Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict: An Extract from ‘Dapaan’

The Storyteller’s Tale

His brother recorded the play when it was aired on Radio Kashmir, and they listened to it over and over again, so he knows it by heart. It was a Kashmiri play called Myean Jigraki Daade Wath, ‘Let My Heart’s Ache Lift’. 

Two children grow up together. A boy who goes by the nickname Nika and an orphaned girl, a Kashmiri Pandit called Sahaba. As they grow older, they fall in love, but it will not do. Nika is sent away to study law and Sahaba is married off. Years pass. Nika also marries and has a daughter. 

Then the story goes where all stories go in South Asian dramas. A fairground, so large, so teeming with people, so full of pleasure that nothing good can come of it. Both Nika and Sahaba end up at the same fair. Both are so careless as to lose their children in the crowd. The two children end up together wqhile their parents draw nearer, calling out their names. 

Here the storyteller stops, a catch in his voice. And what is the little girl’s name? Sahaba. Nika has named her after his long lost love. ‘Sahaba, Sahaba,’ he calls out, looking for his daughter. And a different Sahaba turns around. The years fall away. 

The years have fallen away, too, for the storyteller. He has not heard the radio play since the eighties. In his mind, the story of Sahaba and Nika is tangled with the jaunty notes of Hawa Hawa. The Pakistani singer Hasan Jahangir had come out with the hit number in 1987, and they had the audio cassette. They were still listening to it when everything changed. ‘Haalaat kharaab hua,’ explained the storyteller, who is now a businessman in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. Haalaat kharaab hua, conditions got bad. The police and the military started searches. You did not want to be caught with songs by Pakistani singers. So they buried the tapes. And with that, the other tape also disappeared, the story of heartache. 

What else was lost? In houses across Kashmir, families were sorting through their things. Photographs of sons who had crossed over for arms training. Those had to be buried deep underground. Family photos of picnics and weddings where the sons were part of the group. Those had to go too, so that when the search parties came they could pretend the sons did not exist, had never existed. What else? Photographs of trekking in the mountains, because knowledge of mountain routes was suddenly suspect, proof of intention to go to the other side. What else? Pictures of Pakistani cricketers collected over the years. An Urdu sports magazine called Akbar-e-Noujawan, which often had pictures of Pakistani cricketers. A Pakistani novel about Partition. A collection of speeches by a religious preacher. What else? A pair of decorative swords. What else? Jokes, romances, tall tales told on winter nights. 

All these were driven underground and, in the darkness, went through a reconfiguration in their elements, a derangement that could only have been worked by the ‘haalaat’. This is the word used in Kashmir to describe the time after 1989. Haalaat, conditions, which is to say militancy, militarisation, a geopolitical dispute, a freedom movement, but also something more. Something approaching atmospheric conditions, like the work of earth and water as they seep into buried photographs, twisting hands and faces. It is said, two things can change at any time in Kashmir, the weather and the haalaat. 

The word ‘haalaat’ is plural. This is how it is used when referring to the time after 1989. ‘Haalat’, the singular form, does not quite cover the whole range of meanings and experiences required of the word. Long ago, it passed from Arabic into Hindi, Urdu and Kashmiri, where it acquired new lives. Over time, the haalaat have almost become a unit in Kashmir, a collective noun for all that cannot be named. 

The haalaat may also be the story that Kashmiris tell of their lives since 1989. Sometimes, it seems to be just another one of the stories that Kashmiris have told for centuries. This is because haalaat stories often bear the storyteller’s signature—the Kashmiri word ‘dapaan’: it is said. 

Folktales in Kashmir usually start with the word dapaan. It is said, a djinn once turned itself into a seven-legged beast that could not be killed, because if its blood fell to the ground, new djinns would sprout from each drop. It is said, the serpent prince turned himself human to be with a princess of the earthly realm. It is said, you must not answer the call of women whose feet are turned backward. These are stories of counsel, how to act or not to act when faced with the world.1

Oral histories in Kashmir, telling the story of an event, an individual or society in the distant past, also begin with ‘dapaan’.2 The word makes a story sound authentic, even as it folds in myth with historical memory. Don’t take it from me, the storyteller suggests; these are not my observations. This is what countless others have said before me, therefore it must be the truth.3 There are advantages to the word dapaan, says an elderly history writer in Srinagar, because the storyteller refuses to take responsibility. 

It is wise to put in caveats when talking about the haalaat because one word here or there could be the difference between life and death. It is said, there is a curfew so don’t go out today.

It is said, soldiers stormed the village last night and took away all the boys they could find. It is said, the taps of Srinagar are running with poisoned water—drink at your own peril. Stories of the haalaat are part fact, part rumour, part fever dream. That does not mean they cannot be true. 

Stories are a way of knowing the world. A community is often defined by its shared stories. They start with ‘experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth,’ writes Walter Benjamin.4 When a story is told, it becomes part of the listener’s experience. To Benjamin, writing in the desolation of interwar Europe, it was a way of knowing that had lost value because people were no longer able to communicate their experiences. 

The haalaat worked the opposite effect in Kashmir. Everyone was furiously telling stories of the strange conditions that had descended on their lives. Old stories were buried and then resurrected, somehow disfigured by the haalaat. New stories were found everywhere. These stories of experience knitted together the Kashmiri public, constituting its knowledge of the haalaat. This is a story about stories told in Kashmir. 

Such stories could rarely travel outside because the fellowship of experiences passed on from mouth to mouth did not exist, certainly not in the mainstream Indian public. To this public, sealed off by its own mythologies, the experiences contained in haalaat stories were incommunicable. 

Having lived and worked within this public, I doubt I understood them either. I had been a journalist in the national media, where Kashmir was mostly a security problem. While television channels played out lurid fantasies about Kashmir, the more dignified legacy media operated in the sphere of national interest. Even independent outlets, which tried to lend a sympathetic ear, had to keep to certain frameworks laid down by the state if they were to stay alive. Besides, some stories just weren’t news. 

So this was what brought me to the businessman’s shop on a cold Srinagar afternoon, a heater blowing energetically at me while I drank sweet, milky tea. I was trying to listen better, to absorb his stories into my experience. 

Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov’, 1937. Available at: https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked%20docs/ Walter%20Benjamin%20Storyteller.pdf, accessed on 29 October 2024. 
2. Hakim Sameer Hamdani, Shi’ism in Kashmir: A History of Sunni-Shi’i Rivalry and Reconciliation, London: IB Tauris, 2023. 
3. Ibid. 
4. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’.

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