Rewriting History: A Study of Shalimar the Clown and The Collaborator as Counter Narratives of the Kashmir Conflict
A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Award of the Degree of
Master of Philosophy in English
by B. Raghavi (Reg. No.1630018)
Under the Supervision of Abhaya N B Associate Professor
Department of English
CHRIST (Deemed to be University) BENGALURU, INDIA July, 2018
Approval of Dissertation
Dissertation entitled Rewriting History: A Study of Shalimar the Clown and The
Collaborator as Counter narratives by B Raghavi 1630018 is approved for the award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in English.
Supervisor
______
Chairperson
______
General Research Coordinator
______
Date: …………………
Place: Bengaluru
Declaration
I B Raghavi hereby declare that the dissertation, titled ‘Rewriting History: A study of
Shalimar the Clown and The Collaborator as Counter narratives’ is a record of original research work undertaken by me for the award of the degree of Master of Philosophy in
English. I have completed this study under the supervision of Abhaya N B, Associate
Professor, Department of English.
I also declare that this dissertation has not been submitted for the award of any degree, diploma, associateship, fellowship or other title. It has not been sent for any publication or presentation purpose. I hereby confirm the originality of the work and that there is no plagiarism in any part of the dissertation.
Place: Bengaluru Date: B Raghavi Reg No.1630018 Department of English CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bengaluru
Certificate
This is to certify that the dissertation submitted by B Raghavi 1630018 ‘Rewriting History:
A Study of Shalimar the Clown and The Collaborator as Counter narratives’ is a record of research done by her during the academic year 2016-2018 under my supervision in partial fulfilment for the award of Master of Philosophy in English
This dissertation has not been submitted for the award of any degree, diploma, associateship, fellowship or other title. I hereby confirm the originality of the work and that there is no plagiarism in any part of the dissertation.
Place: Bengaluru Date:
Abhaya N B Head of the Department Department of English CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bengaluru Signature of the Head of the Department Department of English CHRIST (Deemed to be University) Bengaluru
3
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my supervisor Dr. Abhaya N. B for her continuous support and guidance throughout the course of my MPhil research. Her patience and motivation has helped me at all times of writing my dissertation.
I extend my gratitude to my university for providing an excellent coursework and library facilities. My sincere thanks also goes to my internal examiner Dr. Sushma for her timely suggestions and feedback.
I am thankful to my friends and family for being by my side at all times of the research.
Abstract
This research is a detailed analysis of Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie and The
Collaborator by Mirza Waheed as counter narratives which narrate the history of conflict in
Kashmir from the perspective of Kashmiris as it engulfed their lives, families and villages.
The novels foreground the stories and voices of the people of Kashmir which remains largely unrecorded in the nationalist discourse. By incorporating local and plural narratives, the novels break the monopoly of singular and grand nationalist history and provide an alternative view and understanding of the history of violence in Kashmir.
The Collaborator tells the poignant story of a young Kashmiri Gujjar boy whose dilemma over whether or not to follow his friends across the Line of Control to train as a militant gives an insight into the mental workings and confusions faced by Kashmiri youth who are pressured and lured by competing ideological groups. It also portrays the dark and unethical operations of the Indian Army in remote villages of Kashmir which remain generally unknown and unreported. Shalimar the Clown presents its central plot of the union between a
Kashmiri Muslim boy, Shalimar and a Kashmiri Pandit girl, Boonyi and the fateful intervention in their relationship of the American ambassador to India Max Ophlus as a semi allegorical tale to expound the conflation of multiple forces that gave rise to the situation of conflict in Kashmir. The novel illustrates the plight of Kashmiris caught in a power struggle between military oppression, religious extremism and neo imperialism.
Through personal stories the novels weave the larger narrative of the social, political and ideological climate of Kashmir. This research explores how revisiting and reinvestigating this complex history from the perspective of Kashmiris provides fresh insights and paves the path towards understanding the conflict in all its intricacies.
Contents
Approval of Dissertation ii
Declaration iii
Certificate iv
Acknowledgement v
Abstract vi
Contents vii
1. Introduction 1
1.1 Primary Sources: Shalimar the Clown and The Collaborator 6
1.2 Methodology: Historiography 9
1.3 Literature Review 16
1.4 Need to examine the conflict in the 21st Century 24
Works Cited 26
2. Kashmir: The story of a shattered utopia 29
2.1 The implications of Globalization 32
2.2 The heydays of Kashmiriyat 40
2.3 The political allegory and the demise of Kashmiriyat 43
2.4 Shalimar the Clown as a Counter Narrative 48
Works Cited 50
3. The Story of the lost generation of Kashmir 51
3.1 Contrast between the blissful past and the dismal present 52
3.2 The Rise of the Liberation movement and the underlying contradictions 55
3.3 Critique of the unchecked power vested in the Indian army 61
3.4 The dilemma of the protagonist 66
3.5 The death of a community and a village 71
3.5.1 A loving Portrait of Kashmiri Culture and its demise 78
3.6 Final defiance 79
Works Cited 81
4. Conclusion 83
Works Cited 94
Bibliography 95
Raghavi 1
Chapter 1
Introduction
Salman Rushdie is a distinguished and renowned literary figure in the world today.
Born into a Muslim family, he went to school in Mumbai and later studied History at King‟s college, Cambridge, England. He lived in Pakistan briefly in 1964 when his family relocated there. Before he began his journey as a writer, his career included stints as a Television writer and a copywriter for an advertising agency based in England. His first novel Grimus, a part science fiction and fantasy tale, was published in 1975 and didn‟t see much success. His second novel Midnight’s Children published in 1981 propelled him into literary stardom and international fame. It brought him abundant critical acclaim and renown. Midnight’s Children won the Man Booker Prize for the year 1981, the Booker of Bookers prize in 1993 to commemorate the award‟s twenty-fifth anniversary since its inception and The Best of the
Bookers in 2008 to mark the prestigious award‟s fortieth anniversary. The success of his subsequent novels made him a name to reckon with in the literary world. Raghavi 2
Rushdie ran into an enormous and heated controversy with the publication of his fourth novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. The book drew the ire of conservative Muslims across the world and was deemed blasphemous for its alleged insults against Islam.
Escalating matters further, Iran‟s supreme religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against him on 14 Feb 1989. Following the death sentence the writer had to spend about a decade in hiding under the protection of the British Government. However, Rushdie continued to write during his hideaway time and remained an unapologetic and fierce advocate of the freedom of speech and writing carrying out his rebellion against religious tyranny. More recently in 2015 he came out openly in support of the satirical French weekly
Charlie Hebdo and condemned the attack on its headquarters in Paris. Rushdie wrote,
"Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect"
(qtd. in Feeney).
Recipient of leading literary awards and international honours, Rushdie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his services to literature in 2007. A prolific and versatile writer, he is the author of twelve novels. Rushdie has ventured into other styles of writing and wielded his pen as a novelist, essayist, critic, short story writer, editor and playwright adapting his stories for the stage including Midnight’s Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. He also wrote the screenplay for the cinematic adaption of his novel Midnight’s Children.
Rushdie‟s works deal with several themes some of which could broadly be classified under diasporic and postcolonial concerns. The idea of home, homeland, exile, migration, rootlessness, nationality and cultural collisions are common diasporic themes explored in his books. Postcolonial concerns with respect to the Indian subcontinent and Pakistan are recurrent in his works. These include examination of the effect of colonization on post- colonial societies, particularly highlighting the tension in realms such as identity, history, transformation and evolution of culture, political struggles, social changes and the status of Raghavi 3 women. His novels are also an exploration into the political, social and cultural scenario of
India and Pakistan in the horrific aftermath of the partition.
His fiction often problematizes sharp binary oppositions of self and the other, east vs. west, home vs. homelessness, rational vs. irrational, history vs. fiction to reveal complicated personalities, cultures and histories impacted by processes of colonization, migration and globalization. His novels celebrate cultural hybridity, plural identities and heterogeneity and express strong disapproval towards the abusive control and tyranny of religion. Revisiting and resurrecting historical events, personalities, myths, epics, fables and ancient characters into contemporary scenarios to achieve satirical ends is a frequent motif in his works. A scathing criticism of absolutism in political, religious and ideological matters is another common feature. His novels question principles of authority, truth, accuracy and objectivity underpinning metanarratives of history, nationalism, imperialism, patriarchy and other power structures through deliberate factual errors and dubious claims.
Rushdie‟s works challenge the traditional understanding of history by reconfiguring the central tents of Western historiography which places a strong emphasis on facts and evidence. He parodies the traditional perception of history as an objective, absolute and complete narrative to reveal the gaps and biases inherent in it. By resorting to alternative forms of narrating history, he illustrates how the past could be imagined and portrayed in multiple ways and hence, establishes history as a textual act. Rushdie‟s narration of history is overtly personal, yet deeply political.
The correlation between the private self and the public world is another trope in his works. Individual characters, their personal lives, relationships and the politics of the domestic sphere portrayed in the novels often become a semi allegorical model for the larger schemes of historical processes, the political and cultural history of a nation or a community. Raghavi 4
For example, In Midnight’s Children, Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of the midnight hour of independence, becomes the post-independence India incarnate and his life and body with its increasing cracks mirrors the major events and upheavals in the history of the Indian Nation.
Similarly, in a magic realist rendering Shame uses a private family saga to critique Pakistan‟s political and cultural history.
It is common for Rushdie‟s novels, except for a few, to have a sprawling narrative spanning multiple generations, time periods and geographical locations. His narrative strategies include the frequent use of the magic realism mode intermingling elements of reality and fantasy, juxtaposition of the grave and the humorous, interweaving of historiographical discourse with the fictive and his texts revel in parody, satire, allegory, caricatures, intertextuality and self-reflexivity. Postmodern in nature the narrative continuity of his novels is regularly interrupted by changes in the narrative mode, structure and voice.
References to films, songs, fairytales, myths, paintings, historical figures and events, literary works, authorial intrusions and commentaries enhance the scope of his novels.
As a British Indian, Rushdie has used the Indian landscape, its history, politics, tradition and cultural practices as themes and settings of several of his fictional works such as
Midnight’s Children, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Satanic Verses and The Enchantress of
Florence. However, his ethnicity as a Kashmiri Indian has prompted greater involvement in the political history of Kashmir in the book Shalimar the Clown which was shortlisted for the
Whitbread Book award. While Kashmir plays a smaller role in Midnight’s Children represented by Tai, the boatman, it takes centre stage in this novel.
Mirza Waheed, a Kashmiri now living in London, has a longer and closer connection with Kashmir than Rushdie since he was born and brought up in the city of Srinagar until he was eighteen. He studied English Literature at the University of Delhi and worked as a Raghavi 5 journalist in the city for four years. He went to London in 2001 to join the BBC‟s Urdu service. He resides in London now and works as an editor. Waheed contributes regularly to well-known dailies and periodicals such as The Guardian, Granta, Guernica, Al Jazeera
English and The New York Times.
The Collaborator published in 2011 is his debut novel which was shortlisted for the
Guardian First Book award. His second novel The Book of Gold Leaves was published in
2014 and shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. It is a love story set in
Srinagar against the backdrop of the turbulent times gripping Kashmir. Although a budding writer with only two novels to his name, Waheed is well on his way to carving a niche for himself in the world of fiction. His writings in measured tones of fury and calm register a strong resistance to dominant narratives that gloss over the tragedy of Kashmiri lives and lament the loss of Indian armed forces in the long drawn out conflict in Kashmir. Drawing heavily on his personal experiences of military oppression and partly on experiences of being witness to the monstrosity of the Indian army, his writings become the voice of the historically marginalized Kashmiri community.
His novel is among the growing number of writings in English by Kashmiris, sharing similarity of subject matter with works such as The Country without a Post office by Agha
Shahid Ali and Bhasharat Peer‟s Curfewed Night: A Memoir of War in Kashmir which speak of the most traumatic period in the lives of Kashmiris as wars between India and Pakistan and the subsequent Kashmiri armed resistance turned this picturesque place into a war zone.
These works bring attention to the long decades of silent suffering and brutalization endured by Kashmiris at the hands of the Indian army and the government‟s indifference to such cruelty. Raghavi 29
Chapter 2
Kashmir: The story of a shattered utopia
Rushdie‟s Shalimar the Clown turns to the history of conflict in Kashmir and narrates the gaps in the overarching, grand nationalist narrative by reclaiming pluralist, local narratives. The novel is divided into five sections. Each section is named after a central character in the plot. The central thematic focus of the novel is on the story of Kashmir as a paradise lost and transfigured into a battle zone. The description of Kashmir‟s scenic beauty with its crystal clear blue lakes, snowcapped mountains, splendid Chinar trees, enchanting valleys and lush Mughal gardens evoke the picture of a heavenly zone on earth much like
Eden. The intrusion of the Indian army into the valley and the intense militarization that follows becomes an eyesore that mars the beauty of this idyllic place. “It was smudge on an illuminated manuscript. It was debris floating on a glassy lake” (98). The novel has a vast geographical sweep covering far flung and diverse countries starting with the modern day
Los Angeles and going back in time to Kashmir of the late twentieth century, to Strasbourg and Paris caught in the crisis of World War II.
Raghavi 30
The love triangle involving the central characters Boonyi, Shalimar and Max which constitutes the main plot of the novel is used as an allegory to explore and critique the course of conflict in Kashmir from 1947 to the early 1990s. As Shalimar the Clown narrates the history of conflict and violence in Kashmir, the role of the Indian army, Islamic fundamentalists and American interests in exacerbating it is examined. “The characters become metaphorical extensions and repercussions of global – local politics” (Soodan 148).
Through individual stories, the larger political history of the rise of the Kashmir liberation movement, militancy, terrorism and Islamic radicalization of Kashmiri youth is told. Rushdie brings to light the crimes and brutalities committed by the Indian army stationed in Kashmir and granted immense power under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), of the
Indian government. These offences of the army and its predatory practices as opposed to its legal claims as a protector in official history are exposed in the novel. Rushdie looks upon military oppression as a major cause that fueled the liberation movement in Kashmir. The novel mourns the loss of secularism and diversity of Kashmiri culture embodied in the philosophy of „Kashmiriyat‟, besides the destruction of the picturesque landscape and lives.
The first section is called „India‟ and takes place in the present timeline of the plot in the 1990s. This section narrates the adult life of India, Max Ophul‟s daughter and ends with the murder of Max right at her doorstep by his driver Shalimar. India lives alone in Los
Angeles and is the daughter of Max, the American ambassador to India and Boonyi, a
Kashmiri woman. She is illegitimate for her parents were never married and she was born out of an affair, which cost Max his ambassadorship. This section is narrated by an omniscient third person narrator who has knowledge of the past and the immediate future and indulges in frequent foreshadowing of the dreadful imminent murder of Max. Also, short yet recurrent references to the past are made which recall Max‟s celebrated ambassadorship in India and the scandalous affair which robbed him of his reputed stature. India is twenty four years old
Raghavi 31 and has trouble sleeping; she speaks a strange language in her sleep, guttural like Arabic. Her feelings towards her father are summed up in the phrase “beloved, resented, wayward, promiscuous, often absent, irresistible father” (4).
She admires her father and tries hard to emulate him. She looks at him as “her brilliant, cosmopolitan father, Franco-American, “like Liberty”” (4). India, who seems calm, composed and in control of her life on the outside is in actuality an individual seething with rage, questions and in a state of turmoil with her inner self.
The dichotomy of what is apparently visible and what it truly is and kept hidden, the overt and the covert is a recurrent motif in the novel. Here, it is used to explain India‟s dual and contrasting personality. The unreleased pressure of her abusive childhood with the ambassador‟s wife, Peggy and her troubled school life, punctuated with incidents of violence, in England is seated deep within her and given vent when she switches to her alternate self.
There is a completely different individual that she hoards within herself. This person within her was aggressive and violent with a deadly potential to kill. Self-control was her prized characteristic and she keeps her alternate personality a secret. “She presented herself as disciplined, groomed, nuanced, inward, irreligious, understated, calm…This was the persona she wanted, that she constructed with great determination…The problem child within her was sublimated into her spare-time pursuits” (6).
India hates her name, her eastern lineage and speaks with an English accent. The apartment where India stays is inhabited by women from central and east Europe who had migrated to California. A notable character here is the hefty Russian woman Olga Simeonova who owns the building. She is a potato magician or in her own words “the last surviving descendant of the legendary potato witches of Astrakhan” (9). Once happy, admired for her
Raghavi 32 beauty, shown fear and reverence for her magical powers with the potato in her homeland, she now remains alone and abandoned in America.
She becomes significant since she epitomizes the migrant‟s loss, grief, agony, solitude and in-betweenness much like India herself, who is a product of the union between the east and the west. Olga‟s reminiscences about home tell the history of the mass migration of the twentieth century. She comes to represent the phenomenon of survival of an entire generation displaced due to war, oppression, poverty and marriage. “I live today neither in this world nor the next. A woman like me, she lives some place in between. Between the memories and the daily stuff” (9). India, too represents a similar fate for she has been dislocated from home and deprived of a family since her birth by forces beyond her control. Although, the condition of
India and Olga may overtly seem miserable, it is, in reality empowering for they have not been chained to fixed cultural, linguistic and territorial spaces.
2.1 The implications of Globalization
Rushdie has been known to acclaim the process of globalization for its powers to dissolve stable, unitary and fixed cultural and linguistic borders and identities. Globalization has relaxed and rendered flexible established geographical and cultural boundaries leading to fragmentation of traditional identities and cultures. Globalization also threatens the homogenizing and unifying aspects of the rhetoric of nationalism. The condition of hybridity and heterogeneity is produced by the phenomenon of globalization. Shalimar the Clown explores the impact of globalization on cultures, identities and places. Rushdie believes the world has never been stable and portrays the cities of Los Angeles, Paris and Strasbourg as places defined by shifting boundaries, mass migration and cultural mélange. In the 21st century, there is no place untouched by the influence of globalization. He states “Everywhere was now a part of everywhere else. Russia, America, London, Kashmir. Our lives, our
Raghavi 33 stories, flowed into one another‟s, were no longer our own, individual, discrete. This unsettles people. There were collisions and explosions” (37).
