Effort to unravel the knot that is Kashmir
Reviewed by Manisha Gangahar

A Tangled Web: Jammu & Kashmir
Ed by Ira Pande Harper Collins, Pages 284, Rs 699.

Words matter. They matter even more when they are about ordinary people, and still more when these people are suffering and have been suffering for a long time. A Tangled Web puts together quite a few essays on the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir — and not just Kashmir, the Valley. Ira Pande, in her editorial, insists that the book is not yet another one that might spoil the broth. Rather, the collection of essays, divided into four thematic sections, is an attempt to familiarise the reader with the components of the region, while presenting differing, at times conflicting, views on history, politics and autonomy. The final section on the beauty and art of the place serves to reiterate that it is futile to measure the suffering. Can a hierarchy be erected: "How can one say my pain is greater than yours?"

In fact, Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s "Kashmir as a syndrome", the very first essay in the table of contents, puts the issue in perspective. "In all narratives about Kashmir there is now only a subtext, no text`85 There are too many people trying to change things in Kashmir, too few giving a space of understanding." When regions of the same state and communities have created their own narratives of victimhood and resentments, the larger story goes missing. Perhaps, Amarnath is no longer a symbol of cultural harmony but a reminder that there is nothing as an ordinary administrative transaction in the state. Who should one blame?

More than often, and no matter how hard one tries not to, the Valley is overwhelming, both in the literal and the literary sense. What is Kashmir? Who is a Kashmiri? What is Kashmiriyat? The answer changes at different points of time and that is what A Tangled Web debates. While Ashutosh Varshrey argues that it is the contradictions and paradoxes of the three nationalism — religious, secular and ethnic — represented by the three regions, Pakistan, India and Kashmir that have been overlooked while debating about the conflict, Nitasha Kaul (in "On loving and losing Kashmir") insists that it isn’t only nationalism but geopolitics too that has played a role in victimising the Kashmiri people. She goes beyond the geography, as she puts it: "Calling a place an ‘issue’in international relations is euphemism for restrictions on human rights..."

When political mobilisation occurs along religious and regional lines, not just ideology but identity is also appropriated. So, Philip Oldenburg rightly talks about the gaps in political identity of the state, while Amitabha Pande delves into the sacrosanct nature of conceptual constructs in relation to the Kashmir conflict. The writings examine the dynamics of various identities, how they get essentialised and politicised, while exploring their interplay with the state. The absence of jargon is a bonus.

An exceptional write-up in the collection is "Two faces of Janus," where Arif Ayaz Parrey presents a "non-fictitious interview with a fictitious stone-pelter" and a "mock conversation with a Civil Services aspirant". The former brings philosophical wit on paper, but its blunt honesty clears the mind: "Over time, I also began to understand the symbolism of stone-pelting`85 Don’t give me this non-violence falasferry. It makes me sick. My heart has turned to stone, I strike it and it hurts my hand`85 we are involved in this struggle for personal reason."

To break the monotony, the photographs in black and white take over from the text to tell a story, but not in so many words. Militarisation, human rights violations, wounds and grief on the one hand, balms, celebration and a taste of paradise on the other; burden of history and ambivalence of the present, nostalgia and yearning, what more is left in the store for this troubled land.

A Tangled Web features the country’s best minds, each of whom, in his or her own way, combines the understanding and instinct of what might be wrong or missing with the pursuit to untangle. If read independently, they might appear biased in their opinions, but when it is a collection, the kaleidoscopic perspectives allow the readers to make their own sense of the tangle.

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