Just finished reading Curfewed Night, an autobiographical-reportage Novel by Basharat Peer on Kashmir of post 1989. Even that book isn’t free from Bollywood. On seeing his first bollywood film in a theater in the Indian town of Aligarh, the Kashmiri author-protagonist gets his ‘Aazadi’. And just a paragraph earlier, he writes about seeing emaciated Rickshawallas for the first time in his life. His grandfather, who accompanied him on this trip to get him admitted to the University, pays the rickshawalla twice the fare for a ride and thinks, ‘There is terrible poverty here.’ The author-protagonist notes: ‘ The poverty in Kashmir wasn’t as desperate.’
These words reminded me of lines by early European travelers to Kashmir who documented the abject poverty of Kashmir. In 1831, a French botanist named Victor Jacquemont (Born in Paris on August 8, 1801 and died in Bombay on December 7, 1832) arrived in Kashmir valley and wrote ‘…nowhere else in India are the masses as poor and denuded as they are in Kashmir. It is the only country where the price of work is really as low as we believe, mistakenly, to be generally in India.’* Godfrey Thomas Vigne, an English traveler who visited Kashmir in 1835 wrote, “Not a day passes whilst I was on the path to Kashmir, and even when travelling in the valley, that I did not see the bleached remains of some unfortunate wretch who dad fallen a victim either to sickness or starvation.”
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Correspondence inedite 1867 Victor Jacquemont
I also remembered the slogan that cut through Arundhati Roy like a knife and clean broke her heart: Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan. (Naked, starving India, More precious than life itself – Pakistan.)
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*Nulle part dans l’Inde la masse de la population n’est aussi pauvre, aussi dénuée qu’à Cachemire. C’est le seul pays où le prix du travail soit réellement aussi bas que nous le croyons, par erreur, être généralement dans toute l’Inde.
– Correspondance inédite avec sa famille et ses amis
by Victor Jacquemont (Published by M. Lévy, 1867), Volume 2, pp97
[rough google translation] [download]
In the book Letters from India by Victor Jacquemont (E. Churton, 1835), an early translation of his letters, the same thought appears in lines: “India is no longer the poorest country in the world to me: Cashmeer exceeds all imaginable poverty.” (page 111)
These lines, translated, were used in:
Kashmir in the Crossfire: In the Crossfire (1996), Page 36
by Victoria Schofield and also in her book Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War, page 5
Pankaj Mishra then used Victoria Schofield’s translation of the same lines in his famous article Death in Kashmir (2000). The same line later appeared in his Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond (2006), Page 168
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“Kashmir was never part of India”, said a young man who seemed to be the group’s chief spokesman,” Our culture has always been different. We believe in Muslim ideology, the Indians preach socialist ideology. We believe in Muslim educational values, they believe in Darwin’s theory. We are part of the global Islamic movement against the materialistic ideology of the west.” […] “We do not have the kind of poverty in Kashmir. Only Farooq Abdullah is stupid enough to believe that the problems of Kashmir are economic. That jobs are what we need”
– a militant speaks in a page from Tavleen Singh’s Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors (1996)
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An interview of M.K. Raina published in the India Foundation for the Arts. [Found this interview thanks to : punarjanman.wordpress.com]
Last year theatre director and actor M K Raina conducted a month-long theatre workshop with IFA support in Akingam village of Kashmir. The workshop participants were children from families that have traditionally performed Bhand Pather. Bhand Pather is a form of farcical theatre that is said to have entered Kashmir from Persia through the Muslim courts in the 14th century and then spread through the rest of north India. Kashmir’s Bhand Pather has been a vibrant tradition but the form has suffered over the last two decades of unrest in the state. Raina’s aim was to restore the self-confidence of the once-active performers of Akingam village as well as start a process of training children in this theatre.
Raina tells us more about Bhand Pather, the experience of the workshop and his future plans. What does a typical Bhand Pather performance consist of?
M K Raina: It is an open air form performed around Sufi shrines during the annual Urs of Sufi pirs. Thousands of people gather around the shrines during the Urs. They watch the performance and pay the Bhands – sometimes with cash but mostly in kind. The Bhands also perform around Hindu temples. They go into villages during harvest time and they could turn a village courtyard or an orchard into a performance space. They climb trees, they go into houses and peep at their audience from windows, they act entirely according to their whims and fancies.
