Poetry, they say, speaks the language of the heart. Of love and hope, of loss and grief. And anger and resistance. In the frozen valley of Kashmir, where the Jhelum and the chinars wait for spring, woman writers are channelling their emotions into words and verses, echoing the mood of Kashmiris caught in a time warp. Verses of hope of a new dawn. Angry words that cut through the silence in the Valley. These writers are painting their pain and pathos on a broad canvas with dark, bold strokes of the pen.
Most Kashmiris felt a sense of betrayal after Jammu and Kashmir lost its semi-autonomy and statehood and was sliced into two Union territories in August, 2019. A months-long communication black-out, which was (partially) lifted only recently, and the preventive detention of hundreds of people across the Valley only added to the despair and gloom.
Every day while
going to school
the unknown voices
from the concrete bunker
would tease us with
Bollywood songs
and sordid songs
Today when I,
my eyes, my bosom
my dreams, desires
and my entire being
are porous by their pellets
I spend my time
On lonely hospital bed
Making some sense
of songs and sounds
—Hina Khan
For Hina Khan, a Srinagar-based poet and translator, survival seemed more important than everything else since the abrogation of Article 370 last year. She thinks that her multiple identities—that of a Kashmiri, a poet and a professional—“all evaporated from the surface of conscience” and “survival as a human being appeared to be the most important job at hand”. Survive to tell the tale, perhaps. She ended up writing A Letter, a poem that speaks about “avalanches of despair” in a “valley of surplus gloom”.
“They (the Centre) stripped us of all that we ever identified with. When you lose your identity that is when poetry shelters you in the warmth of its cadence,” says Hina, who uses the nom de guerre Rumuz for her literary work. “Nothing makes sense if you are shown how powerless you are.” Hina feels that the relationship between Srinagar and Delhi is fundamentally an asymmetrical power struggle.
Revealing their star-faces, to us by the evenings — Where did they go?
Dazzling the hearts of this light-starved city — Where did they go?
Those snatched by the bullets, are safe in their graves
Sleeping those were, by their mother’s side — Where did they go?)
—Nighat Sahiba
Over the centuries, woman writers of Kashmir have produced some memorable work, both in prose and poetry. The contemporary writers are more nuanced, their writings often layered with metaphors and imageries that convey Kashmir and Kashmiris’ tales even more effectively. Some of these writers, including Dr Nitasha Kaul, Ather Zia, Uzma Falak, Mona Bhan, Insha Malik, Nighat Sahiba, Dr Rumana Makhdoomi, Anjum Zamrood Habib and Hina Khan, and others have been writing about Kashmir in their novels, books, poems, memoirs, and songs. Some of them are based in Kashmir, some live and work in distant Europe and the United States.
“Voices of women are no longer supplementing men’s voices, but are individual and pivotal in their own right,” says Ather Zia, a US-based Kashmiri academic, writer and poet. “Kashmiri women have never been away from political travails—they have lived and taken part in it equally. It is heartening to see Kashmiri women today in the footsteps of their foremothers doing what is the need of the moment, which is to speak truth to power.” She adds that earlier, “not being literate, most Kashmiri women supplemented the struggle by taking part in protests and helping men, as of now they use the tools of writing and speaking to speak truth to power in their individual capacity and that can only grow.”
An assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Northern Colorado, her latest book is Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir. “It is written in a storytelling format and interwoven with poetry which will appeal to a wider audience and will provide the Kashmiri vantage of the political dispute that prevails,” she adds.
Ather Zia, a US-based Kashmiri academic, writer and poet.
Ather is also a poet and often writes resistance poetry. “As for writing poetry, I have always been drawn to this medium of expression. I also use it as a tool of resistance and a means of what I term as ethical surfeit.” Her current poetic lens, in her own words, is singularly focused on the urgency of the political situation of Kashmir, which has ramifications on all aspects of daily life—the themes she writes on.
For some decades now, literature lovers, opinion makers and public intellectuals in Kashmir have been expressing their unhappiness over a narrative vacuum in English language. The Kashmir story has usually been told by outsiders. But there has been a significant shift in the last two decades or so. Now, some serious efforts are in full swing to fill this narrative vacuum—particularly the literature of resistance—but the Kashmir story in English still remains a work in progress.
