where he went to study, life was different. In Kashmir, he hadn’t really met people from other parts of the state — Sopore, Baramulla…In Aligarh he discovered how the state looked from outside Anantnag.
This is reflected in the book that Peer took four years to write. It is only too easy to get bogged down in cloying detail in the nostalgia of how wonderful life was back then. Peer’s childhood was crammed with Kashmiri activities — qahva, noonchai, the rawness of feeling when India won and Pakistan lost cricket matches, Ramzan and Id … But it is also about the Kashmiri out of Kashmir, looking at his home inside out.
Like all Indian middle class parents, his parents too wanted him to become a ‘suit’ of some description: a lawyer, better still a civil servant. But Peer wanted to write. A book, he told his parents, though what he needed to get out of his system was a novel. He chose non-fiction narrative to give it a sense of place.
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In 2006 he moved to New York, got a job and when he wasn’t working (sometimes, even when he was working), wrote. “Going away does help you,” he said. “When you’re there, you get a bird’s eye view. When you’re not there, you see it all in totality”. “It’s not a history book” he says of Curfewed Night, “but a book that deals with images”.
And images that Peer’s serious, clear but innocent eyes saw. It was time in our encounter, to pump up the music, ratchet up the tension a bit. Trying to sound brittle and artless, I argued that a lot of what Kashmir has gone through, the Kashmiris tend to bring upon themselves. With all that had happened to them why would they become accomplices in prostituting their own girls, their children, for instance? I was referring to the string of reports that came out two years ago about former ministers, bureaucrats and police officials, arrested on charges of peddling official favours for sex. This only strengthened the Islamist view that too much latitude was given to Muslim women in India.
The other end of the spectrum was so ridiculous as to be comic. Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan, a cleric in Saudi Arabia, called on women to wear a full veil, or niqab, that revealed only one eye. He said showing both eyes encouraged women to use eye make-up to look seductive. Lately embellishments on this theme have been available in Kashmir as well.
Peer, I could tell, was shocked by my crassness. “There may have been cases… poverty and desperation… people in power exploiting desperate women,” he said. His shoulders drooped: “It is just the old story being repeated.”
Thinking I’d hit too hard, I asked if there was a solution? “I’m not a solutions guy,” Peer said. “Ultimately it is public opinion, those most affected who have to decide. But one thing I know; it can’t be top down.”
Could a Truth and Reconciliation Commission help, I asked. “That could,” he said slowly, “but it’s difficult. Is society ready to live with it, look in the mirror? There’ve been failures of Kashmiri society, of the Kashmiri state, of the Indian state. I’m not sure if people are thinking about it.”
His summation of his book is sweet. “I’m facing my own ghosts (in the book). Whether it resolves everything, I don’t know”.
Be in peace, Peer. No one does.
CURFEWED NIGHT
Author: Basharat Peer
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 143
