The fall of man requires an original sin. What can expulsion from the Garden mean if it is wrought without a cause? The world is either godless, or a surfeit of gods (and godfathers) couldn’t help secure a piece of the earth. Much like the millions transplanted from their soil in the Partition, the predicament of Kashmiri Pandits can only cause perplexion. Unlike the earlier refugees, though, their pain is deepened by hope—the exile is not final, at least notionally, and a return to the promised land is always around the corner, just out of reach. It’s like an infinity mirror that reflects opposites. There is the promise of pain, and the pain of promise. The psychological violence of it all, reduced to the banality of political retorts (‘But what about Kashmiri Pandits?’), can only be confronted through willful amnesia—or by taking life as a memory game. Words, stories, literature, bestowing life and dignity to each little tale, refusing adamantly to allow them to be concocted into anything else, caring for the sacrosanct, battling the banality of everyday evil, defying erasure.
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But stoking that furnace is a gloomy, lonely task...the lamp only renders the darkness visible. “If anything, literature has only made the void deeper,” says Niyati Bhat, a 27-year-old poet and research scholar from Delhi, whose family was forced to leave the Valley in the 1990 exodus. It’s a story-frame mined with words from the biblical mythos. “Exodus has meant that most of our culture is now ‘diasporic’ in nature,” says Kochi-based Vinayak Razdan, who runs the blog SearchKashmir that archives personal stories, folk tales, old photographs, music, books, works of art et al.
Loss, nostalgia, longing…these have unsurprisingly been the chief concerns of Kashmiri Pandit literature post-exodus. But these are made keener by a deeper anxiety, a sense that the culture is dying. So all the activities, Razdan says, eventually tend to be self-aware acts about preservation.
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Haez Bai, a portrait by Pandit Vishu Nath, the first Kashmiri photographer (1890s)
Every culture carries the seeds of anxiety about change…and it had crept into Kashmiri too. “Prior to 1989, literature produced by Kashmiri Pandits had concerns similar to artists elsewhere in India,” says Razdan. “Post 1947 and till the 1960s, the bulk of popular writing was influenced by the Progressive Writers’ Movement. We have poet Dina Nath Nadim with his concerns for the common people. In this period, a lot of literature was also about communal harmony. By the 1970s, we had short story writers like Hari Krishen Kaul, still writing in Kashmiri, but inspired by Western writers like Kafka. How modernity was changing old Kashmiri society was a major literary concern. Also, all this while, we have a lot of devotional songs and music being produced. Poet Master Zinda Kaul’s main themes were devotional and spiritual. That last is probably the most popular theme in Kashmir, among Pandits as well as Muslims.”
For Niyati Bhat, whose family has lived in Najafgarh on Delhi’s outskirts for over two decades, after being dispossessed of their home and homeland, the process of immersion in Kashmir’s literary culture was, in a way, one of rediscovering loss. Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude (fiction, 2011) and Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots (non-fiction, 2013), she says, were the first books in English that dwelt on the story of the exodus and became popular. “At last, we felt then, somebody has told our story to the world,” says Bhat. But over time she came to Chandrakanta Vishin’s works in Hindi, where the exodus was first narrated.
Vishin is a towering figure, who has published over 40 books and 200 short stories in a literary career spanning some 50 years, including the magnum opus Katha Satisar in 2007. The language was part choice, partly fortuitous: a graduate in English literature, she chose Hindi for its reach, but had been almost denied admission to a Master’s course by the principal of a college in Pilani, Rajasthan. “In the 1980s, my publisher asked me to write about Kashmir. Most people who had written about Kashmir so far had written from a tourist’s perspective, merely describing the geographical beauty. Nobody had explored its culture. So the stories I wrote were about Kashmiriyat—the composite Kashmiri culture that had space for Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism,” Vishin tells Outlook. For Katha Satisar, recently translated into English as The Saga of Satisar, she took a much larger canvas, delving into Kashmir’s syncretic past, weaving in oral histories, tracing the faultlines of modern Kashmir to their origins. “The sting remains. Why should it not?”
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Writing Kashmir in Hindi already entails an act of translation—a barter between loss and gain. But translator Neerja Mattoo, speaking in 2018, had spoken of a kind of converse of translation...a growing apart. In old Kashmiri literature, she said, there were common points of reference for both Pandit and Muslim writers. Looking at the work, it was difficult to say if it was written by a Muslim or a Pandit. But a gulf has been created that is only widening with time. “There is a wide gap in the vocabulary of the Kashmiri being written by people who have left the Valley and by those still there,” she said. The sway of Perso-Arabic vocabulary is stronger there. “A time may come when we won’t understand each other.” A natural, if perhaps unwarranted fear—for it is not the words themselves, but what is spoken through them that’s becoming mutually incomprehensible.
Growing apart also has a visual language. Kashmiri, from 8th century onwards, was written in the Sharada script—as was Sanskrit before that, and even Arabic in the transitional 14-16th centuries. Once the Perso-Arabic Nastaliq script took over, Pandits and Muslims alike used that for Kashmiri. But after 1989, while Kashmiri Muslims have retained the Nastaliq, Pandits, especially younger generations, have moved to Devanagari and even the Roman script. The Sharada legacy, however, opens up another terrain: the vast contribution to Sanskrit literature by Kashmiri scholars. A.N.D. Haksar, a retired diplomat and well-known translator of Sanskrit classics into English, says this contribution goes well beyond poetics and dramaturgy. Among other works, Haksar has translated the satires of Kshemendra, the 11th-century poet from Kashmir. “People don’t know satire is a major part of Sanskrit,” he said in an interview to DD News last year. “There is a confluence of other cultures in Sanskrit too. Most people don’t know about it. I once found a text called Suleiman Charitra. It had never been translated. It’s a Sanskrit text and is called Suleiman Charitra! Hazrat Suleiman finds much mention in the Quran and the Bible. But this is a story of his parents David and Bathsheba.”
Niyati Bhat’s disposition for poetry and inquiries into her identity, meanwhile, prompted a search for women poets of Kashmir. “I was acquainted with Lal Ded’s verses and Habba Khatoon’s songs, for they were part of Kashmir’s oral tradition, but I always wondered, did no woman write after them? It was then I stumbled upon the works of poets like Naseem Shafaie, Sunita Raina Pandit and Nighat Sahiba. While distant from Lal Ded and Habba Khatoon by centuries, their concerns were the same—their struggles, spiritual quests, efforts to break moulds,” says Bhat. “I always felt I was writing in a vacuum, so discovering these women poets was revelatory both as a reader and a seeker.”
That vacuum is the real bequest for the younger Pandits. The Kashmir they hear of and read about exists perhaps only in their imagination: present-day Kashmir departs from it in both tone and detail. The past is another continent—rather, Union territory. There are two Kashmirs separated in time, before and after 1989. There are another two Kashmirs separated in space, with imperceptible strands still bridging the two. Maybe those strands are the real Kashmir. For Pandits, holding on to the past’s many-hued palette is an essential part of coping. “I think, in a few years, we will see from Kashmiri Pandits new writings on how the community was changing and how they adapted, carried multiple cultures,” says Razdan. “We will possibly see writings from people either comfortable or struggling to be comfortable with the past and present.”
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