‘Loal Kashmir' review: Stories of love and longing from Kashmir
'Someone from outside Kashmir—if they have to live here even for a little while, they'd go insane," says Madeeha, a girl from Baramulla, in the story titled, Blue Salwar Kameez in Mehak Jamal's debut book, Loal Kashmir.
Poets have often called love an insanity, a disease that destroys the one who experiences it, steals their tranquility and sleep; its only reward being the sights, sounds and smell of the beloved. Loal Kashmir takes you into this world of love and insanity told through 16 non-fiction stories, exploring the human cost of conflict and the resilience of lovers in the troubled land we call Kashmir.
Loal, as Jamal writes in her introduction 'is the Kashmiri word for love and affection". In popular imagination, love and Kashmir are words that don't seem to go together. Jamal seeks to bridge that gap for the reader and present Kashmir, not from the perspective of mainstream Indian media, but as a land of lovers; the ones who would walk for miles just to get a glimpse of their beloved, travel outside the state during a lockdown just to hear the voice of a loved one, or prepare for a wedding against all odds.
Also read: 'Heads or Tails', a short story by Zeyad Masroor Khan
These stories, told to Jamal by people who have faced the twin demons of militancy and army atrocities for decades, are full of beautiful nuances, without being preachy. As her homeland limps back to normalcy after being the epicentre of the recent conflict between India and Pakistan—with scores dead, hundreds injured, and several houses destroyed in shelling—these narratives feel all the more valuable.
The book is divided into three sections—Otaru (Day Before Yesterday), Rath (Yesterday), and Az (Today)— each capturing different periods of Kashmir's history. The first part tells stories from the early days of militancy, where love letters and stolen moments kept relationships alive. The second section focuses on the years of protests and curfews after another bout of unrest in 2008. The final section, the most powerful, takes place after the abrogation of Article 370—which gave the state partial autonomy and barred non-locals from buying land there. During this period, an intense communication blackout made even a simple phone call impossible. Each story reflects the resilience of people who find ways to hold on to love, no matter the obstacles, their struggles blooming like lilies in marshy waters.
As the author puts it, her book is an answer to the question: what happens when you cannot communicate your longing for the beloved? One of the most poignant moments in the book comes in the story, Fight or Flight. A mother waits in a queue at Srinagar's Lal Chowk to wish her daughter Batul, an air hostess working in Saudi Arabia, on her birthday. The incident takes place during the Article 370 lockdown. Batul's mother stood in queue for eight hours to make a call that would last 60 seconds. During this brief call, she only managed to convey that the family was 'doing alright". In her second attempt, she sends a voice note through a conduit. Batul plays the voice note every day like it is a love song.
Of course, romantic love takes centrestage in Loal Kashmir, and the stories immerse the reader in a world of surprise proposals, tuition classes where teenage love blooms, rusty Matador buses and a love letter that saves a boy from being perceived as militant. In this world, romance coexists with death, grief, parental disapproval, army checkposts, violent crackdowns and mobile shutdowns.
The strength of the book lies in the intensity of emotions recounted in the stories, but perhaps more so in the story, Roohani, about the romance between Asad and Haika, a queer couple. Asad, a transgender man, is in a relationship with Haika, who is studying medicine in Islamabad, Pakistan. Just before the Article 370 communication shutdown, the two had a bitter fight which couldn't be reconciled because of the jamming of mobile networks. Asad, whose identity is not taken seriously by his father, becomes restless since he is unable to talk to Haika. Overcome by the need to hear the voice of the only person who truly sees him, Asad conquers his phobia of planes and flies to Punjab, merely for the chance to make a phone call.
Also read: 'The Last Knot', a novel about Kashmir's past, present and future
Another touching story is the account of Beena and Sakib, best friends whose arranged marriage was scheduled for 19 August 2019—days after the August 5 lockdown descended like a supervillain. Rather than postpone their wedding, Beena and Sakib proceed with remarkable resourcefulness, using their contacts to inform guests, source meat, arrange the nikah, and complete all the traditional Kashmiri wedding rituals. Their story becomes emblematic of both the resilience of Kashmiris and the normalization of conflict in daily life.