All central characters in the novel embody identities that are fluid, multiple and shifting. The journey of every character is a journey towards acquiring an alternative, heterogeneous identity. India becomes Kashmira, Bhoomi becomes Boonyi, Noman becomes
Shalimar. The change in nomenclature signifies the evolution of individual characters besides questioning inherited, fixed identities. Changing her name to Kashmira indicates India‟s acceptance of her eastern inheritance, Bhoomi wishing to be called Boonyi, meaning a celestial Chinar tree in the local Kashmiri dialect, is evidence of her love for Kashmir and the growing awareness of her beauty and sensuality. Noman changing his name to Shalimar has multiple significances. Adopted first as a stage name to suit his career as an artist, a tight rope walker in the local folk theatre form of Band Pather, it eventually becomes an alias for his terrorist activities.
In Shalimar the Clown Rushdie also examines the underside of globalization. The novel questions if terrorism wasn‟t an outgrowth of the enhanced connectivity between nations and the increased rate of migration aided by globalization. The undermining of the totalizing power of a nation state by globalization also creates a situation conducive for the involvement of foreign players with vested interests in the affairs of a nation such as the neo- imperialist interests of America in third world countries. Thus, Rushdie critiques the phenomenon of globalization and eschews from embracing any movement or ideology completely.
In the first section, Shalimar, in his forties, works as Max‟s driver and plays the part of a solicitous servant successfully. India and Shalimar meet as he brings flowers up to her sent by Max on the occasion of her birthday. He trembles with rage on seeing her for she is
Raghavi 34 the result of his wife‟s infidelity. On the other hand, India is she thrilled to know he is from
Kashmir. The only thing India knows about her mother is that she was from Kashmir. On her twenty fourth birthday, she wants nothing more than to know about her mother. She wants her father to lift the veil of secrecy over her mother and tell her story, show her photographs and give her messages from mom. Her mother remains a forbidden figure in their relationship.
At this point Max is eighty years old. India admires her father and is in awe of him.
She wants to be his splitting image. She does nothing to infuriate her father. Regret fills up within her when she hurts him with her opinions. Even when she does bring up things seething within her to be explained, answered and is met with her father‟s disapproval, she immediately drops such subjects as taboos. These include her childhood years in England, the woman who raised her but was not her mother, her own mother or the fact that she hated her name. The longing to know about her mother “was like a spear in her belly” (18). Bringing up her mother would drive her father away and she would be left with nobody to love. Hence she suppressed every urge to learn about her mother.
We are told that as an international diplomat Max had spent most of his life uncovering mysteries and secrets about others while fiercely guarding his own. He spoke volubly and the more he spoke the little truth he revealed. The novel portrays Max in a sympathetic light and despite his misdeeds his death is seen as a great disaster. The novel highlights three main portents signaling Max‟s death. The first one is his encounter with a beautiful Indian actress the day before his death which subsequently turns into an affair. The affair brings Max a lot of pleasure and seems ideal until his appearance in a late night show on TV where he “denounces the destruction of paradise in the florid language of a fading age” (26).
Raghavi 35
The host is aghast at having Max skip his bone tickling and witty stories for a tirade on the Kashmir issue with the utmost passion and vengeance. Max vents out his fury against the injustices committed to the people of Kashmir. The question of why Max who had made the deliberate choice to stay out of the public eye for years must make an appearance on TV and launch into a political speech remains a mystery even after his death. The only possible answer could be that he saw this as his last opportunity to speak out against the brutalization of an entire region he had been witness to and had done nothing about as a powerful man. To redeem himself in his own eye and ease his guilt and regret.
The second portent is Shalimar handing Max his notice to leave which leaves him shaken. Shalimar was more than a mere driver. He anticipated every need of Max and was ready to serve him even before Max let it known. Shalimar was willing to go any length to earn his master‟s trust and please him. In doing so, he becomes privy to every little aspect of
Max‟s personality, his strengths and weaknesses. Seeing Shalimar wanting to leave fills him with dread of the chaos that would follow. It is Shalimar‟s arrival that reawakens his love for
Kashmir and his history with the place. It is in some way to express his love and gratitude to
Shalimar that he makes his appearance on TV. The departure of Shalimar is as terrifying to
Max as the sight of his open grave. The third portent is the sight of the Himalayas rising along the sides as he is driven to meet India. The illusion of the Himalayas fills him with a sense of foreboding and he senses that he might be headed for extreme danger.
As Shalimar readies for the assassination, he envisions himself in the light of Shaheed
Udham Singh who showed extraordinary courage by murdering General O‟Dwyer, the man behind the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. On the fateful day Max arrives at India‟s apartment and uses the building entry phone to call India and announce his arrival when his throat is slashed open by Shalimar with a kitchen knife. As India hears her father‟s “gurgling,
Raghavi 36 incoherent, choking noise she recognized it as the voice of death and began to run” (40). She rushes down to find her father lying in a pool of blood.
Aghast and appalled she dashes back to her room and locks herself. Struggling desperately to shut down the noises of ambulance, police sirens and attempts by people to reach her, she enters into a meditative state trying to take her mind off the trauma. Her final thought is one of regret at having failed to save her father and vows revenge.
The second section is named „Boonyi‟ and goes back in time to the beginning of the plot in 1940s to tell us the story of the birth of Boonyi and Shalimar, their childhood and their romantic relationship eventually culminating in a wedding. This section while narrating the major thread of the story (the love angle) also brings into picture the socio cultural ethos and the political situation in Kashmir prior to the independence of India and the formation of
Pakistan. The drastic changes that began to take over Kashmir with its intense militarization after 1947 is told through changes wrought in the lifestyle and mentality of the vilagers of
Pachigam that in due course of time destroyed the secular fabric and diversity of Kashmiri culture.
As the section opens we meet Boonyi and Shalimar, both fourteen years old and strongly attracted to each other. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul‟s mythological tale about the earth being the grabbee with no control over its destiny and the other planets being the grabbers with the power to dictate the destiny of the grabbee sets the tone and mood of the narrative comprising this section. The earth, the grabbee becomes a parallel to Boonyi and Kashmir. If
Boonyi was the grabbee, that made Shalimar the grabber. However, she wasn‟t the passive grabbee she grabbed back as well. The analogy fits Kashmir better than Boonyi since she struggles to gain back control over her life at every crisis while Kashmir is crippled by its grabbers. The use of a Hindu mythological tale to aptly describe the impending fate of
Raghavi 37
Kashmir is an instance that proves the kind of secularism that prevailed in Kashmir before the catastrophe.
Boonyi is the daughter of Pandit Pyarelal Kaul, a Kashmiri Pandit widower. She was named Bhoomi at birth but she hated it since it meant “mud and dirt and stone” and preferred to be called “Boonyi” meaning the “celestial Kashmiri Chinar tree” (46). Shalimar is the son of Abdullah Noman, the headman of the village, and went by the name Noman Sher Noman.
He had only recently taken on his professional name “Shalimar” meaning “abode of joy” after completing his apprenticeship. Their village Pachigam was the village of the travelling players who put up clown stories and performed acrobats for entertainment, a folk art form called Band Pather.
Pandit Pyarelal Kaul is a loving father and an amiable man loved by the people of the village. Noman calls him Sweetie Uncle although they are “not connected by blood or faith.
Kashmiris were connected by deeper ties than those” (47). His daughter was the only family he had and the greatest treasure left behind by his wife as she departed the world. Despite him doting on his daughter, his wife and mother of Boonyi, Pamposh came to her in her dreams on most nights “letting her in on womanly secrets and family history and giving her good advice and unconditional love” (51) which Boonyi kept a secret from her father. She confides in her daughter of the unhappiness and the sense of entrapment she felt in her married life living in a little village like Pachigam. Pamposh is a magic realist manifestation of Boonyni‟s inner voice who longs to escape the simple, conservative, parochial life offered by her village.
As Noman and Boonyi approach their fourteenth birthday, they decide to strengthen their bond since birth and consummate their relationship. Boonyi is a spirited, bold and a rebellious girl who cared little for the traditional code of good behavior and restrictions that
Raghavi 38 governed a woman‟s life. She is daring and adventurous who wants to experience every thrill that life has to offer. Shalimar, on the other hand, is the gentlest of boys, funny, graceful, charming and skilled on the high rope. Boonyi imagines him as the sweetest living soul who wouldn‟t harm even a fly.
Noman chooses the name “Shalimar” partly to celebrate his connection with Boonyi since birth as they were both born on the same night in the Shalimar garden and partly in her mother‟s honour who died during childbirth. The night of their birth marks the invasion of
Kashmir by tribesmen from Pakistan in 1947. The loudest rumour proclaims that “An army of Kabailis from Pakistan has crossed the border, looting, raping, burning, killing and it is nearing the outskirts of the city” (85). What terrifies the villagers the most is the rumour that
“The Maharaja has run away” (85). The appalled villagers erupt with impassioned responses that give the political and historical background to the story. It has been two months since partition and the Maharaja of Kashmir has not yet pledged his allegiance to any side. Pakistan in an effort to terrorize Kashmiris into joining it has sent hordes of fearsome tribesmen who enter and pillage Kashmir and reach as far as the capital city Srinagar. The confusion, divided opinions and loyalties among Kashmiris are reflected in responses such as “Pakistan has right on its side because here in Kashmir a Muslim population is being prevented by a Hindu ruler from joining their coreligionists in a new Muslim state” (86), “How can you speak of right, when Pakistan has unleashed this murderous horde upon us?” (86) Others blame the
Maharaja for dilly dallying without joining either side. The actual political situation of
Kashmir in 1947 is narrativized in rumours.
At fourteen years of age, Shalimar is already an expert at climbing trees and tightrope walking. He was introduced to tightrope walking at a tender age by his father Abdullah. As a father of four sons he loved his youngest son Noman/Shalimar the most although he would
Raghavi 39 not betray it in front of his family “He had been nine years old when he learned the secret of airwalking” (55). It was a magical and exhilarating experience for him. Ever since then
Shalimar couldn‟t keep himself from the high rope and practiced at all times of the day and in all seasons. Tightrope walking is a recurrent motif in the novel and becomes a magic space for Shalimar to transcend obstacles. His escape from prison years later, after he is pronounced guilty of Max‟s murder, has inmates swear that he virtually walked on thin air.
Boonyi was a mesmerizing dancer and performed in the village troupe alongside
Shalimar. She is the dominant partner in their relationship. She leads and Shalimar follows. It was Boonyi‟s decision to consummate their relationship and strengthen it for posterity. At the end of it, Boonyi is thrilled by the pleasures of lovemaking but for Shalimar it signals an unbreakable lifelong commitment. He declares “Don‟t you leave me now or I‟ll never forgive you, and I‟ll have my revenge, I‟ll kill you and if you have any children by another man I‟ll kill the children also” (61). It is the events of this night that set the lives of these two young lovers on the road to tragedy.
Shalimar‟s father, the village headman, Abdullah Noman is a hardworking and self- made man who strove hard to ensure the wellbeing and safety of his family and the village. A rational, broadminded and a secular man he is loved and admired by his people. He has an imperial and commanding personality and walks the path of truth and integrity inducing a great deal of respect among his followers and fear in miscreants. The welfare of the village was his utmost priority and he devises numerous methods to boost its economic prosperity one of which causes the first ever rift among Kashmiris. This dispute between the two villages snowballs into the Pot war which foreshadows the dark and unspeakable horrors lurking ahead.
Raghavi 40
The pot war preceded the birth of Shalimar and Boonyi. Each village in Kashmir specializes in a specific occupation. Pachigam was the village of the travelling players who performed “traditional entertainments known as bhand pather” (61). The nearby village
Shirmal was the village of the cooks who specialized in the cuisine of Kashmir. As the actor/manager of the travelling players of his village, Abdullah Noman came up with a plan to provide rounded service to his audience by offering them entertainment and a feast. Soon the men of Pachigam learned to cook and put up a great show of entertainment and a scrumptious feast. Despite the success of their cooking venture the women of the village were filled with a sense of foreboding, who saw it as threatening the harmonious relationship among Kashmiris.
The cooks of the village of Shirmal saw their economic prospects diminishing and staged an attack on their rivals in Pachigam. This brawl between the two villages came to be called the Pot war. Although Pachigam emerges as the winner, it horrified people from both villages. It was the first time Kashmiris had fought among themselves and had so outrageously violated peace and harmony between two villages. It came as a shocker to realize “that Kashmiris would attack other Kashmiris driven by such crummy motivations as envy, malice and greed” (62-63). The pot war creates an ambience of terror and portends the bloodcurdling violence waiting to break out and decimate the peaceful and prosperous villages of Kashmir.
2.2 The Heydays of Kashmiriyat
Shalimar the clown presents the village of Pachigam as a microcosmic reflection of the state of Kashmir. Kashmir is portrayed as a paradigm of a secular, liberal and peaceful society where a plurality of religions and cultures coexist in harmony and converge to form a syncretic ethos. The principle of Kashmiriyat governed the lives of Kashmiris. As the
Raghavi 41 headman Abdullah Noman explains “Kashmiriyat [or] Kashmiriness [is] the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences”
(110). In Kashmir the words „Muslim‟ and „Hindu‟ were merely descriptions and not divisions. The Kashmiri Pandits unlike Brahmins in the rest of the country ate meat like their
Muslim brothers and the Kashmiri Muslims defied the austere monotheism of their faith by
“worshipping at the shrines of the valley‟s many local saints, its pirs” (83). Hinduism and
Islam intertwined and influenced each other before conflict struck and darkness shrouded the golden era that began in the reign of Budshah.
The ideal of Kashmiriyat is exemplified in two instances; the day of Shalimar and
Boonyi‟s birth and their wedding. The birthday of the two young lovers falls on the tenth day of Dusshera celebration after nine days of navratri. A grand occasion when the Hindu King of
Kashmir organizes a night of Dasshera festivities at the Shalimar gardens for the public. In order to augment the royal staff, people from the villages of Pachigam and Shirmal are called in to provide food and theatrical entertainment at the Dasshera banquet. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul is ecstatic and considers the occasion the perfect model of secularism and communal harmony in Kashmir. He says,
Today our Muslim village, in the service of our Hindu maharaja, will cook and
act in a Mughal – that is to say Muslim- garden, to celebrate the anniversary of
the day on which Ram marched against Ravan to rescue Sita. What is more,
two plays are to be performed: our traditional Ram Leela, and also Budshah,
the tale of a Muslim sultan. (71)
As the love affair between Shalimar and Boonyi comes to the notice of villagers, the village Panchayat convenes to decide the fate of the relationship. The verdict holds that despite their affiliations to different religions the lovers be allowed to marry to uphold in an
Raghavi 42 exemplary fashion the ideal of Kashmiriyat, “that bridges all religious and cultural differences” (Soodan 152). The section ends with the wedding of Boonyi, Kashmiri Hindu and Shalimar, Kashmiri Muslim. However, Boonyi is restless and perturbed at the thought of having to spend her entire life in a little, unknown village like Pachigam. She feels trapped.
She craves a bigger, more adventurous and a successful life which would allow her to explore the limits of her freedom.
It is at this point that Max Ophuls, the American ambassador to India enters the picture. The team of actors from Pachigam is invited to Delhi to entertain the new diplomat.
Boonyi goes to Delhi with the team and performs a mesmerizing dance. Max is instantaneously enamoured of her and Boonyi is strongly attracted to him. She decides not to go back to her village and stay back in Delhi as Max‟s mistress.
The third section is named „Max‟ and recalls Max‟s youth in the Nazi occupied
French town of Strasbourg and his heroic efforts to escape the Nazis. This section journeys back in time and half way across the world to when World War II broke out and reached its peak. As a Jew, Max‟s successful attempts to foil Nazi attacks, his marriage to Peggy, an
English espionage and his final escape from Strasbourg have become a modern day legend and catapulted him to the status of a war time hero. He settles down in America with his wife and pens a book on his war time experiences and romance. The book is an international success and they become a much celebrated couple. Max is invited into the American administration and offered a prestigious office.
But that‟s not all there is to Max. He has a secret life. He is a compulsive Casanova who sleeps around with every woman who is drawn to his larger than life image. Peggy knows all about it yet chooses to stay in the marriage to keep legends of their extraordinary love alive and famous. Walking out of the marriage would mean, relinquishing her celebrity
Raghavi 43 status and shattering the dream of a perfect love story that she has been a part of and sold to millions. Hence, she keeps her knowledge of Max‟s endless affairs a secret. Max secretly also craves a family with Peggy and feels his wife‟s inability to conceive a child is what drove him to these extra marital affairs.
At the age of fifty, he is posted in India as the official ambassador from USA. He endears himself to the people of India and has an illustrious career until his meeting with
Boonyi. Both Max and Boonyi are ruined by their amorous affair and fall into disgrace out of which they never fully recover. The affair costs Max his ambassadorship and he is deported to America. The magnitude of Boonyi‟s loss is immense. She loses a loving husband,
Shalimar, her daughter Kashmir, her family and dearest of all her home, Kashmir. Her loss of
Kashmir is symbolic of the trauma and dislocation of Kashmiri Pundits who were deprived of their homeland as communal violence tore apart the two religious groups.
