The freedom to question a foreign democracy’s responses to its political and social challenges is essentially a test of the integrity of its equality. Discomforting yes but collateral empathy can never be controlled; the ache of concern for Kashmir’s unrelenting struggle for peace and compassionate justice is widely felt.
Ten years ago, a Kashmiri teenager’s childhood memories gave me a glimpse of the fallout from the valley’s decades of conflict. At the age of 6, he’d watched security forces burn his village to the ground, his family killed and his young mother maddened with grief. Caught by insurgents, the boy was made to work as a child soldier. He tried several times to escape before reaching safety in Delhi. His oral account of his early life needed translating from his native Kashmiri language into English to be published in the Delhi newspaper I worked for.
A young Kashmiri journalist intern came to the rescue and together we crafted the young teenager’s incredible story into publishable form. His life touched us both deeply; the boy, now 15 or so years of age was pale and vulnerable, his spirit fragile yet his courage seemed phenomenal to us. Tears fell as he told his story. It was impossible not to long to help him retrieve something of the lost innocence of his childhood. When he’d finished talking, he stood up with a shy smile then turned to leave with a friendly wave. He looked buoyed with relief now that his pain had been held up to the light at last.
In several visits for research interviews and through my ongoing working life with Kashmiri colleagues, the valley’s stories have pursued me, no matter where I’m based in the world. In the years since my last visit, Kashmir’s situation has hardly improved. It’s a sweet irony that in “The Country Without A Post Office”, my colleagues in the valley have been so tenacious about staying connected, as have I. Kashmiri author Agha Shahid Ali’s lovely “Stationary” poem speaks to all for whom the act of writing letters to separated friends, family and loved ones, is such a precious literary form.
Practicing journalism under the scrutiny of the security industry is often formidably discouraging. Kashmiri journalists have been forced to innovate to survive the complexities of reporting all sides of the story under such unyielding circumstances. Space for long form journalism, or narrative essays gives Kashmir’s non-fiction writers the safety to describe the truth in respectfully textured contexts.
It is a way of writing that welcomes the necessary questioning of democracies under threat. Kashmiri nonfiction writers’ urgent artistry is broadening global awareness of the complex anomalies of the region’s geopolitical situation, from the ground. The fierce literary economy in authors Basharat Peer and Mirza Waheed’s essaying reportage, or Majid Maqbool’s examination of a torture victim’s wounds for signs of healing where there are none, or Ananya Vajpayi’s reflective excavations of the valley’s political and cultural histories, are all pitched in a creative unison of outrage. Could this be the beginnings of a new genre?