The performance starts with a wind instrument called swarnai – if you hear the sound of the swarnai, you know the performance is about to begin. The music is dominant and then there are the maskaras or jesters – there could be five or eight or or ten maskaras. They are the spirit of the performance. There is often the figure of a ruler from outside who is exploiting the natives; the jesters fool him and bring him to some kind of an understanding. He will normally speak Persian or gibberish English or Punjabi. They will speak in Kashmiri. He cannot understand them and they cannot understand him. He has a whip which creates a sound of a pistol when he cracks it and that’s a very vivid element. Sometimes the stories are mythological; sometimes you find traces of the Ramayana.
Each performer has a special musical score called mukam. Each mukam has its own name and comes from the classical Sufiana qalaam tradition of Kashmir. The Bhands sometimes sing Sufiana verses too. They mix these with theatre songs and peasant songs; it’s a distinct repertoire of music. They play two percussion instruments – the dhol and the nagara – along with the swarnai and thalej or cymbals. Bhand Pather has been suppressed by militants over the last two decades. What were the greatest challenges you faced conducting the workshop in Akingam village?
MKR: The performers of Akingam lost their mentor and teacher Guru Mohammed Subhan, a SNA awardee. He became a victim. The militants didn’t want Subhan to perform Bhand Pather, they considered it unIslamic. They put him under house arrest for nine months. Eventually he died from extreme humiliation and shock. His death was a big blow to the performers and they lost their self-confidence. Yet I chose Akingam village because one of the oldest Bhand theatre companies in the Kashmir valley – the Kashmir Bhagat Theatre – is based here. Also Akingam is surrounded by many heritage and sacred sites and there are villages around which also have groups performing Bhand Pather. A village called Muhurpur next to Akingam used to have Kashmiri Pandits Bhand performers but they left the village in 1990. The people of Akingam are deeply Sufi and philosophical in outlook – you start chatting with them and before you know it you are involved in an intellectual discussion on the meaning of existence.
The villagers took us in. The whole village was galvanised into action. The women started cooking for us. The young participants of the workshop staged a performance at the end of the four weeks. A huge crowd turned up from Akingam and from the surrounding villages. I am certain that this was the first time in 19 years that that such a large crowd has gathered together for a cultural event in Kashmir. Some of our friends from Srinagar who had come for the performance could not believe that such a gathering was possible without government support and without any security or police. It is also true that though we met with some resistance along the way it was minor. The militants do not oppose the Bhand Pather today as much as they used to. You have said: “Kashmiri children have lost their power of imagination and self-expression …perhaps it has to do with the collapse of the education system and two decades of violence.” Can you tell us how children and young people responded to the workshop and what you did to draw them out? MKR: Because of the threat of violence, children have to be indoors by 3 pm. They suffer from a lack of exposure. Nobody asks them to think for themselves, to imagine. All adults tell them is – shut up, keep quiet, don’t go out because this or that will happen. A people who have traditionally lived their lives in forests and among nature have had to confine themselves to their houses. I went to the houses of Bhand performers in three or four villages and told them – look you have to send your kids for this workshop. They sent them gladly. These elders themselves visited the workshop and performed too – we had a week which was like a little folk festival. We got a flavour of Bhand from other regions of Kashmir.
When working with the boys, my collaborator Rakesh and I woke up to the fact that their bodies were not in the right proportion. There was a stiffness, a distortion, a lack of grace. I started asking myself whether these problems were due to the stresses and tensions that their mothers had gone through before the children were born or if they were a result of the atmosphere they had grown up in.
Initially, it was difficult for the boys to understand that meaningful images and ideas can be communicated just by making an instrument out of the body, like any musical instrument. But eventually they got it. Performance is in their blood after all. You will soon embark on a two-year IFA-supported project wherein young performers will be trained in different aspects of the form by Ustads. What are the ways in which you see these younger performers making Bhand Pather their own? MKR: I am hoping to set up a little school in Akingam. My worry has been that the elders will die. Two are very old and they are the best. I’ve told them – I will come to the village when you die and shower rose petals on your grave only if you’ve taught children. Otherwise, I’ll only say you were a good man, but I won’t come with rose petals!
The thing is that these Ustads have a methodology for teaching what they know, but they are very tough and they tend to get impatient. I have to teach them to be patient with young people. But they’ve seen me working so I think they understand the importance of making a child relax. One of my conditions is also that the children will have to continue with their formal schooling.
They will have to understand the basics of the form first. Later they can experiment. I don’t necessarily want them to only perform the traditional repertoire. My dream is to do King Lear with them.
