The Kashmiri diaspora remembers the displacement: Implication and the challenge of healing

Abstract

From 1989 to 1991, the majority of Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) were displaced from their home in the Muslim-majority Indian-administered Kashmir Valley, in a crisis which I refer to as the displacement. The period that has followed in the Kashmir Valley has been marred by heavy military presence and state violence against Kashmiris – mostly Muslim – who have remained in Kashmir. More than three decades later, Kashmir is still a contested region; memories of the displacement are unreconciled and its diaspora remains divided. This article reveals how memory-work through storytelling can impede reconciliation processes by reinforcing enduring narratives of marginalisation. These enduring narratives frame contemporary memory-making and prevent groups from seeing their implication in oppressive structures. Drawing on Kashmiri conceptual paradigms and oral history interviews with Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim diasporic communities in Australia, I examine both what Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim diaspora share, and why they find it hard to take on the narrative perspective of the other side. While Pandits and Muslims draw on a shared Kashmiri repertoire, they locate themselves very differently within this narrative past. As such, neither Pandits nor Muslims find it easy to see how they are implicated in the direct and structural forms of violence that led to the displacement and subsequent acts of violence. These historical narratives, transmitted through oral stories, may disrupt attempts to institute reparative processes in Kashmir. By analysing this archive of Kashmiri diasporic memory, I argue that this case study complicates our assumptions that personal narratives, particularly in memory-work, are activist vehicles that offer a pathway to healing.

Introduction

For much of the time since the Partition of the Indian subcontinent (1947), the Kashmir Valley, ¹ within the state of Jammu and Kashmir, was subject to Indian governance with semi-autonomy defined in Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution. In August 2019, India revoked the region’s constitutional, semi-autonomous status to assert its claim over Kashmir. Peaceful demonstrations occurred around the world in response to the revocation. In Melbourne, for example, members of the Kashmiri Pandit (Hindu) diaspora marched through the city in their pherans (traditional Kashmiri gowns), celebrating that their Kashmiri identity was officially integrated with their Indian identity (Daily Excelsior, 2019). Members of the Kashmiri Muslim diaspora stood nearby with ‘Free Kashmir’ placards, decrying the move as an imperialist annexation following decades of Indian military occupation in the Valley (BBC News, 2019). The expressions of pain, anger and jubilation from the ever-divaricating Kashmiri communities mirrored the implosion of the multi-faith community in the Kashmir Valley between 1989 and 1991.

In 1989, some Kashmiri Muslims in the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley in India instigated an insurgency against the Indian state, seeking greater autonomy, secession from India or accession to Pakistan. This insurgency developed Islamist elements, and some militants used violent methods, which intimidated the Hindu minority population of Kashmiri Pandits (Evans, 2002: 22). Between 1989 and 1991, over 95% of the Pandit population fled their homes under duress (Madan, 2008: 25). In the immediate aftermath, the majority of Kashmiri Pandits dispersed to other parts of India, including Jammu. The majority of the displaced Pandits have stayed in India, while in the following decades some have migrated to western countries including Australia. I refer to this period as the displacement.

In this article, I will explore how members of the Kashmiri Muslim and Pandit diaspora in Australia share stories about the near-total displacement of the minority Kashmiri Pandit population from the Kashmir Valley, and how these recollections should be viewed within recurring historical narratives held by the communities. I am specifically looking at memories of violence during the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits, not all violence in Kashmir that preceded and followed this.

Drawing on Kashmiri conceptual paradigms and oral history interviews that I conducted with Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim diasporic communities in Australia, I examine both what Kashmiri Pandit and Muslim diaspora share and why they find it hard to take on the perspective of the other side. While Pandits and Muslims draw on a shared Kashmiri repertoire, they locate themselves very differently within this narrative past. Pandit and Muslim perspectives are informed by each community’s longer histories, and the frames of reference generated from the displacement period reflect these narratives.

