Wisdom of the Valley

It is outrageous to displace, as the Palestinian and Kosovo experiences tell us, people from their land of birth just because they profess a different religion

Kashmir, wrote Jahangir, ‘‘is a garden of eternal spring, or an iron fort to a palace of kings — a delightful flower-bed and a heart-expanding heritage for dervishes’’. By far the most important observation of the Mughal emperor, though implicitly stated, related to the long tradition of religious tolerance and pluralism in Kashmir, starting with Syed Ali Hamdani and Sheikh Nuruddin in the 14th century.

In one tale, it is said that when a baby, Nuruddin refused to take his mother’s milk and would drink only from Lalla Deb, the Kashmiri panditani mystic. A century later, Sultan Zainul Abidin exemplified a more civilised adherence to harmonious communal relation and a syncretic culture. According to Srivara’s Rajatarangini, he participated in Hindu religious festivals, visited Hindu shrines and had the Sanskrit texts read to him. English observers of the late 19th and early 20th century in Kashmir found shared popular religious traditions especially in the countryside. Thus W. Lawrence referred to the ‘‘delightful tolerance’’ which existed between the followers of Islam and Hinduism.

By invoking such fragments from Kashmir’s history, I wish to underline that Islam did not come to the subcontinent in a single time-span; consequently, its diffusion took place in a variety of forms from class to class and from one area to another. In its local and regional specificity, therefore, Islam cannot be portrayed as a social entity whose ‘‘essential’’ core is immune to change by historical influences. Thus in Kashmir, as indeed in the south of the Vindhyas, Islam evolved a tradition of worship marked by a striking capacity to accommodate itself to indigenous patterns of faith and worship. It gained a foothold because of its capacity to forge links with the religions and peoples of the wider society, and to offer a form of access to the divine which could be grasped and built upon through means already present within these societies. This intermixing was neither ‘degenerate’ nor a product of superficial accretions from Hinduism. The sharing of beliefs and practices was built up into a dynamic and expansive religious system. The nationalist movement drew upon these syncretic to create a ‘‘national sentiment’’, an statement that has recently acquired special significance. But the major differences in its usage, then and now, must not be lost sight of.

For one, most of the nationalist leaders — from Gokhale to Nehru — realised that a national sentiment (whatever that means in so diverse and segmented a society) can be created, particularly in a colonial context, by drawing upon the shared experiences and memories of the country as a whole and not a segment thereof. Hence they used symbols that reflected the composite and pluralist character of our society. That would explain why the historical memories associated with Ayodhya, Kashi and Mathura were not invoked. Indeed their aim, which the Muslim League leadership in the 1940s failed to grasp, was to forge a joint anti-colonial front and to unite the people rather than divide them along religious lines.

One can fault their judgement and lack of foresight in dealing with minority fears and aspirations, but it would be hard to place them in the dock for mixing up the misguided religious fanaticism of a majority segment with the ‘‘sentiments’’ of the nation as a whole. By all means one should dutifully talk of national duty and sentiment when armed infiltrators and their patrons threaten the nation’s security. But not otherwise. A cursory glance at the political landscape in the 1930s and ’40s, particularly in Punjab and Bengal, reveals systematic attempts to strengthen the region as a powerful and cohesive entity. This was the logical consequence of the political arithmetic worked out in the Act of 1919.

After independence, the spurt in provincialism, often rooted in ethnic and linguistic assertions, found statement in the clamour for linguistic states. Increasingly, the identity of the nation as such (which is, at any rate, a construction), meant little to, say the Jats in Haryana, who discovered that the pickings lay in their territorial stronghold and not in the bruised nation-state commanded by the politicians and bureaucrats sitting in Lutyen’s Delhi. In the subsequent political arrangements, the nation, as visualised by the its protagonists in the 1920s and thereafter, stood fragmented.

The Kashmiris, having long suffered the indifference of their rulers, tried conveying much the same message to Delhi. They did so not as Muslims per se but as citizens of a region that had acquired their own distinct identity over the centuries. Before acceding to the Union, they had acted in unison to struggle for their rights and found a leader in Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah to guide their destiny.

Incidentally, the Sheikh nurtured the vision of a Kashmiri identity within the Indian nation. His was, indeed, a singularly secular and forward-looking movement for the Kashmiris and not only for the predominantly Muslim population in the Valley. Sadly, the self-righteous statesman in Delhi lost the import of his message. He was ignored, rebuffed and incarcerated by Nehru and the wise men, some from the Valley itself, around him.

Today, the Valley is not how Jahangir had found it. Sheikh Abdullah’s secular dream also lies in tatters. Devotees that once thronged the lofty temples that Jahangir described in his memoirs are apprehensive. The Dal Lake, surrounded by armed garrisons, weeps for the dead and wounded. The flowers at Chashm-i Shahi and the Nishat Bagh have yet to blossom. Moreover, the streets of Srinagar, as indeed the glorious saffron fields that Jahangir described so vividly, seem desolate without the Kashmiri Pandits who embody all that was beautiful in Indo-Islamicite society and culture. They seem to be saying to each and every passer-by: Kashmir will have no peace without their presence. They have been and will remain an integral part of our being. Militancy and terrorism may well have forced the Kashmiri Pandits to abandon their home.

At this juncture, however, it is important for the disparate Muslim groups in Kashmir to make strenuous efforts to invite the beleaguered Pandits to return to their homeland. In fact, the moral legitimacy of their movement would depend on their capacity to respect the identity of the Pandits and accommodate their interests. It is outrageous to displace, as the Palestinian and Kosovo experiences tell us, people from their land of birth just because they profess a different religion. This is what Syed Ali Hamdani and Sheikh Nuruddin, the great Kashmiri mystics, would have said way back in the 14th century.

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