But right now the focus is on setting up this school. Akingam has been designated a heritage tourist village. The government is making a campus where a small building has already come up which has been given to us to use as a rehearsal and teaching space. The idea behind the heritage tourist village is that since Akingam is on the way to Pehelgam and Amarnath, maybe tourists will stop here. And if they do we can perform for them.
I watched my last paether in 1988. The nineties was the decade of our disappearances, and the bhands and their plays disappeared as well. On January 26, 1990, Subhan Bhagat and his fellow artists were in New Delhi to perform at the Indian Republic Day ceremony. Eight days earlier, CRPF had massacred more than 50 demonstrators in Srinagar. When Bhagat returned home, visitors with Kalashnikovs arrived. Bhagat promised not to perform again in New Delhi. After his death in the mid-nineties, the mantle fell upon his son, Hasan Bhagat.
The intense violence of the nineties left no space for folk theatre and Hasan became a driver. But he had been thinking about contemporary Kashmir. “Maybe it will take some time to stage plays about today, but they are being already written,” Hasan told me a few years ago.
– Basharat Peer, author of recently published first-of-its-kind novel, ‘Curfewed Night, wrote in a Times of India article (4 Jan 2009), titled ‘Living to tell the tale of loss’. Not a fan of TOI, but this fine article really surprised me.
I did not want to go back to Kashmir, did not want to destroy a fragile memory with sights of guns and roadblocks.
Writes Patrick French in Younghusband: The last great imperial adventurer, a book that was first published in 1994. For writing the wonderful book, the author even trailed some of the footsteps of Francis Younghusband, hiking right up to Rohtang Pass and taking up a challenging journey through Gobi Desert. Younghusband represented British government in Kashmir for a period of three-year starting1906 and ending in 1909 with him leaving India forever. This would have been an important stop for Patrick French but he couldn’t trail Younghusband’s footsteps into Kashmir. In the Chapter titled Fame in disgrace and diversion in Kashmir, he writes:
The State of Jammu and Kashmir was exploding in anger, Kashmiri separatists detonating bombs and Indian paramilitaries responding violently.
This was the fiercest period of insurgency in Kashmir and he couldn’t go to Kashmir, a place which he had visited earlier (in the 80s) when the place was still a “pastoral idyll”. Still at that time, there were “dark mutterings against Indian rule” and the conflict was only “simmering”. The book does not offer much on Kashmir conflict, the roots of which Patrick French discusses rather in detail for the chapter Midnight’s Parents for his book Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division (1997).
Then last year, Patrick French wrote an article in Daily Mail, a paper notorious for its conservative voice ( and for this reason often reffered as Daily Hail), introducing the readers to The surprising truth about Rage Boy, . Patrick French traveled to Kashmir, a trip he acknowledges to be the first in the last 20 years, he had been last there as a teenage backpacker who spent his days enjoying the “pastoral idyll”. This time, he was taken by a local reporter to ‘the Gaza Strip of Kashmir’ to meet the ‘Rage boy’ and French ended up meeting Shakeel Bhat, a rather eccentric Kashmiri boy who became America’s hated poster-boy of Islamic radicalism. The article starts with him quoting various dissuasive voices from the web, and in turn the comments that his article got, is ironic.
Read the full article by Partick French here. (Don’t be put off or turned on by the images that you are going to see to the right of the page)
Also, read this report to read about the toll that the ongoing conflict is taking on psychological health of Kashmiris caught in the conflict zone.
-0- According to The Hindu : Having finished writing Naipaul’s biography The World is What it is, Patrick French is now working on a sequel to his 1997 book Liberty or Death: India’s Journey to Independence and Division -0-
Last rain of winter, tonight it will snow. Morning, my piss will drill holes yellow in pristine snow.
Put kangri out of bed, many houses it has burnt.
Don’t put your feet on it, weak eyes you get.
No bath in morning, no bath for weeks.
Pray the pipe bursts, like it always does. Get your head out of pheran!
Want to choke on coal fumes or on your own fart! Better than choking on your fish – smelly, dried!
Hmm…Two weeks, still no light, no TV.
Son go to sleep, don’t you know it’s snowing in Kashir.