As such, neither Pandits nor Muslims find it easy to see how they are implicated in the direct and structural forms of violence that led to the displacement. Both communities internalise the ‘image of the weak-kneed Kashmiri’ and have no traditions of ‘stories eulogising heroic conquests and victories against the enemy’ (Behera, 2008: 622). These historical narratives transmitted, through personal testimonies, may disrupt attempts to institute reparative processes in Kashmir. I show that enduring narratives of marginalisation have afforded both communities the perception of their own victimhood. Steadfastly positioning themselves as the victim requires active effort from both collectives in their contemporary storytelling (Gutman and Wustenberg, 2023). By analysing this archive of Kashmiri diasporic memory, I argue that this case study complicates our assumptions that personal narratives, particularly in memory-work, are activist vehicles that offer a pathway to healing.

As I analyse the stories of Kashmiris, I will use the term memory in two broad ways. The first way draws on ‘cultural memory’ studies (Assmann, 2011). Cultural memory transforms historical fact into a community’s remembered history, often with a sacred element (Assmann, 2011: 38). The terms ‘remembered history’ and ‘narrative’ convey that these cultural memories have a ‘normative and formative’ effect on the communities that hold them, regardless of their historical accuracy (Assmann, 2011: 38). In line with cultural memory studies, I am interested in the foundations, or the remembered histories, that underpin a community’s memory (Rigney, 2015: 66). Notably, these community memories can become collective memory when community members not only carry similar direct memories of events, but mediate and develop similar reflections about these memories that link the community to a collective identity (Rigney, 2015: 65–67), The second way I use memory refers to personal narrative as an affective form of memory-work – that is, how individuals talk about a past that they feel intimately connected to, their own personal narrative. An individual’s memory develops through ‘communication and social interaction’ so that the individual’s memory is always created ‘collectively’ (Rigney, 2015: 22).

I consider both these broad forms of memory, and their subsequent discourses, productions and cultures, to be ‘multidirectional’ (Rothberg, 2009: 3). Michael Rothberg (2009: 3) proposes that rather than viewing memories through a competitive frame, which imagines that memory operates on a zero-sum principal of scarcity, a multidirectional approach examines how cultural memories are often produced in negotiation and dialogue with each other. While Rothberg’s understanding of multidirectionality emphasises negotiation and conjunction, my work with Kashmiri diaspora highlights memories in competition. Yet there are glimmers of hope that Kashmiri memory cultures can become more multidirectional, so long as there is greater understanding of each other’s implication (Rothberg, 2019).

Each Kashmiri community’s recollections of their community’s recent past are modelled on their historical grievance, and their ongoing historical grievance is framed by the contemporary displacement and secessionist struggles. These memory productions can and do co-exist within Kashmiri diaspora. On the basis of my analysis, I argue that the narratives held by Kashmiri diaspora nuance our understanding of how memory in a non-Western context draws upon recurring historical narratives, and shed light on how these memory cultures can both prevent and promote activist initiatives and healing processes in protracted and complex conflicts. In investigating these memory cultures, I seek to make an empirical contribution by eliciting and recording an oral archive of Kashmiri diasporic memories. Historical narratives and personal testimony are shared through the art of storytelling, and form the oral histories that this research brings to the fore.

I use the term ‘displacement’ for the central event, as it generates more productive conversations than other terms used to describe the mass displacement of Kashmiri Pandits and dispossession from their land. Some of these terms are migration, genocide, exodus and exile. These terms are not suitable – migration removes the duress from the community’s decision to flee, genocide suggests a systematic cleansing of substantial amounts of Pandits, while exodus and exile evoke biblical stories of persecution. The Jammu and Kashmir and Indian governments use ‘migrant’ to refer to Pandits living in ‘migrant camps’ in Jammu (Relief and Rehabilitation(M) Government of Jammu & Kashmir, n.d.) although Pandits insist they should be called ‘refugees in their own country’ (Datta, 2016b: 20). Various Pandit organisations posit that over 300,000 Pandits fled the militancy and over 2000 have been killed by militants since 1989, and that this constitutes a genocide (Panun Kashmir, 2009–2020 n.d.). Other records estimate 150,000–200,000 Pandits fled the Valley and hundreds were killed by militants (Evans, 2002: 24; Madan, 2008; Office of the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR), 2018: 41). While scholars generally don’t refer to the period as genocide, the terms exodus and exile are frequently used in literature (Datta, 2016b; Rai, 2004; Zutshi, 2003). I use the term displacement as it acknowledges the gravity of the event while maintaining distance from emotive and legal terms like genocide and exodus, which can also draw comparisons to European or Judeo–Christian histories.