2.3 The Political allegory and the demise of Kashmiriyat
The personal lives, stories and struggles of characters in Shalimar the Clown are symptomatic of the larger political forces and historical processes that originated and perpetuated the history of conflict in Kashmir. Their lives are intricately tied to the political reality and history of the region. Every character, in his/her journey and story, personifies the power struggles between competing ideological groups to prevail over one another. The union between Shalimar and Boonyi signifies the manifestation of the spirit of Kashmiriyat and depicts the harmonious co-existence between Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims until the intervention of tyrannical forces in the form of US interests, Islamic extremists from Pakistan and the Indian army. Researcher Soodan in a nutshell describes the power tussle between the three groups to claim Kashmir as,
Raghavi 44
The rich and harmonious cultural landscape of Kashmir is annihilated by the
infiltration of repressive and totalitarian forces in the form of religious
radicalization and state sponsored terrorism from Pakistan, the presence of and
the wrecking of violence by the national army in the valley and the intrusion
of Maximilian Ophlus as the representative of American neo-colonial interests
and politics. (152)
The arrival of Max in the lives of the young couple spells the death of their relationship. Boonyi finds in Max an opportunity to realize her dreams. In lieu of satisfying his physical needs she demands dance lessons and a luxurious place to live in Delhi.
However, she soon grows weary of the lustful relationship and realizes she had never loved
Max. He was merely her channel of liberation from the limitations and restrictions of a traditional, parochial life in Pachigam. She yearns to be back with her loving husband,
Shalimar in Kashmir. Max, on the other hand finds himself falling in love with Boonyi, although he had never intended to and considered the relationship one of his many flings.
Depressed and disfigured, Boonyi confronts Max with news of her pregnancy and threatens to make their affair public if he didn‟t take her back to Pachigam. Before Max can take stock of the situation, the affair becomes makes it to the news leaked secretly by his wife
Peggy. The public uproar over the affair strips him of his high office and he is ordered back to America. This incident estranges Max from Boonyi and Peggy makes use of this opportunity to help Boonyi get back to Pachigam. Peggy takes Boonyi to her village on the condition that she must let her have Max‟s child. Helpless, Boonyi gives away her daughter
Kashmira, later renamed India by Peggy. She reaches Pachigam only to learn that she had been declared dead by her family. With no one to turn to Boonyi lives in a secluded hut atop a hill on the outskirts of the village, only later to be found and murdered by Shalimar.
Raghavi 45
Max‟s seduction of Boonyi and the subsequent exploitation of her beauty, youth, naivity and sensuality is a critique of the power games played by America in third world countries for its own gains. The presence of Max and the undesirable role played by him in wreaking havoc with the lives of young lovers is as Nadeem Jehangir Bhat comments, “an effective allegory of US involvement in Kashmir affairs” (201). Shalimar the Clown through the figure of Max Ophuls, a former resistance hero of anti-fascism, denounces the hypocrisy of the stance of US which outwardly proclaims to be a champion of western liberal democracy but covertly sponsors wars in third world countries to serve its neo-imperialist motives.
Besides the role of US interests in aggravating the conflict in Kashmir, Shalimar the
Clown identifies nationalism and religious extremism as two key factors in destroying this peaceful paradise and accelerating the death of the ideal of Kashmiriyat. While the dangers of nationalism is represented by the Indian army captain Colonel Kachwaha. The divisive influence of religious extremism is portrayed by Iron mullah. Colonel Kachhwaha‟s lonely, dull, restrained and sexually frustrated life encounters hope, excitement and new energy when he lays his eyes on Boonyi for the first time. She was what he needed to redeem his life from a debilitating monotony and isolation. She was the poetry he yearned for in his life.
When he professes his love for her, Boonyi scornfully turns him down. The colonel is stung by this rejection and vows to have his revenge on the entire village for Boonyi‟s insulting behavior. This resolve of the colonel to punish an entire village for a personal disappointment goes to show the serious misuses of power carried out by men in the Indian army. The episode is a meditation on the unlimited and unguarded power vested in the hands of the army personnel to act out their selfish motives at the cost of many, innocent lives.
Raghavi 46
The fourth section is named „Shalimar‟ and brings the love triangle and the history of conflict in Kashmir to its climax. The time is the 1960s and the liberation movement demanding a separate sovereign state of Kashmir is just starting up and the Indian administration is determined to nip it in the bud. After Boonyi‟s betrayal and infidelity,
Shalimar is overcome with fury and vows to avenge his loss, shame and dishonor. He resolves to kill Boonyi and Max. Meanwhile, he channels his volcanic rage into the Kashmiri separatist movement and receives training as a guerilla fighter and an insurgent in a place across the Line of Control, the de facto border of Kashmir. He becomes an easy victim of greater political and ideological forces who exploit his personal sentiments to their own political ends. He doesn‟t feel drawn to the separatist agenda or the militaristic ideology, but he sustains through the grueling process of ideological indoctrination by strength of his burning desire for revenge.
So is his younger brother Anees whose dexterity is a much in demand skill in the separatist struggle to make bombs. Both of them are sucked into the Kashmiri resistance without any conviction or knowledge of its aims. Their personal circumstances and general disgruntlement with life throws them into the liberation front. However, a few months into the training and they are convinced them of its ideology and choose to remain within it, even if they didn‟t feel drawn to it in the beginning. Except in the case of Shalimar, who is still driven by his thirst for revenge and looks upon the whole process as training needed to imbibe him with the skills to carry out his ulterior motives.
Rushdie is hopeful of the Kashmiri resistance until it comes under the influence of extremists from Pakistan and Afghanistan who use these men for terrorist activities under the promise of funding the liberation movement of Kashmir. Kashmiri youth merely become pawns in these powerful hands and the Kashmiri Liberation movement soon becomes an
Raghavi 47
Islamic fundamentalist resistance seeking to create an Islamist state. Hence begins Shalimar‟s journey from an artist to a terrorist. He is turned into an assassin whose assignments go beyond fighting the Indian Army to carrying out terror attacks around the world to spread the power of Islam. From a clown in the Band Pather troupe who entertained and amused the audience with his tightrope walking and other acrobatic skills, Shalimar transforms into a terrorist, an assassin who kills ruthlessly. The transformation is also a comment on the sad and pitiful condition of Kashmiri youth who encounter hostile forces and their snare on an everyday basis as a result of the growing political turmoil in Kashmir.
Shalimar the Clown strongly condemns the radicalization of the Kashmiri population by Islamic fundamentalists. The character of Iron mullah with its divisive preaching sows the seeds of intolerance and animosity between the Hindus and Muslims. His magic realist birth and evolution from the mountain of metal junk discarded by the Indian army is a symbolic representation of the consolidated efforts of the army and religious extremists in annihilating the ideal of Kashmiriyat. The iron mullah advocates a militant and conservative brand of
Islam as opposed to the plural and liberal Islamic ethos followed in Kashmir. He forces the veil on the women, instigates the men in the village to turn militants to protect the faith and antagonizes Muslims and Hindus.
As more and more people are swayed by the seditious and provocative speeches of the iron mullah, an atmosphere of fear and insecurity begins to seep deep within the village of
Pachigam culminating in the exodus of the Pandits. While the Indian Army is clearly aware of the miscreants spreading communal tension, it does nothing and watches the communal disharmony escalate. With the exit of Kashmiri Pandits, Kashmir is declared a disturbed region by the Indian government. This was what Colonel Kachhwaha had been waiting for to wreak vengeance on the village for rejection by Boonyi. He takes his army men into
Raghavi 48
Pachigam and destroys it, wiping away its existence from the map. Every man is dragged on to the streets and killed, every woman raped and killed and every child beaten up and killed.
With the village decimated by the Indian army and Boonyi killed by Shalimar, the ideal of
Kashmiriyat meet its end.
2.4 Shalimar the Clown as a Counter Narrative
The final section is called „Kashmira‟ and chronicles India‟s life after her father‟s death, starting with her journey to Kashmir to discover her roots, finding love and her confrontation with Shalimar. After the death of her father, India takes on the name Kashmira.
She decides to visit Kashmir in search of her biological mother and visits her grave. It is only after the trial and imprisonment of Shalimar that she feels her life return to normality.
After she loses her father, her bond with her departed mother is strengthened as she changes her name and reclaims her Kashmiri identity. Shalimar escapes prison to finish his last obstacle to fulfilling his vow of erasing every living memory of Boonyi. The novel ends with Shalimar breaking into India‟s room and finding her armed to face him.
The heart of the novel is the narrative woven around the history of conflict in Kashmir and encapsulated in individual stories. The book offers no solution or closure either to the love story or the Kashmiri conflict. It is in one sense Rushdie‟s lament over the annihilation of a paradise, the homeland of his grandparents which occupies a special place in his heart.
He portrays Kashmir‟s tragedy as a lesson that demonstrates the dangers of borders, nationalism, religious extremism and unbridled power vested in the army. It is also a condemnation of India, as the largest democratic nation fails to implement its tall democratic and secular claims in Kashmir. According to Literary critic Prema A. Rocha “The accord of the peaceful valley is shattered by the twin forces of nationalism and religious bigotry that
Raghavi 49 begin to infiltrate the idyllic region. The Indian army and the Islamic fundamentalists play villainous roles” (162).
The novel ridicules India‟s relationship with Kashmir that is built upon the concept of
„integral‟. The Indian government‟s stance that Kashmir was an integral part of India and the
Indian military presence was integral to its effort to preserve the integrity of the Indian nation is debunked to show how such a philosophy justified all military excesses and brutalities as efforts made to quell subversive actions from the ungrateful Kashmiris who favoured disintegration. Even when the ground reality was starkly different, and “truth and integrity conflicted it was integrity that had to be given precedence” (96).
The reign of terror and oppression unleashed by the Indian army remains unrecorded in the nationalist history. The discourse of nationalism is built upon the premise of homogeneity and unity and suppresses difference. The history of a nation is presented as a linear, continuous and monolithic record. Shalimar the Clown challenges the traditional idea of a nation as an organic, homogenized entity and undermines nationalist history by calling attention to the gaps, silences and discordant aspects of this unified history. By voicing local narratives, Shalimar the Clown foregrounds differences and contradictions in history establishing history writing as an imaginative, subjective and interpretative activity.
As critic Soodan points out, “The novel is a double voiced discourse where the monologism of canonical history is refracted and diffused into a plurality of previously suppressed voices which vie for a place in history” (148). The novel, as a counter narrative, constructs an alternative history from a plethora of voices and stories from Kashmir which have been relegated to the margins in the name of homogenization and unification in official history. The novel shows how the secular policy of India is a farce in Kashmir where violence reigns and truth is subordinated to serve the cause of nationalism. Thus, under the
Raghavi 50 debilitating effect of nationalism, religious fanaticism and neo-imperialism Pachigam‟s utopic status is shattered and replaced with torture, rape and carnage.
Raghavi 6
Besides, throwing light on the violence perpetrated by the Indian army, Waheed reveals the complexities in the Kashmiri political scenario, the differences and divisions among Kashmiris themselves in their vision and aspirations for the future of a peaceful
Kashmir. Thereby, undermining dominant perception that separatism and the desire for an independent Kashmir is the unanimous and undisputed choice of the people of Kashmir. The
Collaborator explores the wide-ranging responses to the Kashmiri armed resistance and
Liberation movement.
In terms of narrative style and technique, Waheed shows a proclivity towards postmodern strategies of magic realism, irony and parody. The caricaturist portrayal of the
Indian governor in The Collaborator is a strong satire directed at the shallowness of Indian administrators. The realism of the narrative is interspersed with magic realist episodes which heighten poignancy and sorrow for the loss of misled, gullible young lives. The novel seamlessly incorporates historical facts and events into the fictional narrative that records the experience of a certain time.
1.1 Primary Sources: Shalimar the Clown and The Collaborator
Shalimar the Clown is Rushdie‟s eighth novel published in 2005. As a quintessential
Rushdien novel it covers multiple generations, continents, time frames and stories in a cyclical fashion. Expansive and multifarious in its settings and themes, the story of the history of conflict and the political turmoil in Kashmir constitutes the heart of the novel. The most striking and familiar technique found in the works of this master storyteller of the interconnection between the personal and the public spheres is again at work here. The novel is his response and lament over the threat of religious fundamentalism and militant nationalism in emerging post-colonial nations as demonstrated in the tragedy of Kashmir. Raghavi 7
The power showdown between India and Pakistan to own this paradise has ripped apart the lives of thousands of Kashmiris and scarred its beauty forever.
Shalimar the Clown presents its central plot of the love relationship between a
Kashmiri Muslim boy Shalimar and a Kashmiri Pandit girl Boonyi and the fateful intervention in their relationship of the American ambassador to India Max Ophlus as a semi allegorical tale to explain the conflation of multiple forces that gave rise to the situation of conflict in Kashmir. Aggravating the delicate situation are the atrocities perpetrated by the
Indian army and the divisive preaching of Islamic extremists from Pakistan which feed on the loss and rage of Kashmiris. While the novel outwardly presents itself as a love triangle and revenge drama what sets it apart is the symbolism underlying the love story and its contextualization which highlights the history of violence and repression in Kashmir.
The transmutation of the protagonist Shalimar from a tight- rope artist to a terrorist explains the complexity of intentions and emotions that underlies a young Kashmiri man‟s decision to join the liberation movement of Kashmir. Highlighting the drastic and unwelcome changes that Kashmiri culture went through in the early 1990s, the novel mourns the loss of secularism, tolerance, diversity and communal harmony that formed the core values of the ideal of Kashmiriyat. Natasha Walter calls the novel “a paean of love to a destroyed homeland”.
The Collaborator is Mirza Waheed‟s debut novel published in 2011. The novel vividly recalls Kashmir of a certain time when the liberation or azadi movement to free
Kashmir reached an unprecedented high. Through fictionalizing history, Waheed records the experiences of growing up in Kashmir for an entire generation of young men. As someone who had lived his childhood and adolescent years through this horrific time of tension and war, he brings to life memories of curfew, fear, violence and death in his writing. This novel Raghavi 8 is the writer‟s impassioned attempt to speak up for Kashmir and to lift the shroud of silence covering its suffering and tragic fate.
The Collaborator tells the poignant story of a young Kashmiri Gujjar boy, at the height of the Kashmir insurgency, who is mired in a dilemma of wanting to follow his friends to the Pakistani training camps to train as a militant and yet doesn‟t want to abandon his family. The Indian army Captain capitalizes his indecisiveness to crack down on Kashmiri youth in his hunt for the militants. The novel gives an insight into the mental workings and confusions faced by Kashmiri youth who are pressured and lured by competing ideological groups to prove their loyalty to the cause of Kashmir.
The novels Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie and The Collaborator by Mirza
Waheed were published six years apart; the former in 2005 and the latter in 2011. Shalimar the Clown chronicles the history of Kashmir starting a few years before 1947, the year India attained its independence from British administration and was officially partitioned into India and Pakistan, to the height of Kashmir insurgency in the late 1980s. The Collaborator, on the other hand, covers the period of the rise and the height this armed conflict in Kashmir reached in the late 1980s spilling into the early 1990s.
The two novels narrate the history of conflict in Kashmir from the perspective of
Kashmiris as it engulfed their lives, families and villages. The novels situate the story of conflict as it unfolded in Kashmir in little villages, Pachigam in Shalimar the Clown and
Nowgam in The Collaborator. Through the stories of individual protagonists, their families and villages the novels weave the larger narrative of the social, political and ideological climate of the Kashmiri community.
As Shalimar the Clown and The Collaborator evoke the tragedy of Kashmir through the lives of Kashmiris they problematize the concept of a terrorist/militant and a freedom Raghavi 9 fighter. Those who are labelled terrorists by the Indian government and the army are seen by the people of Kashmir as heroes since they were boys from their families and neighbourhood who stood up against the crimes committed by the armed forces. The texts identify the Indian army as the foremost enemy of Kashmir and show military brutality as a prominent cause for the emergence of insurgent sentiments. This reverses the perception of the army as a protector in nationalistic histories to that of a tyrannical force in the retelling of history. The failure of the Indian government to implement its democratic ideals in Kashmir compounds the conflict as told through the character of the Governor in The Collaborator and the character of Colonel Kachhwaha in Shalimar the Clown. The unlimited power vested in the
Indian army is identified as one of the primary reasons for the ruination of the villages in the two novels.
Besides thematic similarities the texts show likeness in their narrative methods in the use of magic realism in clear instances of Boonyi‟s mother coming alive to support her in her ostracism in Shalimar the clown and the corpses telling their life stories to the protagonist in
The Collaborator. Both the novels break away from a linear chronological narrative and shift back and forth between the past and present time frames they cover.
1.2 Methodology: Historiography
1.2.1 Overview of the Conflict
Kashmir has been a contested territory ever since the departure of the British and the formation of the two independent nations India and Pakistan in 1947, both of which have laid claims on this princely state. It was a Muslim majority province headed by a Hindu king who signed the instrument of accession to join India setting aside its likeness to Pakistan on grounds of religious and cultural affiliation. The resultant struggle to annex this province has Raghavi 10 caused large scale violence, political instability, civil disorder and gross human rights violations, killing and displacing thousands of Kashmiris from their homeland.
Any attempt at understanding the Kashmir conflict is coloured by the nationalistic theories put forward by India and Pakistan. The voice of the people of Kashmir and their account of their lives and reality has been largely subjugated by dominant nationalistic histories from the two powerful sides. Lodged between these two competing histories, the common folk of Kashmir have been denied the agency to speak for themselves and the misery brought upon them. As the two novels narrate the history of conflict, they foreground the Kashmiri experience as it was adversely affected by the political decisions made on its behalf by the Indian government, the military aggressions and the religious manipulations and invasions conducted from the Pakistani side. In performing this function the two texts act as counter narratives.
1.2.2 Counter Narratives
Molly Andrew‟s in her essay “Counter narratives and the power to oppose” defines counter narratives as “the stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, either implicitly or explicitly to dominant cultural narratives (1).” Counter narratives are most often read in relation to dominant narratives. Dominant narratives are generally understood as discourses from dominant groups that define reality, guide our understanding and shape our opinions to corroborate its ideological position. Counter narratives challenge and reshape our prior understanding by bringing in new knowledge. A counter narrative or counter storytelling comes from those who have been pushed to the margins and whose experiences and reality do not conform to those of the dominant narratives from the powerful groups.
A Counter narrative does not completely discredit or refute commonly held beliefs or convictions but establishes an alternative perspective of viewing and thinking about chosen Raghavi 11 facets of the world. Counter narratives have the potential to improve our collective understanding and serve as a precursor to conflict resolution. This research uses the definition of counter narrative given by Raul Alberto Mora which states,
Counter narrative refers to narratives that arise from the vantage point of
those who have been historically marginalized. The idea of counter itself
implies a space of resistance. A counter narrative goes beyond the notion that
those in relative positions of power can tell the stories of those in the margins.
Instead, these must come from the margins, from the perspectives and voices
of those individuals who have been traditionally suppressed. The effect of a
counter narrative is to empower and give agency to those communities whose
stories need to be heard and told by them. By choosing their own words and
telling their own stories, members of marginalized communities provide
alternative points of view, helping to create complex narratives truly
presenting their realities. (36)
On analyzing the novels as counter narratives, it becomes evident that the writers wish to provide new insights into the history of conflict. Such an insight is possible only when it comes from those who have exclusionary knowledge of the subject, either through first-hand experience or extensive research. Mirza Waheed meets the condition of the first criteria as someone who has grown up in the turbulent times of war, violence, curfews, fear and deaths.
He truly becomes a voice from the margins.
Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, derives his knowledge from the familial space as well as through research. His Kashmiri lineage could be traced to his maternal grandparents who hailed from Kashmir and as a result having spent one too many summer vacations in the valley as a child. It may be argued that Rushdie cannot boast of a lived experience as Waheed Raghavi 12 and hence his writing is elitist in comparison. However, a closer examination of his novel reveals that by means of characterization, setting and ideological positioning, Shalimar the
Clown satisfies the essential conditions of a counter narrative. Conversely, it could also be argued that Rushdie belongs nowhere in particular. He embodies multiple cultures, identities and lives in the margins of a globalized world.
1.2.3 History and Historiography
The concept of a counter narrative which offers an alternative understanding of history calls into question the traditional construction and perception of the discipline of history itself. In a postmodern world which dismisses all forms of certainty, centrality and essentializaion, the conventional notion of history as an objective, authoritative and absolute account has to be eliminated to allow for a greater scrutiny of the methods of recording history. The conception of history as a factual and fixed report must wake way for a more critical view of history as a narrative built around historical facts and details with moorings in a certain ideology. As Alun Munslow purports, “…the histories we assign to things and people are composed, created, constituted, constructed and always situated literatures…they carry within them their author‟s philosophy or „take‟ on the world present, past and future”
(Jenkins 1991).
Taking the interrogation on writing History and historiography further, Keith Jenkins in his book Re- Thinking History sets off by emphasizing the distinction between „history‟ and „the past‟. He defines history as a discourse about the past, as that which has been written and recorded about the past and not the past itself. He refers to „the past‟ as that segment of the world which becomes the object of historian‟s attention and enquiry. Having established a clear difference between „history‟ and „the past‟, Jenkins calls Historiography as the way Raghavi 13 historians attend to the past, as the processes and methods invoked by a historian to write about the past.
Jenkins asserts that different historians will ascribe different meanings to the same historical events. Hence, any understanding of the past is incomplete if it does not offer plural and different truths. Literary narratives, oral accounts, personal reminiscences (memoir) and autobiographies acquire critical importance for this reason. As historical novels Shalimar the
Clown and The Collaborator do not use the history of conflict in Kashmir as a mere backdrop but delve into it to excavate the forgotten and the suppressed. They expose the erased past.
The intermingling of the factual and fictional in the novels shatters the epistemological certainties of dominant histories and provides a new perspective on the history of conflict.
The stark binary of historical and fictional which informs Western official historiography is subverted by the novelists in their reclamation and narration of the past.
Hayden White in his essay “The Historical text as Literary Artifact” argues that writing history very closely resembles the art of creating fiction by a novelist. The historian in performing functions of selection, omission and sequencing of historical facts and events employs the same techniques as a novelist. Every work of a historian ought to be looked upon as a narrative reflecting his or her own world view and ideological positions. Echoing similar concerns Jenkins asserts, “… that history is first and foremost a literary narrative about the past, a literary composition of the data into a narrative where the historian creates a meaning for the past” (13). In their portrayal of a fictionalized version of the conflict ridden history woven around historical facts and events, Rushdie and Waheed perform the role of writers as well as historians. Hence, Shalimar the Clown and The Collaborator rise above the level of fiction to become historiographical discourses. Raghavi 14
Jenkins repeatedly emphasizes the literary character of history and the politics of its production. It implies that despite anchoring history in archival records, scientific methods and objective representation, a historian offers a narrative of history which fits a chosen mold corroborating his/her own ideological convictions and serving his/her best interests. The empirical methods underlying the writing of history do not discount the fact that it is “A form of literature that carries within it our philosophies of life” (13). In a nutshell, Jenkins‟ book conveys, “That history is not the same as the past. That history is always for someone, that history always has a purpose. That history is always about power. That history is never innocent but always ideological” (14).
Narrating history comprises a central and crucial component of the two novels. This history is as seen, experienced and told by Kashmiris who have been marginalized and denied the agency to speak of their trauma and loss in nationalistic history. This writing of history from the perspective of Kashmiris is an attempt at defining the Kashmiri identity, culture and seeking inclusion in the mainstream history of India. Dipesh Chakrabarty in his essay
“Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts” points out that as the novels become voices of the subaltern group, in this case Kashmiris, they call attention to the fact that “…the history of a nation must include the history of groups previously excluded” (15).
In the postmodern era with has invoked a critique of grand narratives, the discipline of history has widened its scope to include pluralist histories. Chakrabarty argues, “...that the nation cannot have just one standardized narrative, that the nation is always a contingent result of many contesting narratives” (15). That‟s where novels Shalimar the Clown and The
Collaborator play an important role as they voice the history of the subaltern Kashmiri group and represent the struggle for inclusion in the mainstream narratives of the nation, that is characteristic of a liberal and successful democracy. In addition, he posits, that subaltern Raghavi 15 history could be narrated by “democratically-minded historians” (15) besides those belonging to the suppressed groups itself.
Chakrabarty negotiates between competing claims of postmodernism and the empirical assumptions underlying history by offering a proposition. Postmodernism allows for multiple narratives and multiple ways of narrating history while the empirical position requires a certain investment in rationality. Carving a middle path, the proposition suggested by Chakrabathy puts forth two conditions that need to be met for any account of the past to be considered historical and absorbed into the gamut of narratives that comprise the historical discourses of a nation. The two conditions are; “Can the story be told/crafted? And does it allow for a rationally-defensible point of view or position from which to tell the story?” (15)
By the first condition, Chakrabarthy addresses the dependence of historical narratives on facts, evidence and truths and the challenges of constructing a historical narrative of an oppressed group which has not its own sources? Instead of seeking to establish absolute truths, he recommends historical records must revolve around „workable truths‟ which he defines as “a shared, rational understanding of historical facts and evidence” (17). This way a nation can function effectively without resorting to a superior, overarching, grand historical narrative. Rushdie and Waheed incorporate historical facts and events, shared by Indian reports, into their fiction and narrate the same incidents from a different perspective avoiding the dangers of a single story. This way the writers emphasize difference, expose untold truths and break the limitations of stereotypes.
The second condition addresses questions of who tells a story. How many stories are told and how are they told? Here, Chakrabarthy delineates the position of the storyteller and how he/she could rationally defend their narrative. He states that as long as the narrative is plausible “within a definable understanding of what plausibility may consist in” (16), it is Raghavi 16 defensible. A narrative is historically defensible as long as it reflects the writer‟s ideology, moral choice or political philosophy but the choices are not unlimited. Any narrative that is arbitrary or just personal fails on this ground. The novels Shalimar the Clown and The
Collaborator are rationally defensible for they emerge as voices of a marginalized community and reflect the writers‟ moral choice to speak of the tyranny and injustices wrought upon Kashmiris. Thus, by satisfying the two conditions the novels qualify as historiographical discourses.
Hence studying these two novels as narratives which offer a counter history and counter reality of the conflict in Kashmir will be the objective of this research. By undertaking an in-depth analysis of the two novels the research aims to answer questions such as what new perspectives about the Kashmir conflict emerge from the fictionalized retelling of history from the vantage point of Kashmiris. How is the conflict and the history of violence and repression in Kashmir portrayed in the novels?
A close reading of the two texts and an analysis of the narrative style and other stylistic devices employed in the novels will form the method of analysis. Also, a comparative study of the two writers in terms of their narrative styles, priorities and points of view will be undertaken.
1.3 Literature Review
Having completed a decade since its publication Rushdie‟s novel has attracted considerable critical attention in comparison to Waheed‟s novel which is a later publication.
Shalimar the Clown has been analyzed from varied critical lenses since its concerns are many and wide ranging from the global to the local. On the other hand, The Collaborator’s focus is Raghavi 17 sharp and clearly defined. It is the story of the “lost generation” of Kashmir and the conditions which precipitated it from 1987 onwards.
1.3.1 Book reviews of Shalimar the Clown
Natasha Walter in her review of Shalimar the Clown for The Guardian states the novel‟s ambition is to use personal tragedy as a means to interrogate the political and religious tragedies of the modern world. Critical of the hyperbolic and mannered language of the novel, she acknowledges that the story of the destruction of Kashmir is the heart of the book and it works powerfully as an account on the roots of violence and the awful fate of
Kashmir. Jason Cowley in his review for The Outsider says “Shalimar the Clown is
Rushdie‟s most engaging book since Midnight’s Children.” He finds the usual tone of comic exaggeration missing in this novel as it is a lament “for the ideal that has been lost in Kashmir and in so many other parts of the Muslim world, the ideal of tolerance and secular pluralism.”
1.3.2 Review of articles on Shalimar the Clown
A look at the articles written on Shalimar the clown reveals the following analyses.
Mukul Sharma in his essay “Reconstructing transnational identities in Salman Rushdie‟s
Shalimar the Clown” locates the novel in the postcolonial and globalization context of the twentieth century where identities are fluid and hybrid. He claims that the novel tells how people living in the remotest parts of the world are not immune to the powers of globalization and world politics. Our countries, cities, towns, villages and lives are interconnected globally.
The essay cites the naming and renaming motif in the novel as symptomatic of identities in a state of flux. Raghavi 18
Along similar lines, Dr. Saurabh Kumar Singh‟s essay “Salman Rushdie‟s Shalimar the Clown: Tragic tale of a smashed world” looks at the novel as espousing the dangers of nationalism and religious extremism. The essay draws a comparison between Kashmir in
Midnight’s Children and Shalimar the Clown and states that by giving centrality to Kashmir in this novel, Rushdie explores the ideal of „Kashmiriyat‟ a doctrine that holds sway over religious beliefs and its subsequent corruption. It asserts that Kashmir is caught in a three way power struggle – US interests, the Indian Army and the Islamic extremists from Pakistan. The plot of the novel is a microcosmic reflection of the larger political forces and historical processes at play in Kashmir and around the world.
O.P.Mathur‟s article “Salman Rushdie‟s Shalimar the Clown: The enigma of
Terrorism” analyzes the novel as expounding the making of an Indian terrorist and the global network of terrorism. He argues that a terrorist is not always made by unwavering affiliation to an ideology but is also motivated by deeply personal reasons such as revenge. The critic claims that Rushdie exhibits a pro- Indian stance with regard to the Kashmir conflict and is bitterly opposed to the secession of Kashmir from India. He also calls the novel a modern epic. Andrew Teverson in his essay “Rushdie‟s last lost homeland: Kashmir in Shalimar the
Clown” delves into the role of US in South Asian politics. He attacks the hypocrisy of US stance which overtly declares its war on terror but supplies the same terrorists with military and financial aid to propagate its agenda of western capitalist liberal democracy. By analyzing the character of Max Ophuls, Teverson presents his transformation from a liberator, a war time hero into an agent of new imperialism. However, he asserts that redemption lies with the next generation represented by Kashmira in the novel.
Ines Detmers in the article “Global minds and local mentalities: „Topographies of
Terror‟ in Salman Rushdie‟s Fury and Shalimar the Clown” studies the functionality of space in the novels. The article regards space not as a geographical entity but as “a discursive Raghavi 19 product of socio-political and ideological construction” (354). It explores the impact of space, dislocation and the global/local interplay on the cosmopolitan self and identity of its male protagonists. The article argues that Rushdie addresses the constraints of hybridity and multiculturalism by creating protagonists who become cosmopolitan failures in their dislocation from home and eventually lose all ties with home. In this case, Shalimar owes no political responsibility to his region and is driven by a selfish rage for revenge. His up rootedness leads to a perverted process of identity formation and destroys every semblance of reason and sound judgement.
Stephen Morton in his article “There were collisions and explosions. The world was no longer calm. Terror and precarious life in Salman Rushdie‟s Shalimar the Clown” and
Florian Stadler‟s essay “Terror, globalization and the individual in Salman Rushdie‟s
Shalimar the Clown” situate the Kashmir conflict under the overarching narratives of neo- liberal globalization, neo-imperialist US international policies and the global network of terrorism which speak of the impact of fluid frontiers with the onset of globalization on individuals, regional politics and culture. The essays study the transnational social and political agenda that underlies the process of globalization portrayed in the novel. Along similar lines, Y. Siddiqui‟s essay “Power smashes into private lives, violence, globalization and cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie‟s Shalimar the Clown” looks at the principle of
„Kashmiriyat‟ as a possible foundation for the concept of cosmopolitanism to take roots in since „Kashmiriyat‟ obliterates religious differences and embraces human relations of heterogeneous origins. He describes „Kashmiriyat‟ as the vernacular notion of the global concept of cosmopolitanism.
1.3.3 Review of theses on Shalimar the Clown Raghavi 20
A PhD thesis titled “Assimilation vs. Exclusivism: Construction of a nation and a culture in the selected works of Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry” by Judith Sebastian argues that Shalimar the Clown shows how the unstable political climate in Kashmir is a result of the gradual decline in economic prosperity. It is when the innocent villagers lose jobs as street performers and cooks in the wake of growing unrest between India and Pakistan that they become more susceptible to the lure of militancy and insurgency. It states that most of the militancy in the valley is motivated by hatred for the army and a desire for the liberation of Kashmir from India.
It reports how the valley, over the years, has repositioned itself from a „Kashmir for
India‟ stand, to „Kashmir for Kashmiris‟ and eventually „Kashmir for India or Kashmir for
Pakistan‟. It looks upon the system of education as the worst affected in the political turmoil and notes the virtual absence of the legal administration in the valley at crucial situations. It emphasizes the historical, geographical and political parallels between Kashmir and
Strasbourg, a quaint French town invaded by Germans during the Second World War.
Another PhD thesis titled “Salman Rushdie: A critical study of his novels” by Prema
A. Rocha examines major fictional works by Rushdie to identify recurrent concerns and preoccupations in his writing. The thesis looks at Shalimar the Clown as Rushdie‟s return to the Indian homeland, particularly Kashmir as a way of honouring his ancestry by speaking out against the injustices and horrors perpetrated in this paradise of a region. Kashmir‟s story as a lost paradise vindicates his passionate and persistent cry against ardent nationalism and religious bigotry. It identifies the Indian army and the Islamic fundamentalists as the villains who destroyed the communal harmony and peace in Kashmir. As a continuation and confirmation of his ideological stance the novel demonstrates the dangers of borders, of rootedness, of rigid religious and political convictions. Raghavi 21
So far the researches on Shalimar the Clown have analyzed it as a novel which celebrates plural identities and cultural syncretism, as a work which conducts crucial interrogation of the processes of globalization, terrorism, international politics, and transnational movements. The novel has been studied as mourning the loss of communal harmony and cross cultural interactions in Kashmir. The novel merits further attention as a historical narrative which narrates the history of Kashmir- it‟s political, socio-cultural and ideological history- from the perspective of Kashmiris and thereby acts as counter history.
1.3.4 Review of articles on The Collaborator
The Collaborator has generated limited critical analyses in comparison. However, significant insights into the novel are provided in the article “Approximating History and
Experience through fiction: A study of Mirza Waheed‟s The Collaborator” by Basharat
Shameen. It argues that the voice of a Kashmiri who has lived and experienced the horrors of militarization which it calls the „indigenous voice” is better equipped to portray the complexities in the region‟s conflict and culture in its many shades. Shameen categorizes the novel under „Resistance Literatures‟ since it brings up issues of justice, identity and oppression which are absent in mainstream narratives. He asserts that the novel gives an alternative and heterogeneous account of history by bringing to light the perspective of the unheard victims and exposing the underlying contradictions within the armed struggle.
The article looks at how Kashmir‟s older generation represented by the narrator‟s father and the younger generation comprising the protagonist and his friends are locked into an ideological conflict. While the older generation disapproves of a militant resistance and adopts a conciliatory approach to the crisis, the young men are lured by violence and the gun culture. This opposition, in the wake of the Indian army‟s increasing control and intrusion into the lives of the Kashmiri folk, speaks of the imminent changes in the socio-cultural life Raghavi 22 of the Kashmiri community. Fundamental Kashmiri ethos and social structures founded upon deference to elders and respecting authority experience a rupture in this scenario.
The article draws our attention to the destruction of the physical beauty of the landscape and lush green meadows strewn with disfigured corpses at the peak of the insurgency to suggest the contrast between the „idyllic past‟ and the „macabre present‟.
Shameen addresses the hypocritical and biased role played by India media in covering the conflict which trivializes clashes between the militants and the army by calling it „skirmishes‟ and by downplaying incidents of military brutalization such as massacres at Gaw Kadal and
Srinagar. The article criticizes extremist militant groups who instead of liberating people terrorize them by imposing an Islamic code of behavior and mercilessly punish those they see as betrayers as seen in instances where they chop off Rahman‟s mother‟s tongue and severe his arms on grounds of suspicion. Shameen credits The Collaborator for restoring historicity back to the people of Kashmir by narrativizing experiences of the silenced and marginalized parties of the armed conflict and foregrounding the humane aspects absent in mainstream discourses.
Another article which traces the recent spurt in Kashmiri writing in English as a response to the massacres and carnage of the1990s is “Literary response to the Catastrophic
90s in the un-silent valley: the comparative study of Agha Shahid Ali, Basharat Peer and
Mirza Waheed” by Javeria Khurshid which studies the three works as symptomatic of a literary revival in Kashmiri writing. It argues that writing became a potent medium for intellectuals to express their anger, pain, love and hope for the future of this region. It credits
Agha Shahid Ali as a pioneer beginning the era of Kashmiri fiction in English.
Khurshid argues how each one of these writers despite taking upon themselves the task of speaking for the gruesome violence perpetrated on the state of Kashmir steadily Raghavi 23 maintain a balance between the literary aesthetics and repugnant reality. Through writing they create a voice for Kashmir, vent out their agonies from having to live with memories of unspeakable horrors and pay their respects to the memories of those dead among them.
Kamila Shamsie in her review of The Collaborator for The Guardian notes, to live in
Kashmir is to be regarded by India as the enemy within and by Pakistan as a strategic puppet.
She says the isolation of the protagonist mirrors the isolation of Kashmir and the individual story becomes suggestive of so many other stories of young men and families in the valley.
Hence, the novel uses a nameless narrator.
Discussing his work in an interview for Book trust Waheed says “The Collaborator is about a nation. A tragic, death filled and often besieged nation called Kashmir”. As Waheed lived in Srinagar he says “I didn‟t need to do much research as many of the concerns of the novel derive from my lived experience. Having said that the novel is not autobiographical”
(qtd. in Chakravarty). Unlike Rushdie whose novel is a product of extensive research together with his childhood memories of vacationing in Kashmir, Waheed has undergone many rigorous military operations one such being the cordon and search operations conducted regularly by the Indian army upon villages and towns in Kashmir.
As a journalist turned author, Waheed has expressed his opinions on India in his opinion pieces for The Guardian. In one such article he states that with regard to Kashmir
India acts as a police state, not as a champion of democracy. A policy of denial and misinterpretation is practiced, he believes, by India on Kashmir interests. However, he hinges his hope on the rise of a new narrative in India which he terms “the new dissent” orchestrated by the country‟s writers, journalists and public intellectuals who refuse to believe the government story and seek to know the truth at the ground level of everyday reality in
Kashmir. Raghavi 24
The Collaborator offers much scope for research as it highlights the inherent diversity in the cultural, religious and ideological beliefs of the people of Kashmir where the Gujjar
Kashmiris in the hills are different from the Kashmiris in the towns. The needs and desires of each community vary and hence the ideological affiliations differ across the region. The story of the protagonist shows the enormous dilemma Kashmiri youth experience arising from these ideological differences. The novel as a historical fiction offers fresh insights as it charts the peak of insurgency from the experiences and ordeals of the victimized sections of
Kashmir which warrants deeper study and analysis.
1.4 Need to examine the conflict in the 21st Century
At a time when the unrest in Kashmir is gradually rising and getting intense as the conflict enters its third decade in 2016, with Kashmiris, young and old, men and women spilling into the streets venting their fury and protesting the killing of the Kashmiri youth
Burhan Wani ,labeled a militant by the Indian Army. One realizes that the problems and miseries of the people in Kashmir are not over and remain seething under the seeming calmness as Kashmir remains the most militarized zone in the world today. Any attempt at understanding the decades long strife within the state of Kashmir is incomplete if the stories of the Kashmiris are not heard and their points of view not taken into consideration. The two novels tell the stories of Kashmiris as the conflict reared its ugly head in this idyllic region.
In the wake of public demonstrations, army retaliations and curfews, it is the common people who suffer extreme loss and damage. The anarchy is unleashed by certain fundamentalist, ideological and political forces that benefit from it. Writers who study histories of conflicts highlight these forces and studying them becomes essential to having a well-rounded and sound understanding of a conflict situation that creates ruptures in the edifice of a harmonious human civilization. Raghavi 25
One derives a sense of identity and socio-cultural legacy from connecting with history. The present is shaped by events of the past. Similarly, the past is also shaped by the present. The way one understands and perceives history is coloured by the beliefs and standards of another time and place. The past is repeatedly investigated from varying perspectives in order to understand the origin of the problems of the present, to undertake the process of resolving conflicts and to prevent disastrous mistakes. Looking at a period of turbulent history with the advantage of geographical distance and retrospective vision available to a writer leads to greater clarity in identifying factors that played a key role in driving conflicts. The Kashmir insurgency continues to be a burning issue in the Indian democracy up to this date and the lessons one needs to learn could be drawn from these texts.
Both Rushdie and Waheed personalize political history by relating the stories of common people and attempt to document the various factors that pushed their homelands into disorder, disharmony and war. Revisiting and reinvestigating this complex history from the perspective of the Kashmiris will provide insights overlooked before and pave the path towards understanding the conflict in all its intricacies.
Raghavi 51
Chapter 3
The Story of the lost generation of Kashmir
The Collaborator opens with a meeting between the protagonist and Captain Kadian who proposes a dreadful deal. The protagonist, a boy of nineteen and the only local left in the village has no choice but to do as the Captain dictates. He is forced by Kadian to be of service to the Indian army and accept the job which requires him to go down into an isolated valley littered with corpses to collect ID cards and weapons off them. The corpses are men shot dead by the Indian forces as they tried crossing into the Indian Territory from Pakistan.
The protagonist although terrified and repulsed by the prospects of the job has no say in the matter and must carry out what has been imposed upon him.
The Collaborator is a first person account narrated by the protagonist whose name is never revealed. The narrator‟s anonymity makes him a representative of Kashmiri youth and emphasizes the loss of personal and social identity in a strife torn society. The novel shifts back and forth between two timelines, the past and the present. The present timeline of the narrative is the year 1993 when the Kashmir Liberation movement is at its height. The past covers the years after 1947, particularly the period when Gujjars, an erstwhile nomadic
Raghavi 52 community, decided to settle down as landed people in the village of Nowgam. The village of
Nowgam lies close to the Line of Control (LoC), the de facto border separating India and
Pakistan. The village had been fashioned by the leaders of the Gujjar community including the Protagonist‟s father who serves as the current headman. The secret tracks into Azad
Kashmir, in Pakistan and the pass into Indian Kashmir lie in the folds of the mountains bordering the village. Hence the village becomes a witness to much of the violent action between India and Pakistan.
The Collaborator offers fresh insights into the conflict as it comes from the perspective of an insider. Mirza Waheed draws upon his traumatic experience of the military oppression and becomes the voice of a marginalized community whose suffering is silenced in dominant history. By highlighting the stories and lives of unheard victims, the novel restores historicity back to the people. Critic Shameem calls the novel, “The emergence of indigenous voices which endeavour to portray the many shades of experience of this conflict”
(25). As a counter narrative, the novel foregrounds the humane and poignant aspects of the plight of Kashmiris omitted in mainstream historical discourses.
3.1 Contrast between the blissful past and the dismal present
It is made clear right at the outset that in the present it is the narrator‟s family alone which inhabits the village which casts a pall of doom and ruin that runs throughout the narrative. The novel constantly contrasts the beatific life of the village prior to its abandonment and the desolation and defilement that haunts it in the present as it plays out in the protagonist‟s mind. Every chapter alternates between the present and the past. The past introduces us to a flourishing village and the closest friends of the protagonist. Hussain,
Mohammed, Gul Khan and Ashfaq comprise his circle of friends. The protagonist reminisces about the blissful times he spent in the company of his friends back in the day until they all
Raghavi 53 left to join the movement to fight for Kashmir‟s freedom leaving him alone and unawares. He feels betrayed and aggrieved that his friends never told him of their plans to become freedom fighters. And then came, the greatest of all losses when all the villagers decided to leave but for his father who decided to stay on in the village. Now the narrator‟s family, consisting of his father, mother and himself live under the direct vigilance of the Indian Armed forces and do their bidding.
On his first visit to the valley he is horrified at what has become of his childhood haven. He recalls how this secluded piece of land with the rivulet running in the centre was where his friends and he spent all their summer days frolicking in the stream, playing cricket and just lying on the thick, velvety carpet of grass. It is now strewn with mangled, rotting corpses with haunting looks and everywhere the protagonist lays foot he finds himself stepping on some human remains. A tooth here, a limb there. He feels himself being watched by the horrid corpses. As he gets on with his job of collecting ID cards off them, he is overcome with disgust and fear of finding his own friends among the litter. “Bodies after bodies – some huddled together, others forlorn and lonesome- in various stages of decay” (8).
He realizes how terribly draining the process is both physically and emotionally; going near the decaying body to pick ID cards and hoping ardently that it is not somebody he recognizes.
As the protagonist thinks back to his years of growing up he recollects how older boys who needed jobs went to Srinagar and never came back. They took up menial jobs in the city while their parents in the village saw their herd of sheep dwindle with each passing year and slowly their lives plunged into abject poverty and illness. After he grew up, the boys had a few more career options. They could either become guides to help other boys from the city cross the border into Pakistan to train as militants or cross into Pakistan and become militants themselves. Once anybody left the village they could never come back. If they did come back, the army wouldn‟t let them live for they were seen as possible militants back from their
Raghavi 54 training and “there is only one way of dealing with the boys: Catch and kill” (7). The novel presents this dark and bleak future of Kashmiri boys as a result of the protracted conflict.
The protagonist is aghast at the amount of killing and corpses that are left to rot in the open. “There must be hundreds and hundreds of them” (9) he muses. The captain is unperturbed and makes light of the situation calling the fierce encounters between the army and militants „skirmishes‟. When he musters up enough courage to ask the captain if that‟s where all the missing people go „into the valley‟, the Captain replies that the valley was just one of at least ten other passes that is used to enter India. His cold and indifferent answer which implies that there are many other passes which witness just as much carnage as this one is appalling and proves that the Indian army indulges in indiscriminate killing, most of which goes unnoticed and unknown. The millions of Kashmiri youth who go missing never make it alive. They are hunted down like dogs and dumped into many remote valleys. The
Captain even boasts about how he could make anybody he kills look like a militant and the
Indian media would never know the truth just as he has converted the pristine valley into an open graveyard. He gloats “The dead don‟t speak, remember, and I still have plenty of old photos and clothes” (9).
The village often wakes up to the sounds of heavy shelling, gunfire, rockets and bombardment. The windows and walls tremble and vibrate from the impact of the cross border firing in the woods close by. After every encounter, the beautiful forests are set ablaze and severed limbs and bodies are found strewn about in the pristine woods. The narrator wonders if the LOC is some kind of fireworks exhibition for the two sides to display their military strength.
He muses, “The whole jungle must be on fire, smoke and fumes and soot everywhere”
(129). The book levels its criticism at how much of the beauty and serenity of this
Raghavi 55 paradisiacal land has been ruined by the intense militarization and the regular cross border shelling. The narrator enlists the destruction unleashed by the Indian army, “What is left to finish off anyway – the maize fields you burned a long time ago, the animals you maimed in the first few months, the people you chased away like rats?” (130) The Collaborator contrasts memories of an idyllic, peaceful Kashmir with descriptions of the macabre and rotting.
A fierce encounter means a lot of work for the narrator since scores of scorched bodies would be deposited in the valley and those strewn in the forest would be dragged by
Kadian‟s men and dumped in the valley, after the usual routine of taking photographs for the news agencies. The news on TV, the next day would report, “[The Army] have either scored a big hit or thwarted a major attempt” (130). Captain Kadian shares the recent report on the number of militants killed that year with the narrator. Kadian is pleased and beams with satisfaction as he announces, “We killed 2,837 intruders from last year until now, compared to 1,227 the year before that. That‟s more than a hundred percent improvement, isn‟t it?”
(137) The narrator finds his head reeling under all the information. He is suddenly disgusted with himself and filled with self-loathing for having been a part of it all, for having played a role in the ugly game.
3.2 The Rise of the Liberation movement and the underlying contradictions
As the Kashmir Liberation Movement gained support and popularity among people, the village saw hordes and hordes of young boys from the city, Srinagar, being dropped off and then guided by Gujjar boys from remote border villages across the treacherous mountains into Pakistan. “There was this time, not too long ago, just two or three years ago, when everyone wanted to go sarhad paar, to cross over and become a famous freedom fighter”
(17). Hence, the border lads found employment as guides and led boys from Indian Kashmir
Raghavi 56 to Kashmir on the other side of the border. “They [Gujjar boys] already knew every dirt track, every gorge, every crevasse and every valley in the mountains and had a mental map of all the check posts dotting the silly Line of Control separating this Kashmir from that
Kashmir” (17).
The novel looks at the many reasons that lure young boys to the cause of Kashmir‟s freedom. They included “Excited, idealistic teenagers; hurt, angry boys wronged by police or army action; vengeful brothers with raped sisters and mothers at home; firebrand youth leaders conjuring up paradisiacal visions of freedom and an independent Kashmir” (24).
Newspapers from Srinagar brought news of protest marches and demonstrations that were growing in size and frequency at an alarming rate and always ended in riots and roadside massacres. Political and religious groups issued decrees and condemnations of “the brutal oppressor Hindustan” (36) and called upon young men to liberate Kashmir from the tyranny of the Indian army.
All of this added to the usual “death toll reports and major encounters along the Line of Control” (36) stirred vigorous passion among Kashmiris and particularly young men.
Families encouraged their men to join the Liberation movement. The protagonist notices how the evening Doordarshan news was completely different from what they had read in the newspapers the very morning. The novel counters misrepresentation and denial practiced by the Indian media by establishing the contradiction between what is reported and what actually happened.
As anti-India passions caught on with the common folk of Kashmir and spread its influence into the far reaches of the state, the mundane life of the village of Nowgam comes to experience sudden activity and change. The new changes are brought about primarily with the construction of a mosque and the mysterious appearance of a mullah that nobody in the
Raghavi 57 village had ever seen or known before. With the arrival of the mosque and the mullah begins the religious transformation and radicalization of the Gujjar village that the author writes about with much scorn and disapproval.
Waheed, as an insider, highlights the differences between Gujjars and Kashmiris from the valley. Gujjars lived in mountainous villages and had taken to landed life only in the years following 1947 after centuries of being on the move. Hence, most people of the protagonist father‟s generation had spent their years and efforts in assuming a more sedentary life which included building houses, adding to their livestock and procuring new land. They hardly had the time or the room for an elaborate religious life. They had only been nominally religious. Their spiritual needs were meager and had been fulfilled by a simpler brand of
Islam that did not call for devotional prayers five times a day or attending religious meetings or ardent worshiping.
As the narrator considers, for Gujjar people living in the far flung villages „the azadi movement‟ was a distant reality. It was meant for boys from proper Kashmiri families, not for those from marginal communities. However, with the construction of a mosque begins the religious transformation of the village much to the displeasure and dislike of the protagonist.
The moulvi‟s provocative sermons militate against watching movies and listening to songs and advocate staunch devotional practices. He condemns those who fail to make it to the mosque for prayers and in no time villagers of Nowgam, the young and the old, make religious devotion a primary preoccupation.
In his sermons, the mullah speaks about incidents of military brutality against innocent Kashmiris arousing strong passions in his congregation. The narrator disapproves of all this unwelcome change and is dreadful of what all of this might lead to. The immense reverence that the congregation bestows upon the moulvi and his orders is summed up by the
Raghavi 58 narrator as “Something new, strange, powerful was going to happen sometime soon- an unnamed dread had begun to settle down inside me” (32).
As a counter narrative the book highlights the differences and divisions in the
Kashmiri population and their varying ideologies. It becomes evident that Kashmiris are not a homogenous group but made up of multiple tribes, the Gujjars being one of them. While those in the valley have a strict religious regime of visiting mosques, following the scripture and praying five times a day, those high up in the mountains placed less emphasis on religious learning and more on their duties to sustain a livelihood. With regard to the issue of
Kashmir‟s liberation too exist conflicting differences in ideologies. While Kashmiris in the valley and cities are seen as active participants and propagators of the liberation movement; organizing demonstrations, protest marches, forming new organizations, planning strategies and sending young men and boys to receive training across the border to fight the Indian army, people in remote villages are seen as lax and unconcerned.
The narrator‟s father, the village headman, represents those naïve villagers who look upon the popular liberation movement with strong contempt and disapproval. They are resigned to their fate and disapprove of a war with the mighty Indian army as foolhardiness.
They consider it foolishness to envision a free Kashmir that has fought down its oppressor the
Indian army. Instead, they seek to negotiate with the army or rather stay far away from its course to steer clear of any conflict with them.
The protagonist too had thought naively that boys from the Gujjar community were not cut out to be freedom fighters. The raging fight with the Indian army seemed distant and foreign. The Gujjars didn‟t stand to gain much from the war with the army. As he puts it,
“…the romance didn‟t lend itself to Gujjar life, because we didn‟t have „an issue with India‟, and the valley people didn‟t think of us as Kashmiris anyway” (26). The fight seemed like it
Raghavi 59 was for those Kashmiris who had political weight and power, although the Gujjars were located so close to the scene of battle between the army and the militants and witnessed it every day. For those like the protagonist‟s father who looked upon the liberation movement as futile, the young Kashmiri men fighting it were militants but those who supported the cause and believed in it, these boys were freedom fighters.
The book remains ambiguous in its position with regard to the Kashmir Liberation movement. While the author wants the readers to have an understanding of what caused it, what propels it and what it seeks to achieve and at times justifies its birth and objectives, nevertheless the story reflects the author‟s disillusionment with the course the movement has taken and the influences it has endued over time as represented in the protagonist‟s indecisiveness to join it. The movement has increasingly robbed people of their religious freedom by coming under severe Islamic radicalization sponsored by Pakistan, which cared little for freeing Kashmir and more to impose a staunch Islamic way of life. The novel is severely critical of Pakistan‟s role. The Liberation front was attracted to Pakistan for it promised military and financial aid to sustain the battle with the mighty Indian army. For people like the narrator‟s father who believe Kashmir wouldn‟t see better days if it joined
Pakistan, the marauders and the savage raids of 1947 are a constant reminder.