This is one the of stories in Loal Kashmir that opens a window into traditions largely unfamiliar to mainland Indians: wazwan feasts, the roles of manzi-kur, manzirath, and manzimyor (transgender marriage matchmakers). This world is poetic, tragic and joyous at the same time, symbolizing the innovation and flexibility of Kashmiris.
Kashmiri in Gaza resonated with me because of the boundary-crossing narrative and the fact that the affair blossomed in my hometown, Aligarh. Layla, a Kashmiri woman studying at Aligarh Muslim University, falls in love with Mahdi, a Palestinian from Gaza. Despite parental resistance and her father's deathbed command to his brothers to prevent the union, Layla ultimately marries Mahdi and relocates to Gaza, an experience that transforms her worldview.
Loal Kashmir is not just a window to a world of love and pain in the valley, but also the story of privilege and 'normal life' that the rest of India takes for granted. If there is one thing the writer could have improved on, it is the descriptions of places. We see the people and their internal struggles, but it would have been beautiful if we could have seen Jamal's homeland through her eyes.
In a state where holding onto love is sometimes the only solace, these stories represent a flavour of Kashmir often denied by mainstream media and cinema, guilty of showcasing the people of the valley as a monolith, a bunch of stone-pelters, anti-nationals or ungrateful citizens. Jamal, whose father is a Kashmiri Muslim and mother a Maharashtrian Hindu, seeks to set the record straight and does so with empathy.
Zeyad Masroor Khan is a freelance journalist and author of City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh.
Also read: How vacation pics overshadowed the Pahalgam tragedy
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
India Today
25 minutes ago
- India Today
From the India Today archives (2011)
(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated June 20, 2011)"As I begin to paint, hold the sky in your hands; as the stretch of my canvas is unknown to me."—M.F. Husain With the death of Maqbool Fida Husain in a London hospital on the morning of June 9, India has not only lost her most iconic contemporary artist but also perhaps one of the last living symbols of the very idea of her modern, secular and multicultural nationalism. Born in 1915 at the temple town of Pandharpur in Maharashtra, Husain came from a lower middle class Sulemani Muslim family and rose through the ranks to become India's most famous painter of people, places and a visual artist-especially a mid-20th century modernist painter-Husain was precariously perched on the crest of a nascent and evolving national consciousness. In the post-Partition era, when he first burst on the Indian art scene, Husain became a much celebrated symbol patronised by the Nehruvian state looking to create modernist role models. Yet, that very celebrity made him and his works vulnerable to be hijacked, misrepresented and reviled three decades later by a semi-literate cabal claiming to represent the collective voice of a largely silent Hindu majority. In fact, the torrid love affair between Husain and 'modern secular' India and their eventual dismaying disengagement makes for a civilisational sociologist Veena Das remarks, this "impossible love" had an inherent fragility because the idol, the image and the word are all strongly contested entities. It is also further complicated by the illicit intimacy between history and the 'perception of history' in post-colonial imaginations. The tantalising and tragic relationship-between a nation's notion of the self and Husain's visualisation of it in his art practice-became the vexed terrain over which competing political alignments fought their proxy wars for a good two decades before it eventually led to Husain's self-imposed exile from India in 2006. Four years later, he accepted Qatari nationality, spending his time between Dubai, London and Husain was educated in the streets of Indore, a madrassa in Baroda, the Indore School of Arts and very briefly the J.J. School of Arts, Mumbai. He was an immensely talented and intelligent man with an enormous curiosity about the world who learnt effortlessly from life and people. He arrived in what was then Bombay in the early 1930s, penniless but bursting with enthusiasm and energy, traits that he retained all through his first started out by walking the streets of Bombay offering to paint portraits of people who could afford to pay him Rs 25. There were not too many commissions but some of these early portraits still survive. In 2008 in London, I saw a portrait Husain had done of Lord Ghulam Noon's elder brother in a Bhendi Bazaar sweet shop. Soon, he