In January 1990, a young Kashmiri Pandit, Sagar’s three-month vacation in Jammu seemed a holiday without an end. As political tensions rose in Kashmir, it wasn’t easy for his family to return home. The 10-year-old understood what it meant to live in “a place of conflict”. He feared being forgotten by his friends back home and when his parents made him join a new school, he thought this meant he was “never going to see home again”.
Sagar is one of the protagonists of Kashmiri author Mehak Jamal’s book, Loal Kashmir : Love and Longing in a Torn Land (Harper Collins).
“‘Loal’ means love, affection, and belonging in Kashmiri,” Jamal tells TMS. The book features Sagar and 15 others trying to live in “a place of conflict” – a phrase Jamal uses often to describe Kashmir. Started as a “memory project” in 2020, it is a compilation of stories from the 1980s, 1990s, the 2000s, and around the time of the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35(A).
The idea for the project came to Jamal after the abrogation which was followed by a month-long communication blockade in Kashmir. The mobile phone and internet services were suspended; people had limited access to the outside world. “It took months for the internet to be restored, and even then, we only had a 2G network. Then came the COVID-19 lockdown,” she says. “I was curious to understand and look at love against the backdrop of what we were going through.”
Love from the valley
Apart from the conflict, Jamal’s female protagonists, Laila, Bushra, and others, fight against patriarchy, oppression, and for their own freedom. The author points out how public spaces are often more welcoming to men than to women.“Women don’t always have the same access to public spaces. Men have mostly been at the forefront of resistance and protest, but it was in the 2000s when women, too, stepped out and raised their voices. Even after the abrogation, they showed up. Also, in the book, you’ll see women who push boundaries to express their love, despite coming from patriarchal backgrounds.”
In one of the chapters, Jamal writes about Zara. Originally from Kashmir but born in Saudi Arabia, Zara was newly married and ready to begin a new life in the US with her Kashmiri husband, Rehan. However, stringent travel restrictions imposed after the 9/11 attacks, prevented her from leaving the country for nearly a year. The couple faced constant communication hurdles, and for Zara—a biomedical genetics student—it became difficult to keep up with her studies, especially when “she was with an internet that was barely hanging with a thread”.
“Love is a universal emotion,” the writer says, adding, “This book isn’t only about romantic love. It’s about platonic,as well as familial love, and the love for one’s homeland.”
No self-censoring
The author remarks that she didn’t have to self-censor about the conflict (despite the sensitivity of the subject) during the writing process, as all the stories came from real people. “I didn’t self-censor. I didn’t have to,” she explains. “I was simply sharing the stories that were told to me. However, I did add context–details about places and events–to help readers understand better. In the first chapter, for instance, I included a brief history of Kashmir to give an overview of what has happened over the past few years, and even in the past century.”
Also a filmmaker, Jamal feels that “films face much more censorship than books”. “Writing this book gave me the space to explore the issue with more depth and complexity,” she adds.
With the mentions of nun-chai (salty tea) and tsot (bread), and the falling chinar leaves, an imagery of a typical Kashmiri life emerges in the readers’ minds. Jamal stresses that people often overlook the small, everyday details in conflict-prone areas, assuming they’re just a part of life there.
The author believes that the lived reality of any dispute can truly be written only by those who have experienced it. “People can, and do, write about Kashmir academically, and journalists often cover it in-depth. That work is important,” she says. “But stories–whether memoirs, fiction, non-fiction, or short stories–come from a personal space. That’s why I feel more Kashmiris should take the initiative to explore their own communities and lives, and choose which stories to tell, including the stories that might seem small or insignificant. Because often, those are the ones that matter most."