The protagonist‟s attitude to the liberation movement is itself one of disappointment and dislike but it wasn‟t always so. While he is very well aware of the atrocities perpetrated by the Indian army which has given birth to the movement in the first place, he is unsure if the movement is on the right course to realize its objective of freeing Kashmir and making it a sovereign state. As the liberation movement gains ground rapidly, he finds newspapers replete with reports of it. He looks at photographs of masked militants marching openly with their shinning rifles. But it all takes an ugly turn with the involvement of Pakistan. He finds
Kashmir losing its secular tenet and succumbing under Islamic transformation.
Raghavi 60
I saw cinemas burned, wine shops splintered colourfully on the city streets,
jeans making way for Khan dresses, video cassettes seized and broken
spectacularly in town centres, and grandiose statements declaring
independence by militant commanders covered in their Palestinian
headscarves. (36)
As the fight between militants and the Indian army got fiercer each day, the newspapers started carrying pictures of endless rows of white shrouded bodies awaiting burial, grieving faces of men, women and orphans outside hospitals. Graveyards multiplied like new housing colonies. The protagonist realizes that freedom for Kashmir, if it ever was achieved, would come at a very heavy price and in a form which wasn‟t what they had wanted in the first place. Pakistan‟s support veils its agenda of creating an Islamic
Fundamentalist state out of Kashmir. This realization distances and disillusions many
Kashmiris from the liberation movement and creates fresh divisions in the society; those for the movement and those against it. This chaos is summed up in the line, “Along with statements and unanimous resolutions and moral support and guns and ammunition from
Pakistan also came calls for Islam (as if we‟d had anything else) for Nizam-e-Mustafa” (37).
The freedom struggle comes to resemble more of a battle of jihad.
The protagonist recalls with great scorn the group Allah Tigers which took to extreme measures to end deviations from the prescribed religious behavior and sought to impose stern
Islamic decrees on a secular population with a liberal lifestyle. Such actions served to distance and disgust greater section of the Kashmiri population from the liberation movement.
…I can‟t help thinking of this new group, Allah Tigers, who broke video
rental shops and torched cinemas in the city and dragged frightened little girls
Raghavi 61
out of school buses and checked their hands for any signs of nail polish and
sent them back home to wear floor length burqas. God‟s own guerrillas
indeed. (90)
As a counter narrative, the book highlights the underpinning contradictions in ideologies and aspirations among Kashmiris for their homeland. For those taking an active role in Kashmir‟s struggle for independence, the new state would be modeled on Islamic principles. The religious politics brewing at the centre of the movement, however, deterred many from partaking in it. This abstinence of fellow Kashmiris was viewed by the more militant Kashmiris as betrayal towards their homeland. Thus the religious politics spurred on by Pakistan wedged a drift among Kashmiris and created a dead lock in the dicey situation.
As a well-read young man, the protagonist had always doubted Pakistan‟s tall claims about being an ally of Kashmir in its battle against India. A finer nuance here is, for
Kashmiris it was a battle against the Indian army but for Pakistan it was a battle against India.
The novel explores the involvement of terrorist outfits like ISI in training Kashmiris in their battle against the Indian army. The foreign involvement goes to show the mounting complications in the Kashmir Liberation movement. For Kashmiris, it was a battle to protect their land and culture but for the foreign terrorist outfits it was a battle to protect Islam. Such complications has gradually turned the liberation movement into a religious battle and given rise to its fundamentalist principles.
3.3 Critique of the unchecked power vested in the Indian army
As the protagonist works with Kadian he comes to know of the sleazy ways of the
Army. He comes to regard Kadian as the accountant of the dead and wonders if he has become his runner. The army releases a list of the dead on a regular interval and sends photos and video footages of those killed as militants to the Indian government. These documents
Raghavi 62 and photos are then passed to the Indian media and become the news we see on TV.
However, the truth about if there was really an encounter between the armed forces and militants or those killed were indeed militants as the army reports remains unknown. As the protagonist notes,
When they have fake encountered some poor boys in some far- flung area,
they will drag the bodies, after their faces are mutilated and quickly hand them
over to the local police, or to scared, do-gooder villagers for mass nameless
burials, that is, after they are done with camera work etc. (14)
The writer directs his strongest condemnation against the unbridled power vested in the army which has unleashed a reign of terror in Kashmir. It kills, loots, rapes and tortures under the guise of sentinels of the land. The army is never held accountable for its brutality; its actions are passed over as necessary means that the army had to take to maintain law and order. He wonders if by carrying out Kadian‟s dirty job, he has become,
Badge runner of the Indian Army, official scavenger of a murderous army
officer, cleaner-sweeper of the brutal Rashtriya Rakshak Rifles? (Rakshasa
Rifles is more like it). The armed caretaker of the unknown dead, the
chowkidar of my own dead ilk, the sole witness to machine of carnage or a
shameless forager of friends‟ remains, a petty ID-card thief, or the grim
reaper. (72-73)
Kadian in one of his alcohol induced rants brags about being the man in-charge of the anti-infiltration operation in these parts of Kashmir. He gloats about his legal license to kill and the more men he kills, the greater his chances of climbing the hierarchy of ranks in the army. The protagonist is disgusted at his cold-heartedness and heinous desire to kill as a show
Raghavi 63 of power. Knowing that he has the Indian government‟s sanction for mindless massacres fills the protagonist with despair at receiving any help from India.
The protagonist begins to question the rhetoric of discipline and honour built around the army when all he has seen is a bitter drunken man, shouting abuses with utter disregard for life, bragging about his power to slaughter whoever he chooses and making momentous decisions at his will without the slightest understanding of the sense of responsibility he carries on his shoulders. To kill is to prove one‟s caliber is the motto that Kadian seems to be guided by.
He is particularly filled with intense abhorrence for his peon, a slimy, evil looking man who sits right at the back of the room guarding the storehouse. Something about the peon, the way he sits motionless with this roving eyes taking in every detail terrorizes the protagonist. Nothing about the army reassures him of its role as a protector of the land. In fact they seem like the predators of the land.
Captain Kadian in his drunken, surly moods always launches into a “long tirade against all of Kashmir and „ungrateful Kashmiris‟ ” (90). He scoffs the pleas of innocence and cries for help of militants caught by the Indian armed forces and subjected to torture. He confesses to killing a lot of boys his team nabs. “…I‟m filled with nothing but disgust when I see such whining sissies. Thank God for fake encounters!” (89). Captain Kadian delineates the roles and functions performed by him or anybody else in his capacity as an anti- infiltration officer. He states, “Look, my orders are to keep infiltration down...and the best way to do that is kill anything that tries to cross into territory, right?” (91)
Captain Kadian‟s revelations about the fake encounters and the indiscriminate killing emphasize the monstrous power vested in the hands of the army personnel who revel in their power to kill. They kill everyone they choose to and destroy everything they disapprove of.
Raghavi 64
Kadian confesses to killing random men and passing them off as militants. He speaks of such cruelty in an indifferent and unregretful manner. Such inhumanness of the army that he had only heard of in rumours is corroborated by Kadian as reality. The reason Kadian offers to justify such heinous acts was to shut down clamours from certain quarters that the army wasn‟t making a breakthrough or showing results of the militants it had managed to wipe out, suggesting that the army cannot afford to stay put and not kill. Everyone expects them to show results and so when they find no militants to kill, they kill anybody and tag them as militants.
The book invites strong condemnation over unethical military practices. It depicts the army stationed in Kashmir as a killing machine which will find its solution to the conflict by having everyone dead. The Indian government pacifies the protesting mob, NGOs and families of the dead in the aftermath of such killing with their meager compensation and aid.
Kadian‟s confessions disarm the narrator with horror and he comes face to face with the absolute power of the army. It dawns on him that the army can kill anybody, it doesn‟t care whether militants or not, foreigners or locals? They see, they kill. They catch, they kill.
He wakes up with a start in the dead of the night for days afterwards with nightmares resulting from his frightful meetings with Kadian. He is now suddenly terrified of Kadian and his camp, he feels the kind of fear and terror he hadn‟t felt before. He now fears for his life, something he hadn‟t known all these years. “What if someone shoots me dead and passes me off too as some dreaded commander; no one will ever know, I realize” (97).
When the narrator tries to reason with the Captain over why he created this open graveyard, he answers, “I don‟t want bodies turning up everywhere, from rivers and fields and gullies and ditches… Nope. Not under my watch, sir. I would rather have them in one place, like this, and I know no one will ever get there” (292). The casual and callous tone of
Raghavi 65 the Captain as he speaks of the horrendous killing conducted by the armed forces on grounds of suspicion or mere whim goes to show the vulnerability of the Kashmiri population which is hounded and hunted mercilessly.
Kadian speaks with utter disregard and apathy for UN commissions and other NGOs from India sent to inspect the war situation in Kashmir for their reports serve no purpose.
They fail to bring anybody to the book expect in rare cases as in the case of the peon. The peon‟s story demonstrates how futile are the routine inquiries and cases conducted against men in the Indian army for violation of human rights. Very often, such violations are justified by the army top brass as a procedural, logistical, technical or human error which happens during operations and hence dismissed. In rare cases when someone is found guilty beyond justification, the Indian army makes a show of discharging him for placating the public; however it continues to bestow the guilty with all the benefits of being in service.
The „peon‟ was once the most sought after soldier, who had broken into a house in the city of Srinagar convinced that it was harbouring militants. When one of the women of the house resisted his attempts, he kicked and pushed her down. The injured woman was pregnant and this incident raised a hue and cry among the general public and human rights activists. The man was still left scot-free until the woman gave birth to a baby with fractured limbs.
As news of this sad episode spread, the Indian media mounted pressure on the government to provide justice to the woman and her maimed baby. The inquiry commission then set up asked „the peon‟ to step down from active combat and gave him a desk job later.
Now Captain Kadian has taken him under his wings and uses him for his skills of interrogation. This bit of news from Kadian sends a chill down the narrator‟s spine. He had
Raghavi 66 always been repulsed by the peon and felt him capable of more evil than Kadian. Now listening to Kadian corroborate it leaves him petrified.
3.4 The dilemma of the protagonist
The initial dread and repulsion he felt at having to walk down into the farm of the decaying dead gives way to guilt and intense mental turmoil over time. He debates if by helping the army he has betrayed his own people or it was his only chance to drag those pitiful mangled bodies into more honourable positions and send them off with a last word of prayer.
As the adolescent narrator misses his closest friend Hussain immensely, he recalls how his melodious voice had made him famous in the village. Hence, when the first mosque was built in the village of Nowgam, it was him who called out azan in the wee hours of the morning. Hussain was the first among his friends to leave. As the protagonist ponders over what might have been his reasons to leave the village and join the liberation movement, he realizes how Hussain was always perturbed by his family‟s poor financial status. Poverty and hardship crunched their lives and Hussain was the sole hope of the family to get them out of their state of deprivation. After the protagonist plays these circumstances over and over in his head, he comes to the conclusion it was poverty indeed that drove Hussain to the drastic decision. Otherwise someone as gentle and peace loving as him could have never gone down this path.
In his trips down to the valley, he comes across the corpses of many young boys he instantly recognizes as boys from the city of Srinagar who had bought the dream of freeing
Kashmir. In a magic realist rendering one of the corpses of a young boy speaks to the protagonist, tells him of how young cadres like him are bullied by senior commanders and how exhausting the whole trek and training is. This incident shows the miserable condition of
Raghavi 67 hopeful young boys who leave everything behind to join the struggle and meet such a dreadful end.
In the absence of all his friends and fond acquaintances, the corpses in the valley become his new companions offering stories and conversation. The dread and disgust gives way to sympathy, sorrow and compassion. He feels for the young boys who have sacrificed their lives for Kashmir. He knows not if he should look upon them as martyrs and heroes or as silly fools ensnared in a meaningless battle.
In the weeks after Hussain‟s unexpected disappearance and the implicit understanding among the villagers that he had joined the hordes of boys crossing over into Azad Kashmir to train as a militant, the protagonist frets over his safety, wellbeing and whereabouts besides feeling hurt that he had been in the dark about his secret plans. The pain of losing his dear friend and the anxiety about his safety robs the protagonist of his peace of mind. But more persistent is the feeling of being left behind. The grief and anguish is so deep that he, himself, considers crossing over not with any grandiose ambitions of fighting for Kashmir‟s freedom but to meet Hussain solely. He treks up to the Dhoka (a makeshift residence) of Shaban
Khatana, a cross border guide, to probe Hussain‟s disappearance.
On reaching his residence, the narrator tells the old man about the sudden disappearance of his dear friend Hussain and Shaban Chacha is only too familiar with such stories of disappearances and replies casually that a lot of boys go missing these days. The only vital piece of information the narrator manages to get from the meeting is that a man brings along boys to be taken across the border. When the narrator presses further to know who this man might be, Shaban chacha has nothing much to tell, except that this man brings boys by headcount, meets his son Rahman at a fixed rendezvous point in the jungle and pays
Raghavi 68 for the boys to be taken across the border. This man becomes the first clue to solving the mystery.
When the protagonist asks to meet the man, Shaban chacha warns him of the dangers it poses. He grows intensely woeful speaking of how perilous it has become in recent times after the independence of India to cross over unlike the old times when he roamed around with his large flock of sheep and goats anywhere in the mountains, with no fear of border and limits. This incident explicates the restrictions that borders impose on people. As the narrator bitterly reiterates, “Among other things, the Line of Control also curtailed bonding of the blood, prevented contact between brothers and sisters, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, as if it were a sin” (107).
After his visit to Shaban Chacha‟s dhoka, the narrator is torn between a deep yearning to be united with his friend and the realization of the magnitude and dangers of undertaking such a mission although he doesn‟t feel drawn to the movement. “I had been agonizing over whether – and how – to act on this desire to follow in Hussain‟s footsteps, or whether to stay home, be the obedient boy and not aggrieve Ma and Baba” (67). The dilemma plagues his mind for days on end until his fateful meeting with the „man‟.
After Hussain, Mohammed was gone from the village. A few days later his friend
Ashfaq disappeared. The truth of losing all his friends wreaks havoc inside him and he feels the quizzical look of villagers as they see him, as if waiting for him to make his departure too.
“In the street the people I passed seemed to know everything, understand everything and gave me a look that I thought said, We know you are next” (109).
After learning all his friends had left and been in league without his knowledge, he is more determined to cross over and confront them about this betrayal. He visits Shaban
Khatana a few more times in the hope of meeting his son Rahman and seeking his help to
Raghavi 69 cross into Pakistan. However, he is fraught with doubts about his resolve to leave. He is wrecked by guilt and sadness about leaving his mother and father alone and “breaching their lifelong trust and blind faith in me (114).” But he manages to fend off these pangs by telling himself that a big cause calls for great sacrifices. At other times, he is thrilled to “imagine myself as a member of an underground outfit, a militant, a freedom fighter, with a small pistol jammed inside my waist, moving about, slinking, at night, on undercover missions”
(114). Such visions reflect the naivety and boyish exhilaration of the narrator without a real understanding of the gravity of such a decision.
At times, the narrator wavers in his resolve to follow his friends but nonetheless, the yearning to meet them, the agony and rage of being left behind spurs him on in another trek up to meet Shaban Khatana. This time he runs into Rahman, the old man‟s son and expresses an interest in crossing over himself. Rahman is struck by the naivety of the boy and tells him it doesn‟t work the way he imagines, he needed to be part of a group to cross over.
Embarrassed, the narrator begs the guide to get him across somehow. Overcome with pity,
Rahman decides to help him and asks him to make arrangements for the long, dangerous trek.
The narrator makes all the necessary preparations to take on his long trek. On the appointed day, he finds his guide, Rahman, waiting for him and follows him gingerly still debating in his head if this was the right thing to do. They soon arrive at a big rendezvous place and the narrator can now make out outlines of many human forms in the darkness. He instinctively understands that he is to join these boys and they all wait for Rahman who had slipped out of vision to make his appearance with the „man‟ after finalizing the bargain.
Rahman reappears after sometime with the „man‟ and the narrator feels the ground beneath his feet give away as he catches the briefest of glimpse of „the man‟ and identifies him as,
“Khadim Hussain. Khadim Hussain of the Masjid Committee. Hussain‟s father” (148).
Raghavi 70
He dashes after Hussain‟s father and demands to know why he had done so. Why hadn‟t he included him in their plans? Khadim Hussain mocks him and retorts he didn‟t make the cut with his “silly little ideas” (158). As the narrator levels more charges at him about putting the life of his son and other boys like him in danger, he answers proudly, “I‟m not worried about him, he will be fine – he is my son…And in case you still didn‟t know, he is fighting a war, he is a freedom fighter. Even if he is martyred tomorrow, I would be a blessed man, father to a shaheed” (159). He rambles on about how the headman, the narrator‟s father is a selfish, greedy man who accepts grants from the government and doesn‟t care to liberate
Kashmir from the clutches of India
Agitated and furious, the narrator bombards him with questions of why he was left behind. Sarcastic and hurtful, Khadi Hussain quips, “You wouldn‟t make a good mujahid, never…You were always, well, rather soft, always reading books, playing cricket, nothing else, just books and cricket. You didn‟t even join the prayers in the mosque” (158-159). He sobs uncontrollably in the darkness, while Khadim Hussain only adds to his anguish by taunting him about his failure to serve the cause of Kashmir. He calls him a weakling, a slacker, a spoilt useless boy who has led an easy life unaware of the dangers facing his motherland. He asserts,
Your friends, they have shown great valour. They are freedom fighters now.
Don‟t tell me the Army does this and the Army does that! I know it much
better than you son…they rose to face a challenge; they are part of the
Movement now, the first freedom fighters from among us, the very first. They
will be a part of history. And look at you, whinging and crying about it all.