Professor Shafi Shauq, a well-known Kashmiri author, poet, fiction writer, critic and linguist, told literature lovers during a recent book release function in Srinagar that most of literature that is written in the Kashmiri language is a “statement, not stand”.
Nitasha Kaul, a London-based Kashmiri academic and novelist born to a Kashmiri Pandit family, has also come up with Future Tense, her second novel since she wrote Residue. She is of the view that the narratives, writings and memoirs are “the traces of history” and they are really important for the present and for the future. Future Tense, in the author’s words, is political fiction. “I feel stories of conflict, struggle and suffering in fiction are told in a way that can potentially reach across and affect those who may not otherwise know.” Why she prefers writing fiction? “Fiction is not about taking sides. It is about understanding. It is about solidarity. It is about getting people to see why and how injustices are legitimised, how and why they are perpetuated, and how and why they need to be undone,” she says. On writings exclusively by women, she believes that women have always been speaking and writing, but do not get the same attention, their work is not read or reviewed in the same manner as are the writings by the men. “Writing by women is really important for it gives us an insight into the ways in which multiple marginalised identities experience life,” she says in an e-mailed conversation.
Your lush olives and dreams when torn asunder,
our apple orchards and maples—captive,
howled too
Beyond fortified towers of meaning,
an unintelligible stutter of longing
made borders porous...
—Uzma Falak
Uzma Falak, a Kashmiri anthropologist based in Heidelberg, Germany, wrote a poem in which she drew parallels with Palestine. According to Falak, “The people of Kashmir have continued to resist for more than six decades now.” Anjum Zamrooda Habib, a Kashmiri political leader, wrote her prison memoir, Qaidi Number 100 (Prisoner No. 100: An Account of My Nights and Days in an Indian Prison). Similarly, Dr Rumana Makhdoomi, a senior doctor at Srinagar’s Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS), has written White Man in Dark, which documents the sufferings of doctors and paramedics during the years of conflict.
In Urdu too, several young Kashmiris have written memoirs, prison diaries, short stories, novels, and poetry that bring to light various aspects of the conflict. Nayeema Ahmad Mahjoor, former BBC broadcaster-turned pro-Delhi politician, wrote her debut novel, Dehshat Zadi (Lost in Terror) in Urdu.
For some, however, the lockdown in Kashmir has manifested in their own locked creativity. Nighat Sahiba, a young poet and award-winning writer from south Kashmir, confessed to have hit a wall. She felt that writing had no purpose; it was futile. “This period since August 2019 has not been fertile for me. I have tried hard to write. I have put pressure on myself. Nothing has come out,” Sahiba says. “I have never felt so helpless in my life, ever.” She says she thought of herself as very “ordinary and dispossessed, and as helpless as a small insect”. A writer, she says, finds no meaning in life if he or she is not convinced of doing something to bring about a change. “I am nothing. We are nothing,” she says.
Things were different for her earlier. She has broken barriers, challenged stereotypes and busted many a myth by writing about womanhood, violence, resistance, resilience and romance. She has been writing about bullets and blood, pellets and blindness, militarisation, custodial disappearances, mass graves and unknown graves, rapes, ‘eve teasing’ and stalking.
This young poet from Kashmir’s Anantnag district mostly writes in her mother tongue, Kashmiri. She is also prolific in Urdu. For her debut book Zard Paneik Dair or Piles of Pallid Leaves, which is her first published work in Kashmiri language, is a collection of her ghazals and nazms. The second volume of her poetry collection is also ready. In 2018, she won Malika Sengupta National Award. A year bef-ore, in 2017, she won the Sahitya Akademi’s Yuva Puraskar, given to young writers.
Kashmir’s new literature of resistance by women cannot be brushed aside merely as literature of protest. Rather, this new culture of writing and documentation offers an outlet to suppressed aspirations and an articulation of collective memories of pain, struggle, sacrifice and resilience.
