Book Review: A Long Dream of Home
Editors: Siddhartha Gigoo and Varad Sharma
Published by: Bloomsbury, 2016
Review by: Supriya Prasanta
Home is that sustained mood or sense that allows us to experience feelings not necessarily sustained in the mundane world: wonder, vision, peace, freedom from worry, freedom from demands, and freedom from constant clacking. ---Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I
Perhaps no other territory has been given such media attention in recent years as Kashmir. The Kashmir conflict remains a contentious issue even as India stepped into its seventy years of independence on 15 August 2016. For those born outside Jammu and Kashmir, one gets to know about the ‘Kashmir conflict’ and the daily life in there through books of fiction, non-fiction, essays in leading as well as less-known journals and news papers. The outsiders also get to see vignettes of life in Kashmir in news and documentaries broadcasted on the television channels—the heavenly scenic beauty contrasted by images of blood, fire, and smoke from bombing and firing. Nation formation, partition, Kashmir—these are part of the grand narrative of the official history of India, and research area of scholars on South Asia. No matter who narrates these stories, Kashmir never fails to leave a hundred questions in the mind—and the foremost of these are: What do the majority of the people of Kashmir want? And will there be a time soon in future which will see the disputed issues settled. And what about the Kashmir pandits who were forced to a life in exile?
II
A Long Dream of Home brings memories of three generations of exiled Kashmir Pandits, a community which has suffered from state apathy and antagonism from native Muslims of Kashmir. These personal narratives fill a gap in the current discourse on Kashmir through bringing such hitherto unheard voices, thanks to the effort and sensitivity of editors Sidharth Gigoo and Varad Sharma, both belonging to the exiled Kashmir Pandit community. The persecution, ouster and eventual mass exodus of Pandits from Kashmir began in early 1990 in the aftermath of the threatening press releases from Jammu Kashmir Liberation front and Hizb-ul Mujahideen. By the end of that year, about half a million Pandits left Kashmir and sheltered themselves in various refugee camps in Jammu.
As one of the exiled Pandit says, in a piece titled, ‘One day Kashmir will become part of Pakistan, What will you do that day?’ about the taunts he received from his friends: ‘Seeing the behavior of my Muslim friends, it became clear to me that Hindu and Muslim communities were strikingly different from each other and nurtured opposing ideological and nationalistic affiliations. I was overcome with a strange sense of alienation, since my friends were the majority.’
Contrasting to this sad realization, PL Waguza’s account ‘The Fatal Seconds’ is ironic, bitter, and accusatory. He does not spare a chance to condemn Nehru’s policies and actions (he sarcastically refers to him as ‘chachaji’), self-seeking, weak political leadership in Kashmir since 1947, the failure of international diplomacy, and also the militant groups funded by foreign agencies along with the hypocritical stands of majority of people.
Finding the roots of one’s feeling can be hard. One might learn this under the grey skies of winter in a refugee shelter in Jammu like Sushant Dhar. In the section ‘Summers of Exile’, Sushant Dhar tells about his alienation from his roots in stark words: in 1990 his permanent address used to be Seer Hamdan of Anantnag district, Kashmir. Two decades later, he has no permanent address to mention. In such a situation, people try to put on a brave face, get on their daily life and work and try to survive with dignity. As Dhar listens to elders talking to each other how they tried hard to settle down in Jammu and that it was a great relief their kids were getting good opportunities. It’s only towards the end of such gossips, that they mutter, ‘Our hearts don’t find solace in Jammu. We don’t belong here.’
It is because home is our psychic hearth. It holds the memories that both comfort and haunt us. In ‘The Pomegranate Tree’, Namrata Wakhloo poignantly remembers a visit to her ancestral place and what she saw after a long gap: ‘Most of the houses, which belonged to Pandits once, have been demolished and rebuilt by the new owners. Nothing is left there which bears a trace of our existence. A part of our history has been erased. Kashmir just doesn’t seem like home anymore. The pomegranate tree still stands tall in the courtyard of my old house.’
After reading the book one may wonder how do the Pandits in exile comfort themselves, how do they resolve, suppress or reconcile to this perpetual sense of homelessness? There’s no dearth of self-help books in the market for the distressed and the down and out—most of these prescribe to try and feel at home in the world, that home is a state of mind. But to exiles anywhere, this surely amounts to a cruel joke.
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(First published in The Dhauli Review, an online journal, 2016)