(163)
Raghavi 71
Shattered and appalled, the narrator descends silently towards the village. He keeps the knowledge of Khadim Hussain‟s pivotal role in spiriting boys across the LOC a secret. He now abandons his intention to follow his friends across the border and tries to come to terms with reality that he is all alone. He also notices how his placid little village has, “acquired a new air, a character of being with it now, being a part of the Movement (165)” and wonders what all of this is going to lead to.
3.5 The death of a community and a village
In the absence of his friends, Noor Khan, the shop owner becomes his close confidant and the purveyor of rumours and news tidbits. Noor Khan informs him of how terrible times await them in the future with the appointment of the tyrannical governor and crackdowns being conducted by the army everywhere. As tales of his dictatorial tenures in office start doing the rounds in the village, everything seems poised to go downhill from then.
As a historical discourse, the book intermingles actual historical details with fiction and alludes to several historic events, one of them being the massacre on the Gaw Kadal
Bridge. The massacre following close on the heels of the appointment of the diabolic governor sets a downcast mood in the village. Villagers speak in whispers about the impending calamity. Exacerbating matters further is the news of more and more bodies of boys being found in ditches as the army steps up its measure to control the rising number of boys crossing over to Azad Kashmir. “They saw, they shot. They saw more, they shot more”
(117).
Meanwhile battles along the LOC got fiercer and raged on from dawn to dusk. The narrator is frightened beyond his wits although he manages to keep a calm and unfazed front.
He knows the seeming lull in the village is the calm that precedes the storm. He finds schools
Raghavi 72 converted into Army barracks and laments the severe blows suffered by the systems of education with the ongoing militancy and intense militarization of his homeland.
Then one day, unexpected news made its way into the village, the start of the tribulation about to befall its inhabitants. The village was declared under curfew on the orders of the new Governor, the king of curfews. The narrator learns how all of Kashmir had been under curfew for the longest time and it had reached their village rather late. “The entire state, all of Kashmir, even the lakes and rivers and ponds and floating gardens of the Dal Lake had been under curfew ever since the new Governor had arrived. He liked curfews” (176).
The chapter “The Milk Beggars” uncovers the dark side of curfews that are so frequently evoked in Kashmir. Behind the veneer of calmness and order restored by a curfew, lies the unspeakable plight of those reeling under its effect. A few weeks after the declaration of curfew, the narrator is bewildered by the sight of a group of withered, pale looking women weeping and sobbing in front of Noor Khan‟s shop. The women looked drained and haggard and didn‟t look like the kind to be wandering about and hence their presence here at this remote village called for utmost attention and action.
One of the sobbing women beseeches them to give milk for their children. The others join in and cry out in chorus, “Do not turn us away empty-handed, brother, do not turn us away, we have travelled far” (179). Puzzled and moved by their pathetic condition, the men ask to know what has made them come this far in such terrible times. The woman explains how the curfew which has confined them to their homes has driven them to a dire state of starvation. They have lost their babies and children due to lack of milk and unable to suffer the tragedy silently anymore, the women have walked this far to get some milk for their children.
Raghavi 73
This heart wrenching chapter brings out the lesser known facts of the curse of a curfew. A prolonged curfew which is so common in Kashmir that it hardly manages to draw anybody‟s attention and concern in the Indian side, plunges the life of Kashmiris into darkness, desperation, poverty and starvation, extinguishing the lives of the ailing and the helpless children. The fact that women take on this strenuous journey although weak and famished themselves, for it would be twice as dangerous for men to venture out and search for food, speaks of the hostile and perilous conditions that Kashmiris have to live in which has imprisoned them in their homeland.
After the incident of the milk beggars, the next blow to the spirit of the villagers comes from the abduction and death of Gul‟s older brother Farooq Khan. The news of the disappearance of the four boys, Gul being one of them, from the village doesn‟t remain local gossip anymore. It becomes public knowledge and the Indian army is hot on the trail of these boys who made it across the border right under their nose. One morning, the villagers are startled by the arrest of Farooq Khan; his arms tied up and head covered with a sack like tunic and hurled him into one of the jeeps while his helpless parents wail, weep and beg the soldiers frantically to let go of their son. The narrator and the other villagers watch the whole incident fixed to their positions, motionless and stunned.
Farooq returns three weeks later, broken and tortured. The diminished self of Farooq and the torture implicated upon his body was a reminder to every one of the dangers of inviting the wrath of the Army. A few weeks later Farooq is taken into custody again. Three days later Farooq‟s head is hurled into the garden of their house. The narrator realizes that
Farooq is the message that the Army wants to send after his brother Gul and the other boys disappeared.
Raghavi 74
This is the most horrendous incident in the short life of the village. The horrific experience takes a toll on the villagers. It breaks the illusion of normalcy for everyone. The narrator notices how his father suddenly seemed older and weaker, unkempt and withered. He notes, “[Baba] seemed uncertain, not in control of things. He was used to order…But now, things seemed to be slipping from his hands, it was beyond his grasp” (182). The narrator for the first time begins to look beyond his misery to understand his father‟s sorrow and stress, as he observes the withering spirit of his father, “He had spent a lifetime building his village, creating a settled order, an organized life for his people and now the boys‟ departure had shown the first cracks in that recently arrived order” (175).
Farooq‟s death is the first incident that sets the village on the course to meet its end, what follows thereafter does not let up until the village is abandoned altogether by its inhabitants and led to its present condition of ruination. As the narrator puts it, “The discreet hamlet nestled in the hills was about to end its brief life as a community” (183). The second brutal blow to the village comes one early morning again in an announcement ordering all men in the village to assemble in the open field nearby.
The men emerge from their homes into the streets reluctantly enveloped by the thick fog and chill of the early morning winter. The sight of a bloody body surrounded by soldiers meets their eyes as they near the clearing. As they get closer they identify Khadim Hussain‟s bullet punctured body soaked in a pool of blood. Every villager is asked to take a look at the body by the menacing looking soldiers before being seated in a queue on the hard, cold ground. The narrator is shell shocked on realizing that the Indian army has found the man behind sending the boys in the village across the border and fears the worst. It finally dawns on them that they are under a Cordon and Search operation. A military crackdown.
Raghavi 75
The writer gives an insight into what crackdowns are
…it‟s some kind of an army checking system where they search homes and
identify every inhabitant of the place under cordon. They take you out into the
open and make you go through this identification parade. Someone behind the
black glasses of an army vehicle looks at you and signals if he thinks you‟re a
mujahid. (167)
They sit there trembling in the cold while the soldiers watch their every movement and threaten a blow with the barrel of their rifles if they shifted their position to relieve their aching muscles. They sit there from dawn to dusk in tormenting confusion and dread the safety of their womenfolk while the soldiers conduct their searches in and around the village.
As dusk approaches, they are ordered to go home and instructed to assemble in the same place the next day. Tired, famished and cold they leave for their homes. The routine is repeated the next day. They see Khadim Hussain‟s body lying in the same pitiful state sending out a warning to those who dare to oppose the army.
On the third day of the Crackdown falls the republic day of India and so everyone in the village of Nowgam, including women and children are ordered to assemble in the ground alongside the men at the crack of dawn. It is the month of January when winter is at its peak and a thick fog envelops everything. The villagers are herded together to form a weary, shivering and an anxious crowd while the soldiers keep a close watch over them. The narrator notices a flurry of activities and more soldiers and officers from the Army that day than the last two days. Soon enough two helicopters come into view and slowing descend towards the clearing.
Raghavi 76
Perplexed and awestruck, the villagers have their eyes glued to the imposing machines. Out of the first helicopter, steps the Governor of Kashmir, “The King of Curfew himself” (227) followed by some ministers and out the other pour people from the media, journalists and cameramen. The esteemed party seats itself on the wicket chairs placed in front of the perplexed crowd. Cold and confused, the narrator wonders,
Wouldn‟t it be bad publicity for the Army, showing us in this way to the
world, herded together on a frozen sheet of mud, three days of misery seeping
into our very bones? I wondered as my bottom hurt. And where had they taken
Khadim Hussain‟s red body? Did the Governor know? (228)
As the bewildered crowd stares blankly, the Governor launches into his grand speech about the devious role of Pakistan which he calls „External forces‟ in exacerbating the conflict in Kashmir and misleading the Kashmiri youth. As he rattles on, the narrator looks around to see the reaction of his people and notices; “a few yawning faces, a few babies stuck to their mothers who were probably hurting at their chests by now and some old men and women who had sunk their heads between their folded knees” (231). The narrator is amused at the futility and ridiculousness of the whole exercise. The governor is making a lofty speech expounding the articles of the Indian Constitution and explaining the rightful place of
Kashmir in the sacred vision of India to an illiterate crowd of Gujjars, former cattle owners and buffalo milk sellers. The crowd grows restless and writhes in agony from exhaustion, cold, hunger and discomfort as the governor rambles on and on in what seems to be the
“longest crackdown in the history of crackdowns in Kashmir” (232).
This episode is especially significant since it brings out the lesser spoken about ordeals of the common people. What is at stake here is not survival but honour. At the end of the governor‟s speech after what seems like an eternity, one of the dignitaries‟ calls out the
Raghavi 77 village headman, the narrator‟s father to receive the presents the Governor had brought along for his people. Embarrassed and ashamed, the narrator‟s father drags his shivering legs to where the minister is handing out brown packets. At that moment, the narrator realizes how terribly old and weak his father had grown from the shame and humiliation of the whole incident. The guilt of failing to protect his people from such misery weighs him down and erodes his pride. He was a broken man.
A week after the governor‟s visit, the menfolk in the village gather in the headman‟s house to let their leader know of their desire to leave. The village medic Sadiq Chechi becomes the new leader of the villagers wanting to leave. The headman is steadfast in his decision to not take up the wandering life again after all their efforts to establish a settled life.
Heated arguments rage on all morning between the two groups, one wanting to leave and the other wanting to stay. The group for leaving quotes the humiliation and anguish of the three days of crackdown, the steady increase in nightly shelling which has robbed them of their sleep and the terror they felt following the murder of Farooq as reason enough for them to vacate the village and look for a safer place. The narrator‟s father tries desperately to pacify them and reassure them of no further misery. He also reminds them of the great difficulties they had undergone to build their village and all of which would stand for nothing if they left it now. At the end of it, the villagers who “were too scared for their lives, for their children, their women, their cattle, their honour” (242) manage to win over the headman‟s supporters and fix on a date to leave.
On the appointed day of the departure, the narrator rushes out to watch the villagers leave. He comments, “They left in a small caravan, in a kafila that reminded me of movies I‟d seen, of black and white scenes of Partition…They marched in one buzzing, breathing, sinuous line and were trying to hurry on, lest someone stop them” (248-249). He watches his father‟s dream die its death. He watches the death of his village and the death of a
Raghavi 78 community. It is only a year later that he realizes how naïve he had been to think that his was the only village that had met its end. It had become the norm in Kashmir. The state of
Kashmir was reeling under the onslaught of the liberation movement gone awry, the brutalities of the Indian army and the pervading political and religious propaganda from
Pakistan.
The headman and his family are left all alone as the only inhabitants of the village.
The narrator and his mother are left grief stricken and frightened. His father, the headman is left devastated and defeated. He was now a weak, defeated man with no pride left in him. In the aftermath of the desertion of the village, the protagonist‟s mother gets more and more withdrawn and taciturn. She speaks precious little only when spoken to and her face takes on a permanent melancholic expression. The father, once a busy man building the village and entertaining endless stream of visitors has nothing left to do anymore. The news on the radio becomes his only source of entertainment.
The mother and the father cannot help but betray their sadness, fear and suspicion that their dear son might make up his mind to follow his friends across the border. The narrator can feel his parents suffer silently under the yoke of isolation, fear and dejection. He helplessly watches them turn to new distractions to mitigate the pain and loss of their friends.
He can see his family getting dysfunctional and breaking apart just like the state of Kashmir.
3.5.1 A loving portrait of Kashmiri culture and its demise
The book provides an insight into Kashmiri culture and ethos as it presents the quintessential lifestyle of a Kashmiri family, their food habits, clothing, rituals, festivals, folktales and myths. The much relished salt tea, dried vegetables to be used during winter and sacks of sawdust, firewood, hay and dried pine for winter fuel are common sights in a
Kashmiri household. The pride and joy Kashmiris take in their cuisine is emphasized
Raghavi 79 adequately in the book. The art and science of cooking and the professionals associated with it are highly revered. Every celebration and social event is incomplete without a lavish spread of delectable Kashmiri delicacies which marks the high point of the merriment. The book provides a sneak peek into the myths and folktales of Kashmiri culture, the most famous of them all is the legend of the shepherd Azad Range Wah-Wah who roams the high forests of the mountain of sorrow, Koh-i-Gham with his flock of mutlicoloured sheep and goats. Such insights reverse the perception of Kashmir in dominant history as a bleak conflict ridden zone and heighten the horror at its destruction. The Collaborator mourns the damages suffered by
Kashmiri culture as the conflict wreaks havoc with the peaceful life of Kashmir
3.6 Final Defiance
In the present timeline of the narrative, the narrator is increasingly tired of having to work with disfigured and decaying corpses that are strewn across the valley. He wonders if the valley was ever discovered later, wouldn‟t it invite a scandal and make him a traitor and a criminal in the public eye for having known about this sordid side of the Army and still collaborated with it. Moreover, the news of Captain Kadian nearing the end of his tenure in this region hits him hard. With him gone after having successfully converted the idyllic valley into an open graveyard, the narrator would be the only one left with knowledge of this devious adventure. Additionally, he fumes at the thought of Kadian getting ready to leave without suffering any repercussions.
Helpless, frustrated and weary, the narrator rues his condition. His pathetic condition as a loner after the exodus that took place in the village has pushed him to be a turncoat, a traitor and the guilt of it gnaws at its insides. Unable to wreak vengeance over the Captain, he seeks to register his protest and defiance against the Indian Army by setting the bodies scattered across the valley on fire as his way of giving them a decent farewell. This would
Raghavi 80 also be the only way in which he could honour the martyrs of Kashmir‟s freedom by preventing their bodies from becoming sad preys to hungry dogs and crows. The novel ends with the narrator paying his respects by reciting a fateha, “to these hundreds of unknown dead, to these unsung, unrecorded martyrs, to these disappeared sons” (303).
Raghavi 81
Raghavi 50
Works Cited
Bhat, Nadeem Jahangir. Contesting History: A Study of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the
Clown and The Enchantress of Florence. Thesis. U of Kashmir, 2011.
Rocha, Prema A. Salman Rushdie; a Critical Study of His Novels. Thesis. Goa University,
2013. 143-175. Shodhganga@inflibnet, 2013. Web. 12 Oct 2016.
Rushdie, Salman. Shalimar the Clown: A Novel. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Print.
Soodan, Manpreet Kaur. The politics of memory in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and Milan Kundera’s The book of laughter and forgetting. Thesis. Punjab University, 2014. 141-169. Shodhganga@inflibnet,
2013. Web. 15 Dec 2016.
Raghavi 81
Works Cited
Shameem, Basharat. “Approximating History and Experience through Fiction: A Study of
Mirza Waheed’s The Collaborator” Research Journal of English Language and Literature.
Vol2. 3.2014. Web. 12 Nov 2016.
Waheed, Mirza. The Collaborator. London: Viking, 2011. Print.
Raghavi 83
Chapter 4
Conclusion
Shalimar the Clown and The Collaborator as counter narratives seek to bring to light the complex history of the intense militarization of Kashmir after India‟s independence. The texts foreground the tragic experience of Kashmiris whose stories and voices have remained submerged under the domination of Indian history and politics. Based in little villages, the catastrophic fate of Kashmir is told through the tragedy of personal lives. The villages become microcosmic spaces for the writers to reveal the destructive influences that took over the macrocosmic space of Kashmir and unleashed upon its people decades of suffering and carnage. Rushdie and Waheed show striking similarity in their methods of interrogation of history as they collapse the distinction between personal and public spheres and establish their interdependence and interconnectivity.
Rushdie uses the tumultuous love story between a Kashmiri Muslim boy Shalimar and a Pundit girl Boonyi to portray the history of the rise and fall of communal harmony and amicability between the Muslims and Hindus of Kashmir. The intervention of Max Ophuls, the Indian army and Islamic fundamentalists in the lives of Shalimar and Boonyi which Raghavi 84 escalate the little dissatisfactions in their relationship and spell its death becomes emblematic of the vicissitude of events and forces that gave rise to the situation of conflict in Kashmir.
Hence, the central plot of the novel, the tragic love story and the ensuing tale of revenge and terrorism, becomes a detailed allegory which reflects the history of Kashmir as it launched into a downward spiral after India‟s independence. In a nutshell, Natasha Walter describes the grand symbolism as “… the resentful Muslim, in revenge for what he sees as the corruption wreaked by the west, is being used by greater political forces to try to cut down the American Jew; leaving in his wake a confused individual, neither western nor eastern, who is nevertheless determined to understand and to survive” ( Walter “The Children of
Paradise”).
Waheed, too uses the personal story to interrogate the larger political, religious and cultural downfalls in the history of Kashmir. The fact that the novel uses a nameless narrator provides evidence that the story told in, The Collaborator, is not the story of a specific individual. It is a fictionalized account of history that speaks for the lives of many young
Kashmiri boys like him and is not limited by individual specificity and circumstance. Every significant political decision is made known by way of its effect on the personal domain.
We learn of the Line of Control (LOC) as villagers are prohibited from foraging in certain regions of the woods, of the long spells of curfews that crippled Kashmir as they are ordered to remain confined to their homes and the excessive powers accorded to the Indian army, as crimes grow in number and gruesomeness. The tussles between the common folk of
Kashmir and the army, such as the Gaw Kadal massacre and the greater political resistance to military occupation are narrated in the newspapers read by the villagers of Nowgam. Hence, the personal and the political spheres remain entwined in both the novels. Raghavi 85
A severe criticism of the intrusion of the Indian army, its control, authority and atrocities perpetrated against Kashmiris lies at the core of the books. The writers direct their strongest condemnation against the special powers granted by the Indian government to its
Army stationed in Kashmir. The people of Kashmir, who in the wake of invasion from
Pakistani tribesmen in 1947 welcomed the Indian army into their midst as protectors of their land, begin to look upon it in due course of time as predators. The books provide a closer look at the military oppression which includes mass rapes, massacres, fake encounters, mass burials, custodial killings, enforced disappearances, torture and other instances of human rights violations.
The Collaborator provides an insight into the humiliating and exhausting routine of a cordon and search operation which could last for days. More appalling is the disclosure of the flip side of a seemingly less harmful strategy of a curfew declared after a period of unrest and violence. The prolonged period of a curfew in Kashmir leaves people in dire straits of starvation and impoverishment which largely go unreported. Shalimar the Clown in impassioned tones shows the distress and torture inflicted upon an entire village that refuses to comply with the whims of an Indian Army officer. Enraged and vengeful, the high ranking army official wreaks havoc upon the village and eliminates its existence. With numerous instances, the books expose the tyrannical reign of the Indian army and label it as the primary reason behind the protracted conflict and turmoil in Kashmir.
The writers rue the fact that much of the violence and injustices meted out to the
Kashmiri population by the Indian army are underreported by the Indian media and excluded from its historical records. Even when horrendous crimes from army personnel see the light of day and are brought under the ambit of an enquiry commission, the punitive measures handed out to the guilty are shown by the writers as ineffective and hardly measuring up to be a deterrent. The writers, in addition to calling our attention to the gruesome activities of the Raghavi 86 army, express equal fury at the top brass of the Indian army and the government for turning a blind eye to the crimes of the army and thereby condoning its oppressive policies.
Another important aspect highlighted by the books is the death of a trade or an art form with the death of a community and a village, for every village in Kashmir is home to a particular community/group skilled in a certain trade, craft or art. Rushdie‟s book shows with the massacre of people of Pachigam, the folk art form of Band Pather or clown stories meets its death, so it is with the village of Shirmal which houses the celebrated chefs specializing in
Kashmiri banquet. As hostility between military forces and the local population intensifies and escalates to a bloody battle, the Indian army unleashes his wrath and demonstrates its might by wiping out its enemy from the face of the Earth. With the death of the villages, die an art form, a cuisine, a culture and an entire community.
Waheed portrays a similar loss as villagers of Nowgam decide to abandon it in search of a safer place to live. The exodus brings with it the end of long years of hard labour put in by elders of the Gujjar community to establish a settled, landed life for the erstwhile wanderers. The exodus is brought about by fierce encounters across the LoC between Indian and Pakistani forces and the fear, anxiety and insecurity that begins to plague the lives of villagers increasingly as the army indulges in reckless killing and torture. The books show that the death of a village not only means the loss of lives but also the loss of art and culture of a specific community inhabiting it. The two villages Nowgam from The Collaborator and
Pachigam from Shalimar the Clown are only representative of the numerous villages that have been destroyed during the long years of conflict.
Besides pronouncing the Indian Army as the chief contributor to the prolonged conflict, the writers give an insight into the involvement of multiple players with vested interests. These include Islamic fundamentalists and Western imperial forces. Rushdie, in Raghavi 87 particular, mourns the loss of secularism and religious harmony which he calls „Kashmiriyat‟ that formed the mainstay of Kashmiri culture prior to the influx of these detrimental factors.
He shows how the ideal of “Kashmiriyat‟ crumbled under the weight of the conflation of forces such as nationalism, religious fundamentalism and imperialism. Max Ophlus becomes representative of Western Imperialistic countries which covertly sponsor war in third world countries and the Iron mullah, a prototypal religious bigot. The satirical portrayal of the iron mullah who comes to life from the junk discarded by the Indian military forces is symbolic of the growing influence of religious fanaticism that takes root in nationalism.
The iron mullah with his provocative speeches and calls for greater religious involvement successfully manages to sow the seeds of intolerance and animosity between the
Kashmiri Pundits and Muslims of Pachigam. This resentment grows each day as rumours of communal violence in India infuriate their Muslim brethren in Kashmir who now begin to see the Hindus as their foes. They are led into believing that the Hindus are complicit with the
Indian Army in their horrendous crimes against Kashmiri Muslims and the army would never attack a pundit. Rushdie asserts how the Indian army aware of the brewing tension between the two religious groups never steps in to avert the disaster of a full-fledged violence resulting in the exodus of the Kashmiri pundits.
Waheed, on the contrary, makes no mention of the awful fate of Kashmiri Pundits or the peaceful co-existence between the two religious sects before the violent conflict shattered this peace and amity. One reason could be that Waheed‟s book tells of the conflict from when it reached its peak in the late 1980s and Rushdie details the conflict from the very beginning throwing light on the roots of violence and the course it took over the years until the 1990s.
The Collaborator is conspicuous in its refusal to address the tragedy of Kashmiri Pundits.
However, the text is strongly critical of the growing religious orthodoxy taking control of
Kashmiri culture from the 1980s. The writer condemns instances of burning down movie Raghavi 88 theatres, music cassettes and film tapes in Srinagar by religious fundamentalists in an effort to centralize religion in the lives of Kashmiri population which had hitherto not been a deeply religious community. Calls for boycotting Bollywood movies and songs issued by mushrooming religious groups sought to polarize Kashmiri population from the rest of India, thereby strengthening support for separatist demands.
Echoing similar sentiments, Rushdie denounces policies of the emerging separatist political parties in Kashmir which propagated a strong religious agenda. Such policies included the introduction of the „burkha‟ or veil for women and prohibition of all forms of entertainment. The fact that the „burkha‟ had never been a part of the Kashmiri attire and women were never known to cover their faces made such policies all the more despicable.
Although detested and found undesirable by the common people, the policies were implemented with an iron fist and detractors were punished severely by separatists who poised themselves against the oppressive regime of the Indian army and purported to be saviours. Left without a choice, the Kashmiri population had to comply with the laws of their new leaders to be saved from the tyranny of the Indian army. Thus, began the religious radicalization of Kashmir without the whole heartened consent of the entire population.
Religious radicalization wasn‟t the primary objective of separatists when the demand for an autonomous state of Kashmir began to take shape and was still nascent. It became so quickly as separatists came under the influence of Pakistan and sought its help in their battle against India. Pakistan offered military training, ammunition and funds to sustain the liberation movement of Kashmir against the Indian army. But such assistance came with a hefty price. The texts show how Pakistan strove to eliminate the secularist and liberal fabric of Kashmiri society and culture by introducing religious radicalization in order to strengthen its claim to annex Kashmir on grounds of religious and cultural affinity. Both Rushdie and
Waheed blame Pakistan for sending in agents of religious radicalization, the iron mullah in Raghavi 89
Shalimar the Clown and the mysterious mullah in The Collaborator to turn the Kashmiri population into a deeply religious one and establishing a widening chasm between Kashmir and India.
Rushdie in his book shows how the rise of the militant Jammu Kashmir Liberation
Front was received enthusiastically by Kashmiris in the wake of the growing power and atrocities of the Indian army. The militant activities of the Liberation Movement was welcomed and looked upon as heroic by people of Pachigam in Shalimar the Clown and when Noman‟s brother Anees joined the front, his decision was accepted and applauded by the Noman family.On the other hand, Waheed expresses the divided opinion prevalent among the common folk of Kashmir on the undertakings of the JKLF. The skepticism of the narrator‟s father and the patriotic fervor of Hussain‟s father bring out the differences among
Kashmiris on their vision and hopes for the future of Kashmir.
Waheed breaks the perception among Indians of Kashmiris as a homogeneous whole who unanimously desire the separation of Kashmir from India. He shows not all Kashmiris share a consensus on the liberation movement. While the urban folk of Kashmir make up the majority support base of the movement, those in the interior villages have their misgivings about the battle against the might of the army. Waheed‟s book remains ambiguous in its position with regard to the Liberation movement which is reflected in the indecisiveness of the protagonist failing to make up his mind on whether or not he should follow in his friends‟ footsteps and join the movement.
Irrespective of their initial perceptions and position with regard to the liberation movement, both Rushdie and Waheed express deep disillusionment and disappointment with the way the movement has fared over the years. Coming heavily under the influence of religious fundamentalism sponsored by Pakistan and packaged along with arms and funds, Raghavi 90 the proponents of the liberation movement soon become the proponents of religious radicalization and control. The movement loses its democratic tenor and bears semblance to a religious war, like that of jihad. Its mission changes from creating a democratic, autonomous state of Kashmir to a Muslim state that remains a puppet, subservient to the powerful Muslim countries.
The movement takes its first step towards achieving this goal by imposing a stern religious code on its population. This move is disapproved and condemned by the writers for depriving the people of Kashmir their religious freedom, restricting their many liberties and stifling their lives. Caught between the brutalization of the Indian army and the religious domination of the purported saviours, the common folk of Kashmir are left with little choice.
Presenting the many challenges and struggles of Kashmiris, the writers foreshadow a dark and frightful future for Kashmir.
With exposing the varying responses to the Liberation Movement and its militant activities, the writers also delve into questions such as who is a freedom fighter and who is a militant? Is a militant synonymous with a terrorist? The books begin answering the questions with a clarification of the term „militant‟. For the Kashmiris „a militant‟ is a man who resorts to a violent, aggressive strategy to fight for the liberation of Kashmir. Unlike a terrorist, the aim of a militant is not to terrorize people to eliminate opposition to their cause. Hence, a militant is equally a freedom fighter. For a supporter of the separatist agenda and therefore the liberation movement, the boys who take to militancy to combat the Indian army are freedom fighters as espoused by Hussain‟s father in The Collaborator who calls them martyrs and champions of the battle. Conversely, for those skeptical of the movement and its pervasive religious doctrine, the militants are freedom fighters who have been misled by larger political and religious forces. Raghavi 91
The death of a militant causes immense grief both to the supporters and skeptics of the liberation movement for the militants are boys from the neighbourhood who have either been wronged or treated cruelly by the Indian army. Infuriated and vengeful, the young boys are swayed by the philosophy of the separatists to fight the monstrosity of the Indian army.
The writers break the stereotype of a Kashmiri militant who is projected as a fierce terrorist by the Indian army and media. They explore the reasons and study the sequence of events that lead many young boys to militancy.
Waheed, in particular, laments the pitiful state of Kashmiri youth. He demonstrates in the wake of an acute dearth of education and employment opportunities with the ongoing conflict, many young Kashmiri boys are left with one of two career options; to become a militant and fight the army or collaborate with the army to fight militants. Similarly, Rushdie voices the dangers of growing up in Kashmir. The youth are sometimes inadvertently or forcibly drawn to militant activities even when they do not believe in the cause. For Shalimar, it is the agony and anger of being cuckolded, which is channelized into the militant struggle but for his younger brother, who is very skilled with his hands, militancy is forced upon him for he is forced to make bombs.
Based on lived and personal experiences, more so in the case of Waheed, the novels examine the intricacies of the conflict and present exclusive information known only to somebody who has lived through the conflict years. Since both Rushdie and Waheed do not reside in India and have completed their works outside the country, there is a greater degree of nostalgia and romanticization of Kashmir. The writers lament the destruction of the physical beauty of the state, it is famously known for through a language of violence which presents graphic descriptions of the gory and the grotesque. Images of mutilation, ruin, wreckage, decay, corpses and death add to the effect of a battered and doomed state. Such a language heightens the shock and horror of the readers. Raghavi 92
Rushdie in particular paints a rosy picture of Kashmir so closely resembling the
Garden of Eden prior to the independence and partition of India. Shalimar the Clown portrays a utopian state of Kashmir and blames the Indian army for most of the state‟s woes. Although
Waheed highlights the differences and divisions among Kashmiris and the hardships they had borne to build their villages, one could still clearly feel the permeating undertone of nostalgia and idealization of Kashmir which was indeed a paradise for its residents until the intrusion of the army.
As counter narratives, Shalimar the Clown and The Collaborator present the history of Kashmir from the perspective of Kashmiris, whose stories and voices have remained marginalized. As historical novels they do not necessarily contradict and refute dominant historical narratives on Kashmir from India but present an alternative view and understanding of this complex history, primarily reversing the cause and effect theory of dominant narratives. This theory from dominant nationalistic history from India legitimizes militarization of Kashmir and justifies stern military policies as the effect of a growing militancy. The books, on the contrary, reason the birth of militancy as a result of the tyranny of the armed forces. The writers narrate the gaps in mainstream history.
Besides enhancing the perception of people on the history and violence of Kashmir, the books call for inclusion in mainstream history as voices of Kashmiris. The ideology of the books do not support the separation of Kashmir rather seek a condition where all those involved in a social or political interaction or conflict have a space to tell their stories in their own terms in order to facilitate more meaningful dialogue to crises.
Raghavi 94
Works Cited
Mora, Raul Alberto. “Counter Narrative”. Centre for Intercultural Dialogue 36 (2014): 1.
Web. 25 Nov 2017.
Rushdie, Salman. Shalimar the Clown: A Novel. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Print.
Waheed, Mirza. The Collaborator. London: Viking, 2011. Print.
Raghavi 95
Bibliography
Bamberg, Michael G. W., and Molly Andrews. Considering Counter Narratives: Narrating,
Resisting, Making Sense. J. Benjamins, 2004.
Bhat, Nadeem Jahangir. Contesting History: A Study of Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the
Clown and The Enchantress of Florence. Thesis. U of Kashmir, 2011.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts.” Postcolonial studies 1.1. (1998):
15-29. Web. 23 Nov 2016.
Cowley, Jason. “From here to Kashmir”. Rev of Novel. The Outsider. 11 Sept 2005. Web. 22
Sept 2016.
Detmers, Ines. “Global minds and local mentalities: „Topographies of Terror‟ in Salman
Rushdie‟s Fury and Shalimar the Clown”. Cross/Cultures, no.121,2010, pp 351-
365.ResearchLibrary, https://search.proquest.com/docview/75706510485.
Jenkins, Keith. Rethinking History. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Judith, Sebastian. Assimilation vs Exclusivism: Construction of a nation and a culture in the selected works of Salman Rushdie and Rohinton Mistry. Thesis. University of Kerala, 2013.
N.p.: Shodhganga@inflibnet,2013. Raghavi 96
Khurshid, Javeria. “Literary responses to the Catastrophic 90s in the Un-silent Valley; The
Comparative Study of Agha Shahid Ali, Basharat Peer and Mirza Waheed”. International
Multidisciplinary Research Journal.Vol II.VI.2013.Web. 16 Nov 2016.
Mathur, O.P. “Salman Ruhdie‟s Shalimar the Clown: The enigma of Terrorism.” Points of
View.Vol.XIV.No.1 Summer 2007.Web. 22 Sept 2016.
“Mirza Waheed: Kashmir‟s lost boys.” Interview. Booktrust.org.uk. 2011.Web.18 Sept 2016.
Mora, Raul Alberto. “Counter Narrative”. Centre for Intercultural Dialogue 36 (2014): 1.
Web. 25 Nov 2017.
Morton, Stephen. “There were collisions and explosions. The world was no longer calm.
Terror and precarious life in Salman Rushdie‟s Shalimar the Clown”. Textual Practice
22.2(2008): 337-355. Web. 26 Nov 2016.
Rocha, Prema A. Salman Rushdie; a Critical Study of His Novels. Thesis. Goa University,
2013. 289.: Shodhganga@inflibnet, 2013. Web. 12 Oct 2016.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta in association with Penguin, 1992. Print.
Rushdie, Salman. Shalimar the Clown: A Novel. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Print.
Said, Edward W. Reflections on exile and other essays. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard
University Press, 2000. Print.
Shameem, Basharat. “Approximating History and Experience through Fiction: A Study of
Mirza Waheed‟s The Collaborator” Research Journal of English Language and Literature.
Vol2. 3.2014. Web. 12 Nov 2016. Raghavi 97
Shamsie, Kamila. “The Collaborator.” Rev. of Novel. The Guardian 5 Mar.2011: n. pag.
Web. 18 Sept 2016.
Sharma, Mukul. “Reconstructing Transnational Identities in Salman Rushdie‟s Shalimar the
Clown.” International Journal of English Language, Literature and Humanities
Vol.III.X(2015):1-14. Web. 20 Sept 2016.
Siddiqi, Yumna. “Power smashes into private lives, violence, globalization and cosmopolitanism in Salman Rushdie‟s Shalimar the Clown”. South Asia Research
27.3(2007): 293-309. Web. 28 Nov 2016.
Singh, Saurabh Kumar.” Salman Rushdie‟s Shalimar the Clown: Tragic tale of a Smashed
World”. Lapis Lazuli- An International Literary Journal 11.1(2012). Web. 8 Oct 2016.
Soodan, Manpreet Kaur. The politics of memory in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and Milan Kundera’s The book of laughter and forgetting. Thesis. Punjab University, 2014. 141-169. Shodhganga@inflibnet,
2013. Web. 15 Dec 2016.
Stadler, Florian. “Terror, globalization and the individual in Salman Rushdie‟s Shalimar the
Clown”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing45.2 (2009): 191-199. Web. 27 Nov 2016.
Teverson, Andrew. “Rushdie‟s last lost homeland: Kashmir in Shalimar the Clown.” N.p., n.d.Web. 25 Sept 2016.
“The Literature of Conflicted Lands: Mirza Waheed, Roma Tearne and Daisy Hasan in
Conversation.” Interview by Andrew Feinstein. Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics 15
Feb.2015: n. pag. Web. 24 Sept 2016.
Waheed, Mirza. The Collaborator. London: Viking, 2011. Print. Raghavi 98
Walter, Natasha. Shalimar the Clown. Rev of Novel. The Guardian.3 Sept. 2005. Web. 21
Sept 2016.
White, Hayden. “The Historical text as Literary Artifact”. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in
Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. Print.