moved to painting cinema hoardings, first for V. Shantaram's Prabhat Studios and later for New perched high on bamboo scaffolding, Husain learnt to be able to concentrate amid the noise and chaos of the street below. He used to paint 40 foot hoardings for four annas a foot under the blazing sun in Mumbai for many years. From painting hoardings, he progressed to designing toys and painting children's furniture for Rs 300 a month. "But even at that time I knew I would be an artist one day," he used to say, adding, "there was a time when I painted furniture by day and my own art by night. I painted non-stop." Cinema held a life-long fascination for Husain and decades later, he went on to make several much-talked about films. Of these Through the Eyes of a Painter (1967) won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival but the most well-known is Gaja Gamini (2000) that featured Madhuri Dixit as his muse. In 2004 he made the semi-autobiographical Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities with Tabu in the lead role which ran into trouble with Muslim life started to change radically around the time of Independence. Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002), the prodigious enfant terrible of Indian art, spotted Husain's talent by chance and immediately included him in his Progressive Artists Group (PAG) in 1947. Husain's work was noticed right from that first showing and with the encouragement of Rudi von Leyden, the German Jewish art critic, he held his first one-man show in Mumbai in 1950. With prices ranging from Rs 50 to Rs 300, the exhibition sold out. As Husain told me with a chuckle, "I was a best seller right from start."advertisementWhat differentiates Husain from his Progressive contemporaries is his deeply rooted 'Indianness' and his celebration of Indian life and people. While his contemporaries were busily assimilating European art from Byzantium downwards, Husain sought inspiration in temple sculptures (Mathura and Khajuraho), Pahari miniature paintings and Indian folk the mid-1950s Husain got national recognition with two very seminal canvases 'Zameen' and 'Between the Spider and the Lamp'. 'Zameen' was inspired by Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1955) but instead of bemoaning rural poverty and indebtedness, it presents a symbolic celebration of life in rural India with a vibrancy that had never been seen before. "I realised one did not have to paint like Europeans to be modern," he maintained. Nor did he, at any time, understand the angst of existentialism."Alienation as a concept is alien to my nature," he would joke. The next year he painted the more enigmatic 'Between the Spider and the Lamp'. This painting, considered by cognoscenti to be his best of all time, features five women reminiscent of ancient Indian sculpture with an oil lamp hanging from the top of canvas and some unintelligible words in a script that looks like ancient Brahmi, Magadhi or some long forgotten dialect. From the hand of one woman, painted as if frozen in a mudra, hangs a large spider by its thread. Some critics have suggested the women were the pancha kanyas (Ahalya, Kunti, Draupadi, Tara, Mandodari) of Hindu mythology. When this painting was shown, despite the ripples it created, no one came forth to buy it for Rs 800. It now hangs at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, on loan from the Husain became a living icon of Hindu-Muslim, gangajamni culture, his art acquired a quintessentially Indian form and content while being global in its relevance and appeal. Moreover, Husain invariably brought relevance to his paintings by making them topical. He was ever ready with the 'image of the day' whether it entailed painting the 'Man on the Moon' in 1969 or Indira Gandhi as Durga after the Bangladesh war in modern Indian art gained wider acceptance through the 1970s and 1980s, Husain was steadily scaling up his prices and using the media to create hype around his colourful persona and his escapades. "Life without drama is too drab," he used to say. Detractors screamed commercialisation and friends frowned in exasperation; but Husain insisted that "the fiscal worth of a painting is in the eyes of the buyer". And buyers came in Badri Vishal Pitti, the Hyderabad businessman for whom he painted 150 paintings, to Chester Herwitz, a handbag tycoon from Boston, who bought up anything that Husain produced through the 1970s. Two decades later, Kolkata industrialist G.S. Srivastava struck a deal for 124 Husain paintings for Rs 100 crore; not for love of art but as good investment. Indian art was appreciating at a higher rate than most stocks and brand Husain was now Husain Inc. After his emigration from India, Sheikha Mozah of Qatar was his last great all his fame and wealth, Husain was personally untouched by both. He could be as comfortable in a dhaba as in a five-star hotel relishing an expensive meal. He stopped wearing footwear as a tribute to the Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh in 1974 and he used to walk barefoot into the most exclusive and august gatherings as well as clubs the world epic saga is ever perfect. And Husain had more than his share of controversies and brickbats. However, it is in posterity that Husain's art and persona will get a truer reckoning. Perhaps the best tribute the Indian state could give would be to set up a museum devoted to the life and art of this most talented son of the to India Today Magazine
Time of India
26 minutes ago
- Time of India
Archana Puran Singh slams a troll who mocked her family setup by calling their home an 'Old Age Home'
Archana Puran Singh , who started her own YouTube channel a few months ago, and keeps giving a sneak peek of her family life through her videos, recently slammed an Instagram troll who mocked her family setup by calling her home an "old age home'. The comment came under one of Archana's social media posts, where a user questioned why her elderly mother and other senior family members were living with her. The remark was made on one of Archana's social media uploads, where someone asked why she had her aging mother and other elderly relatives staying with her. The comment read, "Just for academic interest, why is your Daadu and Naani living together? Is it like an old age home? (sic)." This comment made by the troll did not go unnoticed by Archana and she gave a befitting reply to the remark. She responded, "Just for your academic knowledge: it's not an 'old age' home. It's an Indian home. Let me further give you the definition of an 'Indian home'; it's where elders are loved and respected and kept close to the family." That's not all, Archana shared the screenshot of the remark on her Instagram account, calling out the troll. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like 인천 임플란트 특가! 33만원으로 건강한 치아 완성! [지금 알아보기] 플란치과 더 알아보기 Undo In her videos, Archana often shares family moments wherein she is seen having a gala time with her mother and other elderly family members. In fact, her sons and husband Parmeet also accompany her in the videos. Archana is currently vacationing in Switzerland with her sons Aaryamann and Ayushmaan Sethi and husband Parmeet Sethi . The family has been sharing videos from the trip where they can be seen enjoying the breathtaking views of the snowclad mountains and scenic beauty of Switzerland. The actress is gearing up to return with the season 3 of The Great Indian Kapil Show and recently even shot a promo with the team. Archana Puran Singh gives apt reply to a troll who termed her good deeds as 'show off' Get the latest lifestyle updates on Times of India, along with Eid wishes , messages, , and quotes !
Pink Villa
33 minutes ago
- Pink Villa
Thug Life Box Office Collections: Kamal Haasan starrer LIFELESS on day two
Tamil film Thug Life saw a sharp 55 per cent drop at the Indian box office, collecting just Rs. 7.50 crore. With this, the Kamal Haasan starrer has grossed Rs. 24.50 crore over two days. The four-day extended weekend of the film is expected to wrap around Rs. 40 crore or so. The film had a relatively better showing overseas with USD 2.25 million first day, but even there it faced big drops on the second day. The film was a dead-on-arrival opening poorly, and then the final nail in the coffin was the outright rejection from the audience. It will likely be lights out for the film on Monday and will hardly have any run after the first week. Most probably, the film will not even cross the Rs. 50 crore gross mark at the Indian box office, making it one of the biggest disasters ever. The Day Wise Box Office Collections of Thug Life in India are as follows: Thug Life marks the second box office misfire for Kamal Haasan in a row, after Indian 2, or third, if one already considers the write-off that Indian 3 is. Ironically, it was exactly three years ago, in the same week, that Haasan stormed back to box office glory with the blockbuster Vikram. On paper, his lineup that followed Vikram seemed to promise a strong commercial run, but it has failed spectacularly. Despite the dismal theatrical performance, the producers of Thug Life are insulated from financial loss, as they fetched handsome prices for the non-theatrical rights. The losses will be with those who paid those prices, as they are certainly not going to recover them, and with the exhibition sector, which has been deprived of footfall during what should have been a peak summer window.