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Winter, 2017
last winter II
you been collecting snow for centuries
we believe
you can carve wood, you can carve stone
you can carve meat, you can carve bread
on a good day you can even carve a dream
with eyes wide shut
yet, this art of carving snow
on a good winter’s day
eludes
you and your sheen mohniv
its grubby charcoal nose and
two squinty eyes
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments Translated and Annotated by Richard F. Burton
Section 135. The Craft and Malice of Woman m. The Goldsmith and the Cashmere Singing-Girl
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When it was the Five Hundred and Eighty-sixth Night,
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that when the fourth Wazir had told his tale, the King turned from his purpose to slay his son; but, on the fifth day, the damsel came in to him hending a bowl of poison in hand, calling on Heaven for help and buffeting her cheeks and face, and said to him, “O King, either thou shalt do me justice and avenge me on thy son, or I will drink up this poison-cup and die, and the sin of my blood shall be on thy head at the Day of Doom. These thy Ministers accuse me of malice and perfidy, but there be none in the world more perfidious than men. Hast thou not heard the story of the Goldsmith and the Cashmere[FN#190] singing-girl?” “What befel the twain, O damsel?” asked the King; and she answered, saying, “There hath come to my knowledge, O august King, a tale of the
Goldsmith and the Cashmere Singing-Girl.
There lived once, in a city of Persia a goldsmith who delighted in women and in drinking wine. One day, being in the house of one of his intimates, he saw painted on the wall the figure of a lutanist, a beautiful damsel, beholder never beheld a fairer or a more pleasant. He looked at the picture again and again, marvelling at its beauty, and fell so desperately in love with it, that he sickened for passion and came near to die. It chanced that one of his friends came to visit him and sitting down by his side, asked how he did and what ailed him, whereto the goldsmith answered, “O my brother, that which ails me is love, and it befel on this wise. I saw a figure of a woman painted on the house- wall of my brother such an one and became enamoured of it.” Hereupon the other fell to blaming him and said, “This was of thy lack of wit; how couldst thou fall in love with a painted figure on a wall, that can neither harm nor profit, that seeth not neither heareth, that neither taketh nor withholdeth.” Said the sick man, “He who painted yonder picture never could have limned it save after the likeness of some beautiful woman.” “Haply,” rejoined his friend, “he painted it from imagination.” “In any case,” replied the goldsmith, “here am I dying for love of the picture, and if there live the original thereof in the world, I pray Allah Most High to protect my life till I see her.” When those who were present went out, they asked for the painter of the picture and, finding that he had travelled to another town, wrote him a letter, complaining of their comrade’s case and enquiring whether he had drawn the figure of his own inventive talents or copied it from a living model; to which he replied, “I painted it after a certain singing-girl belonging to one of the Wazirs in the city of Cashmere in the land of Hind.” When the goldsmith heard this, he left Persia for Cashmere-city, where he arrived after much travail. He tarried awhile there till one day he went and clapped up an acquaintance with a certain of the citizens who was a druggist, a fellow of a sharp wit, keen, crafty; and, being one even-tide in company with him, asked him of their King and his polity; to which the other answered, saying, “Well, our King is just and righteous in his governance, equitable to his lieges and beneficent to his commons and abhorreth nothing in the world save sorcerers; but, whenever a sorcerer or sorceress falls into his hands, he casteth them into a pit without the city and there leaveth them in hunger to die.” Then he questioned him of the King’s Wazirs, and the druggist told him of each Minister, his fashion and condition, till the talk came round to the singing-girl and he told him, “She belongeth to such a Wazir.” The goldsmith took note of the Minister’s abiding place and waited some days, till he had devised a device to his desire; and one night of rain and thunder and stormy winds, he provided himself with thieves’ tackle and repaired to the house of the Wazir who owned the damsel. Here he hanged a rope-ladder with grappling-irons to the battlements and climbed up to the terrace-roof of the palace. Thence he descended to the inner court and, making his way into the Harim, found all the slave-girls lying asleep, each on her own couch; and amongst them reclining on a couch of alabaster and covered with a coverlet of cloth of gold a damsel, as she were the moon rising on a fourteenth night. At her head stood a candle of ambergris, and at her feet another, each in a candlestick of glittering gold, her brilliancy dimming them both; and under her pillow lay a casket of silver, wherein were her Jewels. He raised the coverlet and drawing near her, considered her straitly, and behold, it was the lutanist whom he desired and of whom he was come in quest. So he took out a knife and wounded her in the back parts, a palpable outer wound, whereupon she awoke in terror; but, when she saw him, she was afraid to cry out, thinking he came to steal her goods. So she said to him, “Take the box and what is therein, but slay me not, for I am in thy protection and under thy safe-guard[FN#191] and my death will profit thee nothing.” Accordingly, he took the box and went away.–And Shahrazad perceived the dawn of day and ceased saying her permitted say.