The personal

I am a member of the Kashmiri Pandit diaspora, born and raised in Melbourne by Kashmiri parents and grandparents. Both branches of my family fled in the early 1990s due to direct threats to their life and inclusion on public ‘hitlists’, bombings at their places of employment and threats made to their household staff if they continued to work at a Pandit residence. My parents migrated to Melbourne from Delhi in 1991 when my elder sister was 6 months old. In some ways, it was easier for them to migrate as they were not attached to Delhi and knew their roots in Kashmir were severed.

I was born in Melbourne and grew up in a small Kashmiri diaspora community. I, like many participants, have noticed distance between Pandits and Muslims in the community in the last decade. A fragile, chilling silence has descended upon us. Once heated, attempts to discuss ‘politics’ in Kashmir across religious lines have now become too painful. Although I have visited India multiple times, where most of my family settled after the displacement, my parents have effectively forbidden me from travelling to Kashmir and have not returned themselves. When I ask my parents about their hesitance, their responses range from ‘it’s not safe’ to ‘[my father] does not want to return to his home as a tourist’ and ‘[my mother] cannot bear to see what Kashmir has become’.

I strongly identify as Kashmiri and with Kashmiri culture and yet I am dispossessed from my homeland. Kashmir as a physical place and the dispossession from Kashmiri land as an ongoing spatial and temporal experience are key elements of Pandits’ diasporic identity (Axel, 2002: 412), and I have absorbed this experience.

Displacement

Kashmir highlights India and Pakistan’s competing postcolonial projects. For India, its vision of a secular nationalist state is buttressed by the accession of a Muslim–Hindu–Buddhist region (Whitehead, 2017: 70). For Pakistan, the region is the unfinished business of Partition (Duschinski, 2017: 182). At Partition, many Kashmiris wanted total independence, while some swayed towards Pakistan or India.

The Kashmir Valley has been embroiled in the quest for azadi (freedom), often defined ‘in a limited fashion – either as Kashmir’s accession to Pakistan, its greater autonomy [in] the Indian union, or its complete political independence’ (Hussain, 2017: 89). For Kashmiri Muslims, azadi has been a fundamental tenet used to imagine ‘human dignity, economic equity and social justice’ (Hussain, 2017: 90). For Pandits, it connotes exclusionary Islamist goals. In the late 1980s, decades of simmering resentment towards the Indian government laid the foundations for an insurgency in the Kashmir Valley, driven by the azadi movement. ² After the state and national governments rigged the 1987 Jammu and Kashmir state elections, Kashmiris lost trust for the once-revered Jammu and Kashmir National Conference party and the Indian electoral system (Bhattacharjea, 1994: 256–258). This distrust had been steadily growing between Kashmiri Muslims and the Kashmiri and Indian governments since the broken promises of Partition (1947) and failure of democratic ideals to materialise in the following years. By 1989, azadi was developing alongside fundamentalist Islamic rhetoric that had been spreading throughout the Valley (Behera, 2008: 616–626).

