THE title that immediately came to mind is taken from Carl Gustav Jung’s memoirs, one that encompasses a range of responses to a place that is also a time, a time that is almost dreamlike in texture, which is also now a space for reflection and redemptive action.

My early memories of Kashmir are the colours and smells of summer and the beloved face of my daredevil young mother. We lived in the public gaze but somehow this fuelled my mother’s resolve to find her own personal freedom. Sometimes this was through the choice and commitment to her friends, a lifelong habit that gained her the love of a range of people, some of whom I met for the first time at the memorial after her death. So whether it was appropriate or not was never a question that arose with regard to Tahira Shahmiri, Khalida Shah, Saleema Nedou or any of the others who found her a charming and irreverent hostess in an age of formality and custom.

So I grew up in a Muslim majority state with no biases or baggage of the post-partition generation; at least that thorny path was spared me. Every summer, even after my half-felt banishment to a boarding school hundreds of miles away, the magic was recreated in the long hazy days of a Srinagar summer, Pahalgam huts and streams and Gulmarg’s rolling meadows and daisy fields. In the sharply experienced shock of being replaced by two yowling little siblings, in an adolescent gaze returned, in the taking for granted of childhood and youth, nothing prepared me for the experience so evocatively described in Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood, where time let me sleep while the owls carried away the safe haven of my soul.

So, if it appears now that I lived in a Kashmir of my own imagination, I can only agree. But this Kashmir also lived in the imagination of many local residents, Indians and visitors from across the world.

 

You can still see the remains of a treehouse I had built for my young son in the ‘Umbrella’ tree in the back garden of my home beside the Dal Lake in the orchard that I had never set foot in until I returned to Kashmir as a young mother. Kashmir continued to call as we converted a large barn into a habitable home, a home filled with charming friends who all seemed to live in a magic that we thought would last forever. My daughter has no memories of the house, which she first saw when she was twenty; the Kashmir that had us in thrall had long disappeared.

What happened? How? When? Was it all a dream? We were simply blind to the stirring of a parallel reality that was slowly gaining momentum under the surface of our magical world where we thought the Shaivite and Sufi origins that culminated in the Reshi culture in the folk consciousness would hold against the waves of dissatisfaction and anger that ate away at the complex jamawar of syncretism. Two decades of internal warfare followed, leaving a generation bereft of a vision of hope or trust or peace. The popular titles of Kashmir related activities always read the same, Art in the Time of Conflict, Literature at the Time of Conflict, Kashmir Studies, Conflict Resolution, A Tangled Web: Jammu and Kashmir (can you ever untangle a web?). Away in the remote reaches of old Bollywood hits and in our mind’s eye, we saw the dreamlike poplar avenues stretching far into the distance.

 

When I return to the valley to open my house in 2004, the road from the airport is lined with mansion after mansion with bright tin roofs and high walls – impossible not to notice the spoils of this war. There is now a very different feel to the urban space where nouveau riche bungalows jostle the medieval riverfront wooden homes and pleasure gardens. The monolithic bureaucracy is still in place, still moving like a sluggish beast to Jammu for the Durbar move in winter, when all other accoutrements of Durbar have been banished from mention, leave alone sight. Charred or tumbledown remains of structures that were burnt down or had to be abandoned remain as witnesses to a period of unspeakable horror. The jawans of the paramilitary forces are visible at street corners and bunkers, giving the city an embarrassed air of false normalcy, and the men a false air of bravado, to cover an acute sense of being at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I once visited Argentina during the time that the military Junta ruled and everything beautiful was a little dirtied by the army checkposts outside the airport. War is an obscene ritual, played out by a collective egoism on both sides, in costumes and by rules largely agreed upon. But the presence of an army in a civilian surrounding plants hate in the heart of a child.

 

So what now? Let us think and act in ways that help us to live with dignity and joy, in a place that can survive without either being romanticized or demonized. A deep sense of loyalty makes the ladies from a nearby village tell me that they have helped hide fugitive young men from the police; what else could they do – these were their children. In the consciousness of many older residents, the reality of the Hindu exodus from the valley was nothing more than the result of political machinations; it is difficult to admit that the syncretic culture of Lal Ded’s world can only exist if each person chooses to revive it in their own life and times. Many lament the waning of this sensibility and the advent of a new aggressive Talibanization of folk culture, and yet there are secret gatherings, majlis, where men still chant the name of the Goddess as part of their worship and a man and a woman is seen as a divine spark.

On a cool autumn night we drove past the base of the hilltop shrine of Aishmuqam on our way to Pahalgam. As luck would have it this was the day of the Urs and as we approached we saw children holding flaming mashaals on each side of the road guiding us toward the shrine. As we came closer, young men in pherans hung about in clusters enjoying the air of festivity, eyeing young girls that giggled and clung to the matriarchs who chaperoned them. We saw a line of flames moving up and down the hill, to and from the central Asian style mausoleum of the patron saint. Here was a sense of life in all its complexity and pathos and beauty.

 

So what can we do, those of us whose heart is a garden of memories and whose life is somehow and for all time touched by the Kashmir of the Imagination? Many of us have returned with a need to connect to the place and people in a way that is far more vital than ever before. Among us are photographers and filmmakers who have been mentored by wonderful people in the long years of exile and young musicians who have brought a contemporary sound to folk music.

There is National School of Drama alumnus, M.K., who is committed to reviving the folk theatre, Bhand Pather, and has had them play to packed hillsides and in theatre festivals. One woman from Pahalgam has transformed the colourful embroidery of the Gujjar women by adapting them onto bags and wall pieces. Ajaz, an amateur photographer has an idea for reviving reading among children in the valley through inexpensive translations of classic stories.

A festival of the arts, The Dara Shikoh Festival, has been held in Srinagar for the last four years, where young people interact with experts from different fields in a series of workshops, a seminar is held on two days and an evening each of theatre and music is organized. A farmer’s and a craft market is organized every fortnight from May to October, and organic produce is made and sold.

The horticulture and floriculture, agro-industries and the classical crafts of the valley have more people involved than ever before. While some of the crafts have suffered in quality, there are some initiatives that produce world-class weaves and embroideries, the Kashmir Loom group for instance. The Kani shawl in all-wool has been revived after completely ceasing to exist for several decades. Walnut wood carving, papier māché and leather craft still have a huge skill base but the design inputs seem to be very limited. The silk weaving industry is virtually at a standstill and needs some creative inputs. A project involving training local potters to produce contemporary glazeware with technical and design inputs is underway.

 

While Kashmir is rich in natural and cultural resources that need reorientation and reorganization, the more vital initiatives need to engage in an authentic and genuine way with women, children and marginalized groups that have been deeply affected by the years of trauma. Psychiatrists have only now begun to recognize the extent of mental illness which is also related to drug abuse. The shocking fact is that there are no juvenile remand homes or facilities, so that young stone-pelters are placed in the same cells as hardened criminals. There are some established children’s homes but most orphanages are less than adequate. Until some closure is ensured for the half-widows and parents of disappeared persons, their own lives and those of their families will feel like a wound that does not heal, in a society that cannot afford to cover up any more.

A couple of hangul, indigenous antlered deer, came down to the salt lick in the oak stand in the Dachigam forest sanctuary last spring. I saw them nuzzle the tender green shoots with their steaming nostrils in the sacred grove, and I could hear the stream that flowed nearby, just as it would have at the time when Abhinavagupta wrote the commentaries on the Shiva Sutras, centuries ago. The timeless sense of a forest in the sharp beauty of spring felt like a million miles from the bustle of human life.

Which is Reality and which Illusion?

 

* Jyotsna Singh is the granddaughter of Hari Singh, the last Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir.