The advent of partition brought forth a troublesome time for Kashmir, and what followed was only more tragic. The question of Kashmiri women has somewhat always been away from the spotlight, relating to the order of things in a patriarchal society where women are given a backseat. With the rise of resistance and eventually an armed conflict starting in the late 80s, struggles of Kashmiri women have had an added grip of oppression. For what was earlier a lack of space, participation, and opinion became a rising economic crisis, sexual harassment, and a longing for disappeared fathers, husbands, and sons.
Literature: By, for and on women
The richness of Kashmiri literature is well known from the time when its sovereignty was held by the Dogra rule. Way before that, Hindu poetess Laleshwari (known by the name of ‘Lal Ded‘) defined an era of mystical tales of religion and life of women in the valley that was predominantly Hindu at the time. Habba Khaatun became an inspiration for contemporary as well as modern poets of Kashmir, notably Mehjoor, Deena Nath Nadeem, and Rasul Mir, amongst many others. Her impact as a poetess of grief and longing builds a direct connection to the generation of women who faced the turmoil of the 90s.
In her book, ‘Behold, I shine,’ Indian journalist Freny Maneckshaw has done some great work, collecting stories of Kashmiri women of different backgrounds who have seen the wrath of the patriarchal structure and conflict through different lenses. “How does one understand Kashmir and its sense of pervading loss? How has militarisation transformed its landscape and eroded its cultural matrix? One way of imagining Kashmir, as it once was, is through Habba Khatun and what she symbolises for the people, especially women,” Maneckshaw writes, emphasising how the mystic wanderer and poetess is cherished by Kashmiri women partly because her story resonates with them.
Stuck in the rut of a loveless marriage, her mystic tales of violence by husband and in-laws become a melody of grief and loss for women in Kashmir. Her life changed paths after falling in love with Kashmir’s last ever emperor, Yusuf Shah Chak, but this was rather short lived as he was imprisoned by the Mughal rule in Delhi. Khaatun’s life thereafter, a continuous search for a missing fragment, became her tales of yearning that resonate with the life of a woman in Kashmir.
Maneckshaw further tries to build on the narrative on how the insurgency gave an upheaval to militarisation in the region, rising surveillance, and hijacking of spaces. “If Habba Khatun is loved, it is also because her poems are a reminder of a life once familiar in Kashmir—her verses are replete with allusions to wandering in open spaces, gathering wild basil or jasmine flowers, or drawing water from the wells. Her verses tell a tale that there lived a time when groups of girls could pick chinar leaves and twist them into ornaments, or walk into forests to collect firewood, or celebrate the coming of spring in badamwaris.” These erstwhile resting places today have succumbed to the rising urbanisation or taken over by the army. In this also lost are the traditional Yarbals or washing ghats, places where women did not just wash clothes but talk. These shared spaces of conversation hold a huge significance as a space where with each other in a sisterly bond, women felt freedom of expression and consequently release of emotion inside these places, something the patriarchal setup of Kashmiri households does not allow them. Yarbals also disappeared due to the same reason as Badamwaris.
Different eras, same silence
The conflict has no doubt changed the trajectory of the Kashmiri populace. What followed before it and what came in its aftermath were not alike at all. The sentiments of a popular struggle against the Indian state, whose presence was seen as a neo-colonial approach by a formerly colonised state, had risen in the 1960s. So when the aftermath of the 1987 assembly elections brought an armed uprising and resistance against the Indian state, it was not out of the blue.
Yet, the chaos of the 90s in the valley changed the lives of its men. The question arises: can the same be said for its women? They were victims of such atrocities as the men were and even more, but had things for a woman in Kashmir been better before.
The women of the Pandit community had to leave their homes; the rest of the women of the valley had to stay back and watch their homeland being controlled by the army; their houses searched; their localities cordoned; and their freedoms snatched. The prolonged wait for the return of disappeared kin became a routine of the women in the 90s. Married women whose husbands were disappeared by the armed forces got the name of Aadhi Bewa, or half widows, becoming a menace to the community that didn’t see their remarriages as fair but couldn’t fathom support either.
The rise of sexual harassment, mass rape in Kunan Poshpora villages, and the fear of the Ikhwanis (surrendered fighters of the resistance who joined the state) was what the army brought as Kashmir entered the 1990s, but the subjugation of women in Kashmir dates back to the era before the conflict. The silence seen in the female populace of Kashmir during the era of Dogras was done in an environment that was perceived as normal. As the significance of Yarbals and Badamwaris goes, it was an epitome of female expression and freedom of thought with fellow women, all of whom faced the suppression of voices at their homes. A nuisance in practice, that men are the breadearners and the breadearners are the heads of their families, taking control in the say of every matter. Such a discriminatory fact has been existent in Kashmiri society and continues to do so, subjugating its women from education and empowerment.
Amongst Dogra royals, women were not the heroes of war and administration, and the same went for their Zamindars. After gaining semi-autonomous status under the instrument of accession with the Indian state, Kashmiri politics saw ups and downs, but those born in the 1950s and 1960s became the recipient’s of Sheikh Abdullah’s ‘Naya Kashmir‘ and its dynamic land reforms.
While working on her book, Freny Maneckshaw managed to interview a bunch of journalists who were based within as well as outside Kashmir. “Landless peasants, who had come of age hearing stories of forced labour and the injustices of the Dogra kings, suddenly became the proud possessors of land and could hope for social mobility and financial security. This was the ‘wushnear’ (Kashmiri word that connotes cosiness or warmth) generation, one that could ‘flirt’ with fulfilment. But the generation that followed—that could dream bigger—its goals unhindered by memories of the Dogra subjugation—was doomed to get increasingly restless.” explained Arif Ayaz Parrey, a writer and journalist working in Delhi, one of the men she interviewed.
Such a radical shift in property ownership and the economics of the land posed a future full of dreams and prosperity for the new generation. Alas! All was lost, and a contrast was grown. A generation that attempts to erase those memories of a childhood in the 90s.
Accounts of oppression amidst conflict
Documenting the accounts of events, individual accounts, and massacres has been done on a large scale. Freny Maneckshaw’s work starts with reporting the incident of Haneefa Begum Wani of Kreeri, Baramulla. A divorcee with custody of her daughter (after his husband married another woman) was shot five times by the CRPF while taking her sick daughter to the hospital amidst curfew. Her family was distorted by the loss of a daughter who had already seen a failed marriage, diagnosed with diabetes, but this was something they never even imagined would happen to her. The tales of killings and sexual assault in Kashmir never seem to stop. The happening and then the cover-up of the mass rape of women in Kunan Pospora in 1993 provides a brief example of how the state sways justice for women whilst promoting militarisation in the name of national security.
For women generally, a patriarchal structure tends to cater to men being the protectors and torchbearers of justice, but that can’t be applied to the male hegemonic administration and the armed forces, who have let justice slip when it came to cases of conflict, especially women.
Every year hundreds of thousands of tourists from all over the world visit Kashmir for its beautiful lakes and landscapes. A huge chunk of the Hindu populace visits for their pilgrimage to holy sites as well. A difficult irony to digest when outsiders feel safe and secure in a place prone to conflict and unrest and its very own people are given a lack of space in their very own home. Women of Muslim orthodox families find it distressingly difficult to move in an environment where they are surrounded by armed men.
Loitering is not a suitable feminine trait, nor do we see it as applicable in the context of Indian society and Muslim settlements. Shilpa Phadke, in her book Why Loiter, imagines a world where women access public spaces the way men do. This battle of Kashmiri women against the freedom of speech and space includes opposition from three sides. Patriarchy, State and the armed forces all have in the vast history of Kashmir marginalised women and silenced their voices.
An injection of vast conflict literature by Kashmiri women like Nyla Ali Khan with her work of Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir & The Life of a Kashmiri Woman: Dialectic of Resistance and Accommodation gives a detailed account of the lives of Muslim women and the role privileged women have played in raising voices and concerns. In the latter work, she talks about the life of her grandmother, Begum Akbar Jehan, whose vision provided a future of women political action in the valley. Conflict literature in the context of events such as Do you remember Kunan Poshpora? Written by five young academics and researchers from Kashmir, Essar Batool, Ifrah Butt, Munazah Rashid, Natasha Rather, and Samreena Mushtaq. Kashmiri women activists or writers possess reasons that the conflict imposed upon them, wrath due to loss of loved ones in the 90s, and total altered environment in which they grew up. These successors of the Wushnear generation who were destined for a prosperous future destined towards the shackles of grief, mourning and longing.
Samreena Mushtaq, an eloquent researcher and one of the co-authors of the Kunan Poshpora book, lost her father when she was three years old. It was through a newspaper clipping that the family got the news of his death. For Samreen, that place became an existing nightmare, snatching her father’s shadow from her. For Samreen and many other women who, with their voices and pen and art, resist the patriarchal subjugation and the state’s harassment, a new peak of courage is known.
References:
- Zeeshan, S., Aliefendioğlu, H. Kashmiri women in conflict: a feminist perspective. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11, 259 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-02742-x
- Maneckshaw, F. ‘Behold I Shine’ Narratives of Kashmir’s women and Children. (2017)