In this broader context in which Islamist ideals were coming to define azadi, militant and insurgent groups such as the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) suspected that Kashmiri Pandits were loyal to India rather than to their movement. These suspicions were partly motivated by exclusionary Islamist rhetoric and partly because Kashmiri Pandits were associated with employment in the state government (Rai, 2004) and mostly did not participate in the azadi protests (Datta, 2016a). By 1989, Kashmiri Muslims who were not formally part of militant groups also began participating in azadi protests – albeit without the weaponry – against the Jammu and Kashmir and Indian governments, indicating support for unification with Pakistan-administered Kashmir or secession from India (Ganguly, 2006). These sometimes included slogans demanding Islamic law and for Pandits to leave the Valley or convert to Islam (Behera, 2008; Evans, 2002). Srinagar-based newspapers published violent threats from militant groups against Pandits if they did not flee immediately (Evans, 2002: 9). Hitlists with Pandits’ names and addresses were plastered on trees and doors and mosque loudspeakers echoed these threats (Behera, 2008; Evans, 2002). By 1991, Pandits perceived the wider community’s support for azadi as tacit acceptance of the militants’ Islamist rhetoric against them.

From 1989 to 1991, militant groups launched a campaign of terror which brought the Valley to a point of crisis and precipitated the near-total displacement of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir Valley. Police officers, intellectuals, journalists, activists and leaders of different religions were intimidated and murdered by militants, who ‘fostered [a] regime of impunity’ and created a climate of fear (Duschinski, 2010: 112). Owners of cinemas, liquor stores and other recreational activities closed or were banned (Behera, 2008: 626). Militants instructed Muslim women to adopt orthodox dress codes and morning prayers at mosques were more strictly attended, while Hindu women stopped wearing the bindi (Behera, 2008: 626). State government offices shut down or tacitly complied with militant demands and police stations were targeted by militants (Behera, 2008). Kashmiri police officers suffered low morale, and when they abandoned their posts, India did not initially send reinforcements, signalling to militants India’s inability to deal with the militancy (Behera, 2008: 620; Ganguly, 1997: 104). This political climate left Muslims and Pandits feeling vulnerable to the militancy.

The communal bonds between Muslims and Hindus in Kashmir became strained as they sat on opposite sides of the azadi movement. In the first few months of 1990, the fear and violence reached a fever pitch and over 150,000–200,000 Pandits (and some non-Pandit Hindus and Sikhs) sought refuge in displaced-persons camps in Jammu, Delhi and with family members outside the Valley (Evans, 2002: 24; Madan, 2008: 25; OHCHR, 2018: 41). Many Pandits permanently settled in Jammu, in colonies or camps of one-room tenements, and these harsh living conditions precipitated death and disease for some (Datta, 2016b: 57). This unsettled and undignified existence fuelled Pandits’ resentment towards their Muslim counterparts.

The state and national governments used inhumane and intimidatory practices in Kashmir. In 1990, the newly installed Jammu and Kashmir Governor, Jagmohan, instituted the counterinsurgency, which involved curfews and excessive force against Kashmiris attending azadi rallies. Protests attended by mostly Muslim civilians, such as Gawkadal (January 1990), were fired upon by police and security forces, which for Kashmiri Muslims legitimised the violent methods adopted by the insurgents (Behera, 2008: 620). Curfews extended for months in Kashmir, compounding the economic desperation and religious fervour that had already erupted in the Kashmir Valley. Indian security forces instilled fear in the population through cordon-and-search operations where security forces surrounded areas, used informants to identify militants and interrogated or tortured detainees (Asia Watch, 1993: 14; Human Rights Watch, 1996). Throughout the 1990s, Kashmiris who remained in the Valley lived through the peak of militancy, which was met with the extreme force of counterinsurgency imposed upon the entire population. According to Navnita Chadha Behera (2008), Governor Jagmohan’s blunt force likely ‘radicalized the movement and turn[ed] the most apolitical of Kashmiris into active supporters of the militancy’ (p. 620).

The displacement marks an inflection point for both groups’ relationship to each other, and the Indian state. It entrenched differences between Pandits and Muslims, whose textured relationships with each other’s community should not be viewed in binary terms – as either straightforwardly familial or suspicious (Bhan et al., 2020). Pandits are now more explicit in their support for the Indian state and view their past as a ‘sacrifice’ for the goal of Indian secularism against Islamism (Datta, 2020: 55), while India’s military presence in the Valley since 1990 has made the existing administrative structure untenable for Kashmiri Muslims (Kazi, 2017: 166).

