Darkness or Light

Silence on fatwas is no longer an option for Kashmiris

When I was growing up in Kashmir Valley in the 1980s, music and dance were an integral part of our lives. As I got ready for school, a musical programme played on Radio Kashmir, featuring singers—many of them female—who were a rage in the Valley. There was Kailash Mehra, and Shamima Dev, and Raj Begum. Among the other artistes, there was Haseena Akhtar who mesmerised us with her voice and delicate dance. At marriages, women would sing and dance with men all night while henna was applied on the bride and groom. And in the winter of 1989-90, all of it changed. Suddenly, watching a film became ‘haraam’. Wine shops were shut down. Blood flowed on the streets. There was nothing to celebrate. We slipped into mourning. It would last for years.

Then gradually, Kashmiris got used to it. In the early 1990s, when I was in exile in Jammu, my erstwhile school friends from the Valley would visit us and spend days catching up on the latest films. They also took along with them audio cassettes of popular films. In the absence of any kind of entertainment, young boys would appear on the streets and tease paramilitary soldiers with stones and verbal insults. Sometimes, it would prove lethal. And then there would be more mourning.

The whole cultural landscape of Kash- mir changed. There were no Pandits left. Those who were born after 1990 have little idea how Kashmir was in happier times. Many of them have since been fed a dose of radical religious taleem. Along with it came other forms of Talibanisation. In the absence of any meeting places, boys and girls would spend their intimate moments in cyber cafes. But even there, they were not left alone. The lady CEO of Jihad Inc, Asiya Andrabi, her entire body draped in black, would storm into these cafes with her cadre and admonish the young for being ‘unIslamic’. There was not a whimper of protest. Journalists, authors and civil rights activists who usually took one terabyte of space to remind us how freedom was being suffocated in Kashmir by the Indian State would disappear when it came to raising a voice against the likes of Andrabi. The common man was silenced as well. He was silenced in the name of the ‘cause’.

In the last few years, this silence has deepened, even as the noise of India-hating Kashmiris on social media has increased. In 2010, a young Kashmir-based artist Diba Mushtaq spoke to a Mumbai-based newspaper about the concerns of ordinary Kashmiris. Towards the end, she also praised Chief Minister Omar Abdullah. She was immediately made a target of such hate and abuse that the article had to be taken off the paper’s website. In 2011, similar venom against the proposed Harud litfest forced its organisers to call it off. In all these incidents, saner elements in Kashmir kept quiet.

And now in 2013, an all-girl rock band has been targeted by the same custodians of religion. It was only last December that the band called Pragaash, which ironically means ‘from darkness to light’ in Kashmiri, performed at a music festival in Srinagar. Soon, the band’s members—all of them school girls—became a target of a malicious campaign. They were accused of insulting Islam. Even Kashmir’s Grand Mufti has criticised them for ‘straying from the rightful path’, in response to which Pragaash has disbanded now. The news went viral, with the national and foreign media picking it up, leading to several hours of debate in TV studios. From other parts of the country (and world), the girls can count on plenty of support. But within Kashmir, the same deathly silence reigns.

One of the band members has said they will not continue with their music because no one in Kashmir supports them. That is precisely the problem. No matter how much support they get from outside the state, any attempt by a Kashmiri to move from darkness to light becomes a target of those who profit from regression. Kashmiris who live in the Valley need to rethink what kind of life they envisage for themselves. And if music and literature and freedom from regression are their priority, they need to speak out. They could perhaps begin with Pragaash.

 

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