Review: Loal Kashmir by Mehak Jamal

Hindustan Times

6 hours ago

There's a common saying, 'In Kashmir, the news can be wrong, but the rumours are always right,' writes Mehak Jamal in Lōal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land, her debut collection of 16 real-life love stories set in the Valley against the backdrop of the unrelenting conflict. In this case, she is referring to a sense of foreboding in Kashmir in July 2019. By the end of the month, locals had begun hoarding food, medicines and fuel, preparing for the suspension of phone and internet services, and generally sensed that something was afoot. But no one was prepared, after the revocation of the special status of Jammu and Kashmir, for the total communication blackout imposed — certainly not young people in love. Lōal is the Kashmiri word for love and longing. Like rumours, love here often exists in whispers and moves in the shadows. And Jamal's book is a collection of the sweet, bittersweet, or even bitter — and often inventive — ways in which Kashmiris must navigate romantic relationships, with patience and restraint. Under the chinar trees at the Nishat Mughal garden in Srinagar. (Waseem Andrabi/ Hindustan Times) 364pp, Rs599; HarperCollins
The people in this book have lived through the significant political events of the last three decades, and Jamal has neatly divided their accounts into three chronological sections: Otru (day before yesterday) from the 90s, Rath (yesterday) from the 2000s and Az (today) from 2019. Altogether, this book is perhaps the most perspicuous account of Kashmir and the conflict.
The most complex and powerful — and suddenly, unanticipatedly topical — story is about Pakistani wives of former Kashmiri militants. Months after the publication of Lōal Kashmir, these women were among the Pakistani nationals across the country deported in the aftermath of the Pahalgam attack in April. What's little known outside of Kashmir is the years of protest by dozens of these women — Pakistani wives of former Kashmiri militants — to either get Indian citizenship or be allowed to return. Bushra, a young woman in the Bagh district of Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir, marries Burhan, a member of the Hizbul Mujahideen from Baramulla who had crossed over for arms training in the 1990s. When they married, he left militancy. They were madly in love, they ran a fruit and vegetable shop together, had children. A few years later, in 2010, chief minister Omar Abdullah started a rehabilitation programme for ex-militant youth stuck in PoK, giving them a chance to return and be reintegrated into Kashmiri society. Bushra accompanied her husband to the home he hadn't seen in over a decade since he was a boy, promising her mother that she would be back soon. But Burhan had thrown away their passports. And Bushra, along with about 350 other wives, was now stuck in limbo, neither being granted Indian nationality nor allowed to return to their home towns. Over the course of the story, Bushra and Burhan's marriage, soured beyond repair by his betrayal, ended and she joined Pakistani women like her who were protesting their precarious situations.
This is a story about the inheritance of displacement. Bushra's grandfather too had been from Pattan, Burhan's home town, in Baramulla. During the 1965 war, he had crossed the ceasefire line and married a woman from Bagh and then had been unable to return or visit his family. But Jamal doesn't analyse the labyrinths of borders and identity and ideas of nationhood and belonging — she simply lays them out for readers to make their own connections.
The early stories, more so because of the benefit of the passing of time, are more compelling.
There's the love story of the Kashmiri woman who lived in Gaza (and was evacuated in 2023) with her Palestinian husband she had met when they were students at the Aligarh Muslim University in the 1980s. There's a man from a village in Anantnag who still carries around a love letter in his pocket because when he was 17, in the 1990s, he was saved from what could have been a terrible encounter with soldiers, by one written in poetic Urdu from his girlfriend. There's the unlikely relationship of a young Pandit boy and Muslim girl in the early 2000s — spending time together talking in a PCO booth or empty Matador buses or a giftshop called Dreams whose sympathetic owner let them wander around — and the story unfolds over the years starting from his family decision's to return to the Valley after temporarily relocating to Jammu during the exodus of the Pandits in the 1990s to what their lives looked like in the Kashmiri crossfire between the army and militants. There's a woman whose Indian-American husband — his knowledge of the Valley was limited to the 2000 Bollywood movie Mission Kashmir — was aghast at the realities of life in a conflict area.
Most stories, though, are from around the 2019 blackout — and couples somehow found ways to correspond. An engaged doctor couple, working in different hospitals and unable to meet, exchanged love letters passed through a chain of medical staff. Couples would handwrite letters, take photos of them and share via Bluetooth. They were using Bluetooth-enabled messaging apps — 'many a boyfriend visited his girlfriend's neighbourhood, and once in the area range, messaged her while standing in the lane right outside her house, hoping she checked her phone and his journey would not prove futile.' A young trans man who flew to Amritsar to be able to stay uninterruptedly on the phone with his girlfriend who had moved to study medicine in Islamabad.
Lōal Kashmir started as a memory project in 2020. Jamal, a filmmaker, grew up in Srinagar 'struggling with language, religion and belonging'. Her father is Kashmiri Muslim and mother Maharashtrian Hindu, and she writes in the introduction to the book, 'I always felt I belonged to Kashmir, but I wasn't sure Kashmir belonged to me.' This is a reclamation, her own love letter. She put out a call online asking Kashmiris willing to share their stories to fill up a Google form and then conducted detailed interviews. Author Mehak Jamal (Courtesy A Suitable Agency)
The idea is deceptively simple — its execution more so.
Jamal is a thrifty writer. She prefaces the stories with brush strokes of the history of Kashmir — from Yusuf Shah Chak, the last indigenous Kashmiri king in the sixteenth century to the assembly elections in 2024 — in four pages. And in 16 stories (although some could have been skipped), she covers the most significant events of the last three decades.
This is a very accessible book, which is not to say that it's simplistic. Far from it. The writing is plain but succeeds through its clarity. Its only real flaw is the inability to capture any kind of sentimentality. The material is dramatic, the characters are intriguing, and the landscape is stunning. But there's little here in terms of emotions or insight associated with love and strife. There isn't, really, any passage or sense of feeling worth quoting but all the stories are easy to remember and to read.
Saudamini Jain is an independent jouralist. She lives in New Delhi.