Historical grievances

Kashmiri memory productions have emerged through paradigms that emphasise ‘historical grievance’ (Zutshi, 2014: 300). Attachment to grievance inevitably promotes attention to some elements of history and experience over others, a combination of remembering and forgetting. The melding of Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim practices means that Kashmiris share many spiritual and Sufi traditions, such as local shrine worship (Kaul, 2017: 302). However, overstating this unique Kashmiri identity and religious syncretism, known as Kashmiriyat, inaccurately represents Kashmiris as somehow exceptional in the region for their multi-faith and inter-faith bonds, and collapses the communities’ distinct remembered pasts.

Pandits tend to see their past as a series of existential threats and survival against numerical odds. Kashmiri Pandits are the only community of Hindus indigenous to the mountainous regions of the Kashmir Valley. Before the displacement, Pandits made up less than 5% of the Valley’s population (Madan, 1993: 694). While other Hindu groups exist in Jammu and Ladakh, Pandits are a specific subgroup of the Hindu Brahmin upper most caste. This identity differentiates them from most Kashmiris in the Kashmir Valley, who embraced Islam during Muslim rule in Kashmir (1320–1819), as Pandits did not convert (Witzel, 2008: 38–39). Pandits internalise stories of ‘survival’ against widespread conversion to Islam. Oral tradition holds that during a particularly brutal period of Muslim rule, only 11 Pandit families remained in the Valley while the rest fled, converted or were killed (Witzel, 2008: 39). This oral tradition also refers to the displacement as the seventh exodus, recalling six instances before the displacement where the community was told to convert, leave the Valley or die by Muslim rulers (Bhan, 2003). From the 1400s onwards, Pandits found employment as administrators and translators in the Muslim court (Witzel, 2008: 38). Pandits believed their ‘survival as a community’ was dependent on their ‘indispensability to the administrative machinery of various rulers’ after various Muslim rulers persecuted Hindus (Rai, 2004: 220–250). Through such ways of telling their history, Pandit communities have defined themselves as subject to the zeitgeist of Muslim leaders and the majority, while being central to the administration of the very state within which they feel minoritised.

Whereas Pandits have internalised these stories of persecution and exile at the hands of Muslim rulers, Kashmiri Muslims tend to see their past as a series of foreign occupations and disenfranchisement from the corridors of power. These foreign rulers were most recently Hindu or Sikh, and before this, they were non-Kashmiri Muslims from whom Kashmiri Muslims differentiate themselves. The Dogra period of rule (1846–1947) advantaged Pandit and Punjabi landowners over Muslim Tillers (Rai, 2004). Meanwhile, the Mughal (Muslim) era of rule (1586–1751) is considered the ‘beginning of the end of Kashmiri independence’ (Zutshi, 2003: 49). The majority of Kashmiris embraced Sufi Islam in the 1300s–1800s, for spiritual, social and political reasons (Khan, 2008: 142). Sufism preaches that the mystical path leads to the true knowledge of God and practices saint worship and keeps shrines, unlike other branches of Islam (Sikand, 2008: 490). For Kashmiri Muslims, Sufism still places the Valley in the wider Islamic world (Zutshi, 2017: 7). Due to a series of Sikh and Hindu rulers (1819–1947), followed by accession to India, and subsequent violence from state and central governments, Kashmiri Muslims feel like an embattled group without full democratic rights.

Kashmiri time and implication

To frame Kashmiri memory discourses, I draw extensively on the theoretical work undertaken by Chitralekha Zutshi, a historian of Kashmir, and Michael Rothberg, a memory studies scholar. Zutshi’s theory guides us through questions of Kashmiri memory cultures, while Rothberg conceptualises how we remember implication and envision justice and healing after conflict. These themes are central to the way this contribution conceptualises and interrogates Kashmiri memory discourses.

