Understanding Kashmir

Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown

Anticolonial nationalism is almost always bound up with a myth. In this myth, European powers are the colonizers and (largely) non-European countries are, simply, colonized. Thus, colonialism ends once the non-European countries throw off the political rule and escape the economic exploitation of the European countries. A successful break with European domination, then, successfully ends colonialism. This is the myth of postcolonial emancipation. Of course, everyone acknowledges that European domination may continue after nominal independence of the colony. The point is not that anticolonial nationalists deny neocolonialism. The point is that there is often a tacit presumption that colonialism is confined to Europe and emancipation from Europe (and by extension, the United States) equals emancipation from colonialism. But, in fact, after successfully creating a new nation, a former colony is all too likely to establish its own colonies, its own forms of domination over regions or over minority populations. This postcolonial colonialism may be more local when compared with the global reach of the European powers. But it need not be any less brutal.

Salman Rushdie has been sensitive to this point for many years. In his 1980 novel Midnight's Children he depicted the horrors of West Pakistani colonialism in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). In Shalimar the Clown, he takes up Indian control of Kashmir. But, in its depth of analysis, Shalimar goes well beyond that earlier treatment of postcolonial colonialism. Shalimar begins to suggest that colonialism is always complex, recurrent, multiple. It is found reiteratively, at level after level, like the old story from the American South of the slave owner who beat his wife; the wife in her turn abused the foreman; the foreman in his turn beat the slave; the slave in his turn flayed the horse.

Mythic Kashmir: The Loss of Eden

Of course, Shalimar is not a treatise about colonialism generally. It is about Kashmir, which is, as we will see over the following chapters, a clear but highly complex and in some ways atypical colony. In keeping with this, the novel is pervaded by Kashmiri history. As briefly noted in the present volume's introduction, a central idea shared by writers on Kashmiri history is that Kashmiri culture was marked by an unusual degree of intercommunal harmony; Hindus and Muslims loved and respected one another and lived together without religious conflict. The idea is expressed in the poetry of medieval mystic poets who opposed the sectarianism of Hindu and Muslim, favoring instead the unity of all in devotion to God. In this account, the ethnocultural category of Kashmiriyat (Kashmiriness) superseded and rendered innocuous the categories of religion.

This standard idea is also a myth — a myth created around history. As used today, the idea of Kashmiriyat is the converse of emancipation; it is the myth of a lost paradise. The great historical hero of this story is the fourteenth-century ruler Zain-ul-abidin. Before his reign, "officials seized the wealth of Hindu temples, broke idols, imposed the hated jiziya tax [poll tax on non-Muslims]." At this time there was "a vicious anti-Hindu policy" including "forcible conversion" and a ban on the wearing of distinctive Hindu symbols (Akbar 53). Hindus fled (as they did again in the early years of the militancy, when threatened by Islamic militants). But Zain-ul-abidin brought the Hindus back, abolished the poll tax, and practiced reconversion (Akbar 27–28).

Rushdie, it seems, accepts the myth of Kashmiriyat. As he puts it, in the voice of Shalimar, "In the valley these words ['Hindu' and 'Muslim'] were merely descriptions, not divisions" (57). Moreover, he points toward Zain-ul-abidin as a model of Kashmiriyat. Indeed, in his novel, the anticommunal orientation of the indigenous Kashmiri theater group is manifest in part through their performance of the story of Zain-ul-abidin: "To be a Kashmiri, to have received so incomparable a divine gift, was to value what was shared far more highly than what divided. Of all this the story of [Zain-ul-abidin] was a symbol" (83). The version of this story in the novel shows Rushdie's human sensitivity. It would be easy for a Muslim to see Zain-ul-abidin's acts as a simple manifestation of Islamic generosity. But Rushdie presents them as the ruler's gratitude to a Hindu physician (79–80). In this story, then, Hindus are not simply recipients of charity.

There is undoubtedly some historical support for this view of Kashmiriyat. Yet, even so, it remains a myth. Why would mystic poets have had to denounce sectarianism if it were simply absent? Why did Zain-ul-abidin have to call Hindus back and allow reconversion, except that they had been driven away or forced to convert initially? Moreover, conflict did not at all stop with Zain-ul-abidin. Thus, Wajahat Habibullah points out that the term Kashmiriyat was "coined ... to project a common cultural heritage among Kashmiri Hindus and Muslims," thereby "papering over their religious and social dissimilarities" (24–25). Robert Huttenback observes that when political organizations arose in Kashmir they were not, initially, national but "were divided along strictly religious lines" (133). This suggests that perhaps Kashmiriyat was more of an ideological ideal than a practical, political reality. In keeping with this, Ghulam Khan points out, "Apparently the relations between the Hindus and the Muslims were very cordial and peaceful. But in fact there was a deep wave of suspicion, hostility and bitterness running at the bottom of their social relations" (31).

Rushdie, with his characteristic sensitivity to historical complexity, recognizes that the stories we tell about history involve selection and arrangement. We choose where to begin and where to end, what to see as characteristic and what to see as an exception. Thus, when communal violence spreads in the Kashmir Valley, the Hindus in Shalimar begin to question this myth of long-standing communal harmony (239). Nonetheless, Rushdie clearly wishes to maintain this myth of a lost Eden — an Eden that persisted even into the modern period.

Emplotting Modern Kashmiri History

This modern period is, of course, a period where the details of actual (rather than mythic) history matter as well, and it is important to overview a few of these before going on. For centuries, Kashmir was ruled, with greater or lesser incomprehension and exploitation, by...