When is was the Five Hundred and Eighty-seventh Night,
She said, It hath reached me, O auspicious King, that when the goldsmith had entered the Wazir’s palace he wounded the damsel slightly in the back parts and, taking the box which contained her jewels, wended his way. And when morning morrowed he donned clothes after the fashion of men of learning and doctors of the law and, taking the jewel-case went in therewith to the King of the city, before whom he kissed the ground and said to him, “O King, I am a devout man; withal a loyal well-wisher to thee and come hither a pilgrim to thy court from the land of Khorasan, attracted by the report of thy just governance and righteous dealing with thy subjects and minded to be under thy standard. I reached this city at the last of the day and finding the gate locked and barred, threw me down to sleep without the walls; but, as I lay betwixt sleep and wake, behold, I saw four women come up; one riding on a broom-stick, another on a wine-jar, a third on an oven-peel and a fourth on a black bitch,[FN#192] and I knew that they were witches making for thy city. One of them came up to me and kicked me with her foot and beat me with a fox’s tail she had in her hand, hurting me grievously, whereat I was wroth and smote her with a knife I had with me, wounding her in the back parts, as she turned to flee from me. When she felt the wound, she fled before me and in her flight let drop this casket, which I picked up and opening, found these costly jewels therein. So do thou take it, for I have no need thereof, being a wanderer in the mountains[FN#193] who hath rejected the world from my heart and renounced it and all that is in it, seeking only the face of Allah the Most High.” Then he set the casket before the King and fared forth. The King opened the box and emptying out all the trinkets it contained, fell to turning them over with his hand, till he chanced upon a necklace whereof he had made gift to the Wazir to whom the girl belonged. Seeing this, he called the Minister in question and said to him, “This is the necklace I gave thee?” He knew it at first sight and answered, “It is; and I gave it to a singing girl of mine.” Quoth the King, “Fetch that girl to me forthwith.” So he fetched her to him, and he said, “Uncover her back parts and see if there be a wound therein or no.” The Wazir accordingly bared her backside and finding a knife-wound there, said, “Yes, O my lord, there is a wound.” Then said the King, “This is the witch of whom the devotee told me, and there can be no doubt of it,” and bade cast her into the witches’ well. So they carried her thither at once. As soon as it was night and the goldsmith knew that his plot had succeeded, he repaired to the pit, taking with him a purse of a thousand dinars, and, entering into converse with the warder, sat talking with him till a third part of the night was passed, when he broached the matter to him, saying, “Know, O my brother, that this girl is innocent of that they lay to her charge and that it was I brought this calamity upon her.” Then he told him the whole story, first and last, adding, “Take, O my brother, this purse of a thousand dinars and give me the damsel, that I may carry her to my own land, for these gold pieces will profit thee more than keeping her in prison; moreover Allah will requite thee for us, and we too will both offer up prayers for thy prosperity and safety.” When the warder heard this story, he marvelled with exceeding marvel at that device and its success; then taking the money, he delivered the girl to the goldsmith, conditioning that he should not abide one hour with her in the city. Thereupon the goldsmith took the girl and fared on with her, without ceasing, till he reached his own country and so he won his wish. “See, then, O King” (said the damsel), “the malice of men and their wiles. Now thy Wazirs hinder thee from doing me justice on thy son; but to-morrow we shall stand, both thou and I, before the Just Judge, and He shall do me justice on thee, O King.” When the King heard this, he commanded to put his son to death; but the fifth Wazir came in to him and kissing the ground before him, said, “O mighty King, delay and hasten not to slay thy son: speed will oftentimes repentance breed; and I fear for thee lest thou repent, even as did the man who never laughed for the rest of his days.” “And how was that, O Wazir?” asked the King. Quoth he, “I have heard tell, O King, this tale concerning
The Man who never Laughed during the Rest of his Days.
-0- Author’s Footnote: [FN#190] The Kashmir people, men and women, have a very bad name in Eastern tales, the former for treachery and the latter for unchastity. A Persian distich says:
If folk be scarce as food in dearth ne’er let three lots come near ye: First Sindi, second Jat, and third a rascally Kashmeeree.
The women have fair skins and handsome features but, like all living in that zone, Persians, Sindis, Afghans, etc., their bosoms fall after the first child and become like udders. This is not the case with Hindú women, Rajpúts, Maráthís, etc.
-0- Find the complete text of The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night at Project Gutenberg License: This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6
