Making a Part Inalienable: Folding Kashmir into India’s Imagination - II

This is not very different from the mapped belonging imagined by religio-political groups like the Jamat-e-Islami of Kashmir that, drawing together people in broadly common religious unity, seeks enswathing within that of Pakistan. However, there is one essential point in which the Jamat’s separatist/assimilationist map cannot be drawn as easily as that of the Hindu nationalists of India or Panun Kashmir’s of Kashmir-in-India. It requires a violation of Islamic norms even as it makes Islam the thread that binds Kashmiris to Pakistan. The place of Islam even in Pakistan and in the public life of its citizens has never been precisely established or been beyond challenge. As events after 1947 demonstrated, it could not provide the adhesive to hold together Muslims dispersed in territories separated by over a thousand miles of India, speaking different tongues, worshipping in different landscapes and eating different foods. Oddly, even the party today associated with the demand for an Islamic dispensation in Pakistan, the Jamat-e-Islami founded by Maulana Abul Ala Maududi in 1941, had been vehemently opposed to the state’s very formation until it was presented as a fait accompli in 1947. Maududi’s opposition stemmed from normative Muslim thought that ‘decried affinity to territory’ represented in nation-states as undermining the more proper ‘identification with a non-territorially defined ummah’, an ideological conception of the community with global reach.16 Of course, Muslims inhabited not only spiritual but also temporal worlds and, in their various environments, have needed to negotiate between the local and the trans-local, the lived everyday experience and the ideal of the ummah. But what it does mean is that any envisioning of a Muslim nation can fit only awkwardly within bounded territories and mapped representations remain open to challenges on the grounds of religious (non)conformity.

As for including Kashmir within Pakistan, Jinnah had discovered even during his visit to Kashmir in 1944 that the separate homeland for Muslims he allegedly desired had takers among only disappointingly small numbers, mostly confined to elite Kashmiri Muslims led by the relatively orthodox Mirwaiz of the Jama Masjid or to the Muslim Conference—a breakaway faction of the secular National Conference—dominated by urban Jammu Muslims.17 If the Jamat-e-Islami’s proposed future for India’s Muslims challenged the Muslim League’s quest before 1947, there was no reconciliation after either. Indeed, the territorial partition of 1947 even brought about a split within the Jamat that ironically followed national boundaries with the formation in 1948 of the Jamat-e-Islami-e-Hind. But within Indian territory the Jamat-e-Islami of Kashmir retained its separate organization from the latter largely politically inactive umbrella organization.18 As parties representing the same religiously defined interest, it is remarkable how webbed their existence is within territorially defined nations. How does one fold a web and what does one fold it into?

And encasing does not come easily for those in Kashmir who demand independence. Their renderings of the nation challenge current geo-political reality and so the spaces of India and Pakistan must remain as deeply marked in their imaginations as the entity for which they seek a new future. Therefore it may seem surprising that these political organizations would find equal utility in presenting their demands in as totalizing territorial terms as the nation-states they resist or wish integration with. On the other hand, it may be the only way to get the ear of nations and the rigidly territorial presentation of the nation may be ‘strategic essentialization’ requisite to make claims in an age of nation-states. Thus secularist parties like the Jammu and Kashmiri Liberation Front seek ‘independence’ for a state whose frontiers were those of the princely state ruled until 1947 by Dogra-Hindu dynasts from Jammu. This cartographic reshaping for a new nation-state bears the burden of negating two partitions, the one that created India and Pakistan in August 1947 and the second that split Jammu and Kashmir along the cease-fire line of 1949. But paradoxically, if unsurprisingly, it is a demand that has set off, in turn, calls for ‘partitions’ or ‘secessions’ within.19 This mapped nation for which the JKLF and others seek independence encloses a multitude of different religious, linguistic and cultural groups deriving their unity only from having formerly been subjects of a princely state constructed to suit British geo-political interests in their Indian empire. Then there are also transhumant groups such as the Gujjars and Bakarwals whose annual circuits in search of pasturage in high mountain meadows defy all borders. Justifying why the boundaries of the princely state that was challenged from within the valley before 1947 should be privileged any more than those of the nation-states of India and Pakistan that Kashmiris have resisted after 1947 can only be as simple as squaring the circle.

But here the latter have an advantage: over 63 years of living within the lines ordained in 1947 has given the mapped myths of the nations then created at least a tenuous reality, which in turn has allowed them to arrogate to themselves the mandate, defended by powerful armies, to determine which other national aspirations they will consider legitimate. Alternative representations of nation-states’ boundaries even by outsiders with no interventionist political agendas are treated almost like contraband. As an article by Umar Ahmad in the Kashmiri daily Rising Kashmir recently pointed out, India has joined eleven other countries since January 2009 in banning or censoring issues of the British newsmagazine The Economist. In fact, ‘having censored 31 issues of the weekly’ for publishing a map of Kashmir that does not accord with the government’s version, India leads a group that includes countries like China, Libya and Saudi Arabia. The rigid defence of imaginary lines can make strange bedfellows.20

Despite all the evidence of the obduracy of such national boundaries, in the name of whose inviolability governments permit themselves to oppress defiant citizens, the modern cartographic representations of Kashmiri nationhood outlined above replicate those of the nation-states they seek to exit or merge with. Marking their terrains also in territorial terms, the people that fill them are formed by an imagination that seeks convenient homogeneities. Map first, its world conjured after; a map’s nation. Recalling Carroll once more, this dissociation between representation and reality could well have been what Alice meant in her remark that while she knew of cats that do not grin, ‘...a grin without a cat!’ was the ‘most curious thing’ she had ever seen.’21 In the end, cartographic challenges to cartographically defined entities are like endless reflections in a hall of mirrors of the same absurd conundrum of maps that seek to define people. Not only can such maps not fully encircle the plural groups within them but every effort to do so sharpens the angularity of their imaginations bearing down both internally and vis a vis the surrounding nation-states.

World(s) Before Possessive Maps

Power, authority and sovereignty in pre-colonial polities, thought of as layered and shared, could never have been accommodated within the straight-jacketing of modern nation-states and their frontiers. And yet modern nation-states nearly all claim very ancient existence. The historical reality in India is that the territorializing of sovereignty began only in the nineteenth century and moreover it represented no native or indigenous impulse but was the preferred political arrangement of a colonial power. In the specific case of Kashmir, for instance, the disjuncture in the pre-colonial state system came with the Treaty of Amritsar signed on 16 March 1846 following the first Anglo-Sikh war fought to a draw earlier that year. It created the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, gave it disparate territories and made Gulab Singh its first maharaja.22 What was altered critically at the same time as Kashmir was handed to the Dogras was the nature of the political world in India at large.

The British understood the Treaty of Amritsar to transfer the rights, titles and interests the Sikh Government had possessed in the territories concerned into their own hands. These were then handed over, along with territory, ‘completely and absolutely’ to the Maharaja Gulab Singh. 23 Before this novel intervention, however, rights and interests had never been possessed absolutely and exclusively, nor considered transferable in the manner understood by the British. Instead, they had been arranged along a hierarchy that recognised superior and inferior rights. Power at all levels was held by mutual recognition and this pattern of mutuality protected against the complete subsumption of the rights of subordinate levels. As wielders of localised power viewed it, the superior authority of an overlord was not only compatible with their own authority but was necessary to establishing their own influence and prestige. Furthermore, sovereignty in pre-colonial India had operated in overlapping polities in which the primary political exercise had been one of winning over people rather than territory.24 This vertical and horizontal architecture of power, authority and sovereignty had ensured fluidity in both the content and the boundaries of kingships. Its maps stretched the spaces of power, sovereignty, and authority not just horizontally, but also into the heavens and into time.25

The Treaty of Amritsar drew the curtains on this world of ‘nested authority’. Within the princely state, the structure of relations between different levels of the polity was taken apart and power held in localized niches sought to be yielded up to the Dogra maharaja alone. And in 1858 the right to wage war and make peace was removed from the princely domain, a prerogative of sovereignty appropriated in perpetuity by the colonial state. This meant that the Indian ‘circle of kings’ would remain forever frozen as the colonial state inaugurated notions, new to India, of a subordinate ‘native’ sovereignty circumscribed by rigidly demarcated territorial frontiers.

The Land of Kashmir is Hindu

While their sovereignty may have been territorially circumscribed and relegated to a subordinate level, the Dogra rulers turned aspects of this transformation to their own advantage and increased their control over their subjects. From the second maharaja Ranbir Singh’s (r. 1856-85) perspective, as a recognized ruler of his state, he was given a territory, whose frontiers could not err into British domains. At the same time, he was assured of his legitimacy, founded on his being a ‘traditional’ Rajput-Hindu ruler, to claim this territory and its populace. Within these parameters, Dogra princely efforts were directed towards matching the political dominion allowed them and the religious identity assigned to them within the territories marked for them.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the religious boundaries of the Hindu faith united the provinces of Jammu and Kashmir in a state that not only had a Hindu ruler but that also witnessed new degrees of control over a territorialized Hindu religious arena of patronage and worship. Indeed, the Dogra re-invention of their religio-political landscape as Hindu had registered so widely that the eminent civil servant Walter Lawrence could declare in 1931 that Kashmir was ‘holy ground to all the Hindus of India’.26 But such firm Dogra control also meant that the fluidity and competitive nature of pre-colonial patterns of power that had ensured a measure of deference to the religious domains of other communities in Kashmir, including its numerically preponderant Muslims, had disappeared.27 The British guarantee of the Dogra ruler’s sovereignty vis a vis his subjects obviated the need for the ruler to seek legitimacy through the time-honoured practice of granting patronage to the religious and cultural sites of his diverse subject population. They could achieve this by conjuring the ceremonial trappings of a specifically Hindu sovereignty derived from outside the territorial confines of their fiefdom and enacted within it.

There are echoes of this Hinduization of territory in Panun Kashmir’s map, discussed earlier, which depicts a valley denuded of any references to the faith of its majority population, Islam, while being plentifully speckled with the markers of that of its minuscule Hindu population—including inter alia the Shankaracharya hill28, Mattan, Tulamula, and Amarnath29. Indeed, one might be forgiven for thinking this a map of Kashmir dating from the thirteenth century, before, as the story is told, the Sufi divine Bulbul Shah’s melodious singing of the fajar azan made a Muslim of Rinchen Shah, the prince of Kashgar and Ladakh and the rescuer of Kashmir from Tatar depredations.30 This expunging of Muslims’ sites of religious and cultural affinity is a necessary step in underwriting Panun Kashmir’s separatist demand, which it makes by contradicting overwhelming evidence that the land of the valley has many equally legitimate claimants.31

Claims to the ground of Kashmir have been made by many through the centuries—by rulers and traders, poets and craftsmen, those who worked its fertile soils and those who plucked its fruits, those who made ambrosia from its purple saffron flowers, those who brought gentle thoughts of God in its temples, springs, mosques and shrines. All these jostled with each other, sometimes settling into peaceful co-existence and shared spaces, at others borrowing parts or whole from each other and at yet others ousting rivals. But the age of nations brought ideas and claims of a different kind and that sought more permanent habitation. They spoke of all time past and all time to come.

C. A. Bayly has described the rise of new eighteenth century Indian states in which rulers established their sovereignty through links with powerful symbols of their own faiths. They were still based notably on traditions of ‘religious compromise’ as Hindu, Muslim and Sikh rulers ‘insisted not on the exclusiveness but on the primacy (or merely the equality) of their own form of worship’ and a subject’s belonging to a different faith did not preclude access to power.32 The state of Jammu and Kashmir founded in mid-nineteenth century, however, was of a different order. Created to meet imperial requirements of securing the northwestern frontier of India, the British were also keen to ensure that this largely arbitrary feat of state construction be seen as legitimate. Given the newness of Dogra rule in Kashmir, this legitimacy was sought largely extra-territorially by fashioning the Dogras into ‘traditional’ Hindu rulers generically identified as ‘original’ Indian sovereigns. They became concerned with mining in rather general ways ‘older’ stores of Hindu symbolism. Thus, they became regular visitors to and patrons of worship at Haridwar and Benares, the great Hindu sacred centres of northern India.33 The promotion of Sanskrit learning similarly provided access to a prestigious ‘Hindu’ symbol. But by the end of the nineteenth century, the Kashmiri political landscape had not only been re-imagined as Hindu but also as having always been Hindu, justifying British intervention through the Dogras as an act of legitimate restoration.

Can India rise to the challenge of celebrating M.F.Husain’s legacy?

While India’s politicians squabbled about the perceived rights and wrongs of M.F.Husain’s virtual exile from India, the country’s most famous and prolific artist was quietly buried in the UK on Friday, and then remembered yesterday at a London teatime memorial meeting – both events attended by relatives, friends and admirers of his work.

Namaz-e-Janaza (prayers) took place at a modest Idara-e-Jaaferiya mosque off Tooting Broadway in south London on Friday morning, calmly and serenely, far away from the senseless noise in India.

MF, as he was known lay in an open simple coffin on the floor of the Shia mosque, surrounded by nearly 100 mourners – his family, including sons Shamshad, Mustafa and Owais and daughter Raisa, friends and people from the art world. The coffin was then buried at Brookwood Cemetery outside London, which has a dedicated area for Muslims.

Yesterday afternoon, at London’s Dorchester Hotel, tributes were paid by his son Owais and by friends who included London-based businessmen Lord (Gulam) Noon and Anwar Siddiqi, former tennis player Naresh Kumar, and N. Ram, editor of The Hindu. MF was remembered at the meeting for the vast span of his life through most of the 20th century and into the 21st – from “bullock cart to Bugatti” as one family friend put it .

There has been some doubt about MF’s age, with most reports saying he was 95, but his family tells me that he was 97 because he was born in September 1913, and not 1915 as is shown in his passport. According to the Muslim calendar, he was 100 last year.

Meanwhile people in India could still not make up their minds whether to honour this great painter or leave him forever exiled their minds. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister, who did little if anything during MF’s lifetime to encourage him to return home and defy right-wing Hindu fanatics who were attacking him and his paintings, had the gall to talk about the “national loss” of an “iconic artist….whose genius left a deep imprint on Indian art”.

Too late, the government offered to facilitate the return of the body. Right-wing political leaders, who had helped to keep him in exile while he was alive, also said controversies should now be forgotten and he should be brought back to India, but more fanatical voices continued to attack him on the internet. Friends of MF tell me that he definitely wanted to return to India – though he acknowledged that his wealth had grown substantially in recent years when news of his exile spread his fame and boosted his prices.

His family momentarily thought, just after he died in London last Thursday morning, of taking his body to Mumbai, but then decided to honour his specific wish to be buried wherever he died. How much better to be surrounded by family and genuine well-wishers in London than be flown into controversy in India!

But what will India do now about the memory and artistic legacy of this legend? There are three partly completed series of works. There is an Indian history – the Indian civilisation from the Maharabharata to Manmohan Singh as MF described it to me in an interview two years ago. This has been commissioned by Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian-born London-based steel tycoon who was at Brookwood cemetery and at yesterday’s tea meeting. There is also a series on the Arab civilisation, commissioned by the ruling family of Qatar where MF took nationality last year, and a history of Indian cinema.

Can the India now rise above its feeble responses of recent years and recognise India’s most famous modem artist with a museum that will house his work? It welcomed Anish Kapoor, the Anglicised Indian-born artist, with two big exhiitions last year, and Sonia Gandhi, leader of the governing coalition, said she hoped that “we may one day see Anish Kapoor’s installation in one of our cities”.