book review loal kashmir mehak jamal

The Hindu

09-05-2025

In documentary filmmaker Mehak Jamal's debut book, Lōal Kashmir, there's a moment when Beena, a bride-to-be, sighs as her fiancé, Sakib, recalls the hardships his parents faced while marrying in the 1980s. He remembers the silent pounding of meat under constant surveillance in a wedding that felt like an act of defiance. Beena then utters a line that exposes the book's cardinal irony: 'Woh waqt koi aur tha.' That was another time. Except, of course, it wasn't. The temporal space that Lōal Kashmir occupies often folds in on itself and makes way for repetition.
'Lōal' is the Kashmiri word for love and longing. The idea of this book was born after the abrogation of Article 370 when Kashmir came under a complete communication lockdown. Jamal set out to collect stories of love, longing and loss, and received an overwhelming response. People shared their stories; and as she writes in the Introduction, 'They wanted the world to remember how bravely they had fought, but equally how fiercely they had loved.'
The book, structured in three sections, Otru (day before yesterday), Rath (yesterday), and Az (today), wants to suggest a time sweep, but the truth is that the stories are caught in an eternal present. The lovers here are driven and desperate. Even love, which might hope to carve out a private refuge, is shaped by conflict.
A letter break
In the first story, 'Love Letter' a 17-year-old boy Javed, caught in a crackdown, remembers too late that he has a love letter in his pocket. The reader who is trained by headlines clearly expects the worst. But no, the soldiers instead make him read the letter aloud. The narrator then reveals that this was made possible as the soldiers 'wanted a break from the crackdown as much as Javed did'. Not to forget, the army in Kashmir is a force of power, and Javed, the boy with the letter, is tyrannised. To collapse their exhaustion into a single experience completely flattens the inherent violence and humiliation associated with these crackdowns.
The stories are potent with cross-border love, cancelled weddings, exiled lovers, migration as an ongoing negotiation with loss. But the telling of these stories is where the book falters. Kashmiri words are inserted not because they are not translatable, but as linguistic decoration which can perhaps work to perform the weight of lived experience.
The internet shutdown is recited, almost rhythmically in every story of Az (third section) as if to remind the reader of its importance. There is a documentary impulse at play here, which needs to explain Kashmir to a reader who might otherwise not 'get it.'
A four-and-a-half page too long Kashmiri history is a part of this impulse. But the best stories understand this instinctively. For instance, in Sagar's story ('Matador'), arguably the collection's sharpest, a Kashmiri Pandit caught in a minor altercation realises that in Kashmir, everyone is playing a survival game. The majority-minority binary, while so easy to invoke, is blurred in practice. 'Out here,' the story notes, 'they were all Kashmiris first.' Yet Sagar had been so focused on his difference that he had missed the larger truth that survival often demands betrayal. The realisation is devastating for him, and the story does not attempt to soften its blow.
Improbable bonds
Elsewhere, though, Jamal's technique is unconvincing. A story about a Kashmiri woman falling in love with a Palestinian man feels oddly voyeuristic. Love in Lōal Kashmir is very event-specific, we never quite know why lovers are tethered so fiercely despite the weight of distance, miscommunication, and the sheer improbability of their bond. Where does the resilience come from? At what cost? These questions are not probed. Jamal also does something very curious, she adds little notes at the end, updating the reader on where these characters are now, as if to satisfy an audience's curiosity. But who is this audience? And what is the book's obligation to them?
This is the paradox of Lōal Kashmir. The book understands that love in Kashmir is never separate from violence. And yet, again and again, the stories tell us that lovers triumph. Love, against all odds. Love, carrying on. But is this truly love in a conflict zone? Love in a place where time itself has been rendered meaningless? The book wants to have it both ways, and in doing so, sometimes doesn't realise that conflict is not backdrop, not setting. It in fact shapes love at the root.
To tell the story of love in a place where love and violence are inseparable is to risk either sentimentalising suffering or diminishing love. Jamal's stories live in this paradox, sometimes they succeed in capturing it, sometimes they evade it. But then, perhaps evasion is also a kind of truth. After all, 'in Kashmir, there is always someone in the background playing his own game'.
The reviewer is an independent journalist in New Delhi.
Lōal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land Mehak Jamal Harper Collins ₹599