Saturday, August 14, 2010

Of Life, Love And War

By Sameer Rahim, *Curfewed Night: a Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir: review* - Telegraph - UK
Friday, August 6, 2010

Sameer Rahim admires a moving memoir about growing up in war-torn Kashmir

In February 1990, Basharat Peer saw a procession moving through his Kashmiri village towards a Sufi shrine. The bookish 13-year-old felt a rush of joy as he heard the men chanting for freedom: Aazadi! Aazadi!

They were protesting against the killing of Kashmiri demonstrators by Indian soldiers; but they were also calling for the disputed region to be allowed a plebiscite on its own sovereignty, as the UN had once promised.

Although Kashmir is Muslim-dominated, this idyllic land with snow-capped mountains and gorgeous lakes was divided between India and Pakistan in 1948. Since then various groups have campaigned – peacefully and violently – for the whole of Kashmir either to join Pakistan or to become an independent state. The Indian army, in response, has fought the rebels and carried out atrocities which, in turn, have further fuelled the rebellion.

Curfewed Night is an exceptional personal account of the conflict. Peer has a superb feel for language and incident. Words such as “frisking, crackdown, bunker, search, identity card, arrest and torture,” he tells us, formed the lexicon of his childhood. His village is shadowed by militants showing off their Kalashnikovs; Peer and his school friends carry their cricket bats like guns, “in imitation and preparation”. But though he was tempted, like one of his cousins, to join the militants, Peer grew increasingly suspicious of their tactics.

Despite his family’s pleas, the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front attack an Indian convoy close by their village. The army’s reprisals will be swift and the family quickly grab their possessions. As they leave, the young Basharat looks longingly at the books in his father’s library – the leather-bound Shakespeare, the hardback Russians, the Urdu writers Manto, Ghalib and Iqbal – thinking he will never see them again. In the end they are lucky: they return home to find only a few bullets stuck in the walls, which Peer’s grandfather pulls out with pliers.

A few years later there is more luck: Peer’s father survives a militant attack on him, justified because he works as a civil servant in a government run by Delhi. He was, according to rumour, betrayed by a jealous rival at work.

After becoming a journalist for an Indian newspaper, Peer reports on other wars far away from home but is inevitably drawn back to Kashmir. The second half of his book records his interviews with victims of the army occupation: former militants, now broken men unable to father children due to the torture they suffered in Indian jails; a husband and wife trying to cope with the trauma of having their wedding party attacked by soldiers and the bride raped.

Peer is particularly good on how the landscape has been desecrated by the presence of 500,000 Indian soldiers. Srinagar, the capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, was once composed of “elegant latticed houses, mosques and temples admiring each other from the banks of the River Jhelum”; now it is covered with concrete bunkers and checkpoints. “Armoured cars and soldiers patrolling roads or manning check points had become part of the Kashmiri landscape, like the willows, poplars and pines.”

Another sinister development is the increasing prominence in the conflict of Pakistani-funded radical groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which carry out suicide attacks in Kashmir, India and even in Pakistan itself against Sufi and Shia mosques. These groups also often have links with the Taliban.

The book ends in April 2005, with the hopeful resumption of a bus route between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. But five years on, despite occasional gestures from both governments, freedom is still a distant prospect for the people of Kashmir.

Curfewed Night: a Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir
by Basharat Peer
223pp, HarperPress, £16.99 T £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515

No comments:

Saturday, August 14, 2010

Of Life, Love And War
By Sameer Rahim, *Curfewed Night: a Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir: review* - Telegraph - UK
Friday, August 6, 2010

Sameer Rahim admires a moving memoir about growing up in war-torn Kashmir

In February 1990, Basharat Peer saw a procession moving through his Kashmiri village towards a Sufi shrine. The bookish 13-year-old felt a rush of joy as he heard the men chanting for freedom: Aazadi! Aazadi!

They were protesting against the killing of Kashmiri demonstrators by Indian soldiers; but they were also calling for the disputed region to be allowed a plebiscite on its own sovereignty, as the UN had once promised.

Although Kashmir is Muslim-dominated, this idyllic land with snow-capped mountains and gorgeous lakes was divided between India and Pakistan in 1948. Since then various groups have campaigned – peacefully and violently – for the whole of Kashmir either to join Pakistan or to become an independent state. The Indian army, in response, has fought the rebels and carried out atrocities which, in turn, have further fuelled the rebellion.

Curfewed Night is an exceptional personal account of the conflict. Peer has a superb feel for language and incident. Words such as “frisking, crackdown, bunker, search, identity card, arrest and torture,” he tells us, formed the lexicon of his childhood. His village is shadowed by militants showing off their Kalashnikovs; Peer and his school friends carry their cricket bats like guns, “in imitation and preparation”. But though he was tempted, like one of his cousins, to join the militants, Peer grew increasingly suspicious of their tactics.

Despite his family’s pleas, the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front attack an Indian convoy close by their village. The army’s reprisals will be swift and the family quickly grab their possessions. As they leave, the young Basharat looks longingly at the books in his father’s library – the leather-bound Shakespeare, the hardback Russians, the Urdu writers Manto, Ghalib and Iqbal – thinking he will never see them again. In the end they are lucky: they return home to find only a few bullets stuck in the walls, which Peer’s grandfather pulls out with pliers.

A few years later there is more luck: Peer’s father survives a militant attack on him, justified because he works as a civil servant in a government run by Delhi. He was, according to rumour, betrayed by a jealous rival at work.

After becoming a journalist for an Indian newspaper, Peer reports on other wars far away from home but is inevitably drawn back to Kashmir. The second half of his book records his interviews with victims of the army occupation: former militants, now broken men unable to father children due to the torture they suffered in Indian jails; a husband and wife trying to cope with the trauma of having their wedding party attacked by soldiers and the bride raped.

Peer is particularly good on how the landscape has been desecrated by the presence of 500,000 Indian soldiers. Srinagar, the capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, was once composed of “elegant latticed houses, mosques and temples admiring each other from the banks of the River Jhelum”; now it is covered with concrete bunkers and checkpoints. “Armoured cars and soldiers patrolling roads or manning check points had become part of the Kashmiri landscape, like the willows, poplars and pines.”

Another sinister development is the increasing prominence in the conflict of Pakistani-funded radical groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which carry out suicide attacks in Kashmir, India and even in Pakistan itself against Sufi and Shia mosques. These groups also often have links with the Taliban.

The book ends in April 2005, with the hopeful resumption of a bus route between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. But five years on, despite occasional gestures from both governments, freedom is still a distant prospect for the people of Kashmir.

Curfewed Night: a Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir
by Basharat Peer
223pp, HarperPress, £16.99 T £14.99 (PLUS £1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515

No comments: