Akhtar Mohiuddin (1928-2001) is indisputably the finest raconteur of stories in the Kashmiri language. He has received the highest literary awards of India for his writings in the Kashmiri language including the Sahitya Academy Award in 1958, The Kala Kendra Shield in 1975 and the Padam Shri in 1968. The five stories in this book record the events in Kashmir at crucial turning points in the checkered history of this State and because of their human interest are bound to keep a thoughtful reader spellbound and unable to leave them unfinished once he starts reading them.
Kashmiri Short Story Was Born With The Progressive Movement In Kashmir And It Accepted The Standards And Values Dictated By The Movement Unquestioningly. Nationalism And The Desire For Reaching Out To People Inspired Most Of The Writers To Switch Over To Kashmiri, Even Though They Had Started Writing In Urdu. Dinanath NadimýS Javabi Card (Reply-Card) And Somnath ZutshiýS Yeli Phol Gash (When There Was Light) Are The First Two Short Stories Written In Kashmiri. The Seventeen Stories Presented In This Volume Explore Inner Realities Through Unconventional Means Breaking Free From Stereotypes.
Indian literature is produced in a wealth of languages but there is an asymmetry in the exposure the writing gets, which owes partly to the politics of translation into English. This book represents the first comprehensive political scrutiny of the concerns and attitudes of Indian language literature after 1947 to cover such a wide range, including voices from the cultural margins of the nation like Kashmiri and Manipuri, that of women alongside those of minority and marginalised communities. In examining the politics of the writing especially in relation to concerns like nationhood, caste, tradition and modernity, postcoloniality, gender issues and religious conflict, the book goes beyond the declared ideology of each writer to get at covert significations pointing to widely shared but often unacknowledged biases. The book is deeply analytical but lucid and jargon-free and, to those unfamiliar with the writers, it introduces a new keenness into Indian literary criticism to make its objects exciting.
The Indian government, touted as the world's largest democracy, often repeats that Jammu and Kashmir—its only Muslim-majority state—is "an integral part of India." The region, which is disputed between India and Pakistan, and is considered the world's most militarized zone, has been occupied by India for over seventy-five years. In this book, Hafsa Kanjwal interrogates how Kashmir was made "integral" to India through a study of the decade long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of Bakshi's state-building policies in the context of India's colonial occupation. She reveals how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to integrate Kashmir's Muslims while also showing how these policies were marked by inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression. Challenging the binaries of colonial and postcolonial, Kanjwal historicizes India's occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, she urges us to question triumphalist narratives of India's state-formation, as well as the sovereignty claims of the modern nation-state.
Peerzada Ghulam Ahmad Mehjoor (1887-1952) popularly known as Mehjoor Kashmiri was born in the village of Matrigam in South Kashmir. When just thirteen years old he completed the study of “Panj Ganj –e-Nizami “ of the Persian poet Nizami and was declared to be proficient in Persian by his teachers. He started writing poems in the Kashmiri language at an early age and in 1930s was recognized as one of the greatest romantic poets of Kashmir. A few years before his death following the tribal invasion of Kashmir in 1947 he came out of seclusion and wrote poems on subjects that were of importance to the inhabitants of the State at that time. Though a devout Muslim the ideas expressed in his poem “AZADI” or “FREEDOM” are strikingly similar to those in the Turkish communist poet Nazim Hekmat’s poem “A Sad State of Freedom”. The topical poems of Mehjoor .provide an insight into the conditions prevailing in Kashmir at the time of the departure of the British from the Subcontinent.
Kashmir remains one of the world's most militarized areas of dispute, having been in the grips of an armed insurgency against India since the late 1980s. In existing scholarship, ideas of territoriality, state sovereignty, and national security have dominated the discourses on the Kashmir conflict. This book, in contrast, places Kashmir and Kashmiris at the center of historical debate and investigates a broad range of sources to illuminate a century of political players and social structures on both sides of divided Kashmir and in the wider Kashmiri diaspora. In the process, it broadens the contours of Kashmir's postcolonial and resistance history, complicates the meaning of Kashmiri identity, and reveals Kashmiris' myriad imaginings of freedom. It asserts that 'Kashmir' has emerged as a political imaginary in postcolonial era, a vision that grounds Kashmiris in their negotiations for rights not only in India and Pakistan, but also in global political spaces.
Sir Charles Cunningham Watson the Political Secretary of the Viceroy made the following interesting observation in his own handwriting on the file regarding appointment of Lt.Col.Colvin as Prime Minister of Kashmir: "I am definitely of the opinion that if Col.Colvin is to be of full value both to the Govt of India and the Durbar he must not draw less than Rs.4000/pm. Otherwise it will be said in the bazars that he is a cheap figurehead imported by the Maharajah on the advice of the Kashmiri Pandits. This last is true; he must not start with any other handicap." This makes clear the reason for the appointment of Col.Colvin as the Prime Minister of the Maharaja and is referred to in Chapter 18 of this book. To put it in proper perspective for the modern reader the lowest paid government worker like the Government Silk Factory worker was paid about Rupees ten per month. Thus the salary recommended for the Prime Minister was 400 times the salary of the lowest paid worker. In modern India the lowest paid employee of the Central Government the peon is paid about Rupees 7000/p.m. while the Prime Minister gets a pay of about Rupees 160,000/p.m. i.e. just about 23 times the salary of the peon The Resident of Kashmir in his memorandum of September 1931 to the Government of India made the following observation about the July 1931 agitation: “.. At the present moment communal trouble, as such, has not come to notice. The tenseness of Muhammadan feeling is rather anti-Durbar than anti-Hindu.” This belies the attempt by some persons to dub the agitation by the people of Kashmir for their greater empowerment that began on 13th July 1931 as a communal riot. Amin Kamil (1924-2014) is a famous Kashmiri poet and writer.Appendix 3 of this edition has the english translation of his short story “Pyind Puran” which describes the sea change that came about in Kashmir after the abolition of feudalism by Sheikh Abdullah in1952. This is the first time that this story has been translated from Kashmiri into English. The story of Sheikh Abdullah’s life is a love story. It is the story of a man who loved Kashmir and “whose entire life was an expression of this love”. It is a story of his trials and tribulations, his successes and failures, of storms that he weathered and his halcyon days. It is a story that deserves to be read and reread for its sheer human interest by all those who have a place in their heart for that blighted paradise that is Kashmir.
*Shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2016* Mirza Waheed's extraordinary new novel The Book of Gold Leaves is a heartbreaking love story set in war-torn Kashmir. In an ancient house in the city of Srinagar, Faiz paints exquisite Papier Mache pencil boxes for tourists. Evening is beginning to slip into night when he sets off for the shrine. There he finds the woman with the long black hair. Roohi is prostrate before her God. She begs for the boy of her dreams to come and take her away. Roohi wants a love story. An age-old tale of love, war, temptation, duty and choice, The Book of Gold Leaves is a heartbreaking tale of a what might have been, what could have been, if only. 'I loved it. The voice is lyrical, to match the beauty of Kashmir, and yet it is tinged with melancholy and grief, as is the story it tells' Nadeem Aslam (on The Collaborator) 'Waheed's prose burns with the fever of anger and despair; the scenes in the valley are exceptional, conveying, a hallucinatory living nightmare that has become an everyday reality for Kashmiris' Metro (on The Collaborator) Mirza Waheed was born and brought up in Kashmir. His debut novel The Collaborator was shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhat Prize, and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. It was also book of the year for The Telegraph, New Statesman, Financial Times, Business Standard and Telegraph India, among others. Waheed has written for the BBC, The Guardian, Granta, Al Jazeera English and the New York Times. He lives in London.
