The plural archive of memory,” says Badri Raina, in A Long Dream of Home, about the act of remembering Kashmir, “can yield healthy antidotes to fixated moments of pain and betrayal. If only, of course, we dig deep enough and with a will to look for gold among the dross.”
How does one “dig” into the deep archive of memory about the loss of home? Whose memories do we pay attention to, and which ones do we discard, if we are to find the “gold among the dross”? How does one reconcile memory with pain? And how does one retain hope—or any form of “healthy antidote”—in the process of remembering which itself revives pain? But memory also serves politics, and in the continued articulation of shared vision. Each seder, when dispersed Jews say “next year in Jerusalem”, they invoke both hope and longing in a manner that keeps the promise of home alive. We have our own displaced communities—displaced through violence of many kinds, and some, more than others, have used memory to keep alive that promise of home.
The human story of the ongoing struggle in Kashmir has many fronts—the disappeared and their mothers, families caught in the crossfire as two nations war over land, the raped women, the dead soldiers and civilians, and the many rendered homeless by waves of anger. For many of us in the rest of India, Kashmir remains on the edges of our national imagination, a place celebrated in cinema and tourism, or demonised in the geopolitical game-space rendered by Partition, and it is in the occasional encounter with retold experience, storyfied in anecdote, that we glimpse the harsh realities of displacement.
With A Long Dream of Home, Siddhartha Gigoo and Varad Sharma bring into focus a multiplicity of these narratives, the voices of the young, the old, the professional and the farmer, the worker and the doctor, the hopeful and the resentful, the angry and the wistful—stories told by people who continue to hold the elusive hope of return to their homes in the Valley. Together they tell a haunting—and haunted—story of terror and betrayal, but also of humanity and courage.
The 29 histories in the volume span the 25 years of exile of the Kashmiri Pandits, who left their homes, some abandoning their property and possessions overnight, to face years of unsettled life in migrant camps and temporary housing, depending on the handouts of a lethargic state. The stories are unpretentious and raw, lacking literary finesse but making up for it with honesty and the immediacy of first-hand experience. The editors have tapped the memories and hopes of three generations of Pandits: those who left Kashmir as adults, those whose childhood and adolescence was interrupted by the exodus, and those who were born in exile and grew up on stories about the hills and the chinars, about a homeland that is the stuff of fiction. The narratives traverse Srinagar and Pahalgam, Udhampur and Jammu, in their detailing of the mood of the times and the tensions that drove communities apart. The simple stories break the distance built by impersonal news stories and instead, are inhabited by real people—fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles, grandmothers, and neighbours. One can feel the texture of a grandmother’s shawl and sense the stench of the overflowing drains, as also the everydayness of the uncertainty that plagued all communities in the Valley. As one progresses through the book, however, there is a sense of deja-vu that comes from realising that it is the same story, told over and over, only with different names.
While the volume does not purport to be a “complete” story of the tragedy that is Kashmir, restricting itself to the stories of the Pandits, it fails to offer a broader perspective of what the decades of unrest has meant to all people. What about those who stayed behind—those of the “majority”? The desolation that is written into the pictures of abandoned Pandit homes is also seen on the faces of the many mothers whose sons have encountered the army. But to be fair, that is not what Gigoo and Sharma have set out to do.
The strength of the volume—and perhaps also the source of its repetitiveness—is that it draws on a range of ordinary people whose lives were thrown into disarray by the way the game was played by politicians and the Army on either side. Memory-making is after all an imperfect, but essential activity. And as others continue to “dig deep” into the memories of such ordinary people, to elicit a true plurality of voices, we need to make space for the stories that have emerged so far, before we can find the “healthy antidote” to the remembered horrors of the past.