Kashmiri memory discourses pivot away from Western historical frames that emphasise linearity and narratives of progress. Zutshi’s (2014) work on archived textual traditions concludes that Kashmiri texts, both Persian and Sanskrit, ‘brought together the past, present and future into one seamless frame of discussion’ so that Kashmiris view their pasts and futures as recurring narratives (pp. 7–60). In both archival texts and my work with oral history, Kashmiri authors, speakers and audiences do not always distinguish between ‘certifiable’ or factual history and ‘memory as a sensual and emotional experience’ (Zutshi, 2014: 27).

Within memory studies, implication and the implicated subject are a conceptual framework that helps us understand an individual’s direct or structural position within conflict (Rothberg, 2019). Implicated subjects occupy ‘positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm’ (Rothberg, 2019: 1). The implicated subject is not solely a victim or perpetrator; such a subject is also a participant or beneficiary in histories such as the displacement, and in social formations, such as the economic inequality between Pandits and Muslims. Rothberg describes implicated subjects as occupying different positions in coexisting regimes of domination (Rothberg, 2019: 8). As with Zutshi’s findings on Kashmiri history and memory, implication in the Indian state or Kashmiri militant violence cannot be neatly bracketed within a specific time period. Pandits and Muslims have occupied different positions, and these positions have not been static or uniform.

Interviews

My research is based on oral history interviews with Kashmiri diaspora, which constitutes a set of oral memory sources which have not yet been studied. I conducted 15 oral history interviews in 2021 with Kashmiri diaspora in Australia with whom my family has varying personal relationships. Eight interlocutors are Pandit, and six are Muslim. Interviews covered a fraught and live conflict, so I have chosen to refer to participants with the letter ‘P’ (Kashmiri Pandit) or ‘M’ (Kashmiri Muslim) with an accompanying number (e.g. M14). I have prioritised the person-making categories of ‘Pandit’ and ‘Muslim’ because these are the historical categories I am investigating and all participants identified with and took pride in their religion. In addition, I did not want to depoliticise their experiences or reproduce the relations of power from the Kashmir Valley. I explicitly reference 7 of the 15 interlocutors: P1, P2, P5, P13, M7, M9 and M14.

I was motivated in part by oral history’s most conventional use: to derive ‘more history’ about the displacement (Bozzoli, 2016: 216). However, to understand which memories of the displacement continue to endure, and how they have transformed, I also examined the context in which these memories were initially formed (Deshpande, 2007: 4). Interviews went beyond personal stories and included ‘moral or political lessons’ (Gutman, 2017: 54). In this sense, the testimonies of Kashmiri diaspora revealed more about the formation of their political and cultural identity than they unearthed novel historical data (Gutman, 2017: 53).

I recognise memories are informed and circumscribed by a participant’s class, education, personal connections and age as much as they are by their religion and politics. Of my interlocutors, most are middle class, university educated and all had the resources and ability to migrate. The class and education levels of both the Muslims and Pandits that I interviewed are similar now and were similar when they were in Kashmir. The majority of diaspora interviewed were also children or young adults during the displacement or when they left Kashmir in the 1990s.

As an ‘insider’, I came with a lifetime of family stories, which posed a set of complicated questions about my implication in Kashmir’s past and my stake in its future. My insider status inevitably brings a unique set of expectations for my work from Pandit and Muslim communities, as they have tolerated my intrusion (Datta, 2016b: 32). The richness and generosity of participants forced me to examine my own politics, but it also allowed me to probe their politics. Interviews were intimate, using vernacular language and nodding to our shared customs, as participants perceived me to have a particular meaning in their history and lives (Bozzoli, 2016: 147). As a Pandit interviewing Kashmiri Muslims, I may have been relegated to observer rather than participant observer (Gutman, 2017: 62), although my family’s close personal relationships with the Kashmiri Muslims I interviewed meant they were similarly intimate and emotive as interviews with Pandits. While these close family relationships and ‘insider’ status within the community gave me access and a level of intimacy with interlocutors, their relationship with my family may have motivated them to sanitise or reserve certain views.

In analysing these interviews, I will first make visible the moment of displacement and then consider how the recorded memories echo the recurring historical grievances felt by each community. Each community’s attachment to their historical grievance produces silence around the other community’s contemporary trauma, a silence that both communities notice in the other. Despite this polarisation and silencing, interviews reveal coexisting spheres of privilege and precarity felt by both communities. Finally, I show that, while evidence does not suggest that there is a Kashmiri way of answering questions of implication, memory in activism and healing policies must be anchored to acknowledge Kashmiris’ recurring historical narratives and contemporary notions of implication.

How do Pandits and Muslims remember their own and the other community’s implication in the displacement?

Pandit recollections of their displacement and dispossession are both intimate family memories and political reflections on the existence of their community. P2 was barely a teenager on the night of 19 January 1990 in Srinagar (P2, interview with author, 28 June 2021). His mother had turned off the lights in his house to deflect attention, and he remembers that the entirety of Kashmir was also pitch black. Cacophonic mobs raised slogans outside his house. The loudspeakers in mosques, which usually sounded for morning and evening prayers, carried a different message that night: Ralive, Tsaliv ya Galive (convert, leave or die). The messages on the loudspeaker seemed spontaneous yet coordinated. In the preceding months, P2 had heard hushed and panicked conversations between the adult members of his family when he left his joint-family home for school. School was then disrupted by frequent blackouts, curfews and turbulence in the Valley. During the long winter nights, P2 had woken up to gunfire multiple times. He knew that his parents were also unable to sleep, anxiety stricken because his father had been named on militants’ hitlists. But it was on 19 January 1990 that P2 felt that he, and other Pandits, would be ‘wiped out’ by the mobs. During that night, P2’s family fled their home in the Valley to tent accommodation in Jammu with a bag of clothes each. This departure became permanent. ³

Along with internalising their community’s deep past, Pandit children absorb their community’s displacement memories and experience them as visceral and personal. Postmemory is a helpful way to understand the Kashmiri context, where a generation has been raised by or lived among trauma survivors. Marianne Hirsch’s (2008) work is grounded in Holocaust studies, where postmemory is ‘the product of traumatic recall . . . at a generational remove’ (p. 106). P1 was born in Delhi years after the displacement and describes her childhood, with her elder brother, like that of a ‘typical middle-class Delhiite’ (P1, interview with author, 23 June 2021). P1’s dadu (paternal grandfather) worked in Srinagar for one of the premier Indian Civil Services before the displacement. He received a letter marked from Hizbul Mujahideen, one of the dominant militant groups at the time, which violently advocated for an Islamist Kashmir. The letter directly threatened to kill P1’s dadu and kidnap his daughter. One night, Hizbul Mujahideen militants appeared at her dadu’s joint-family home demanding that her dadu come out. P1’s dadu was in the property’s granny flat at that moment. Mistakenly, or perhaps as a proxy, the militants shot both of her dadu’s parents point blank – P1’s great-grandparents. P1’s father and heavily pregnant mother were in the house when her great-grandparents were killed. P1’s parents fled Kashmir that night and P1’s elder brother was born and initially raised in a displaced-persons camp in Jammu. Despite being born years after the displacement, P1 cried in each of the rooms of her now uninhabited ancestral home in Srinagar when she visited as a teenager. She imagined what shape her identity would have taken had she maintained connection to her mulk (country). Kashmir was always present, in the nostalgic stories her family told, in the tragedies she knew they experienced, and as the site for centuries of Pandit survival which motivated her parents in her upbringing. ⁴

These scenes of atrocity are understandably highly visible in Pandit memory discourses, and were a recurring element in the interviews I conducted. But these resounding memories of violence leave little space for Pandits to distance their community from the excesses of the Indian military in Kashmir. P1 acknowledges that ‘truly the reason my family was not wiped out’ is because Governor Jagmohan sent the limited security force personnel he had available to her dadu’s joint-family house and some other Pandit homes (P1, interview with author, 23 June 2021). Jagmohan’s name ‘has always stood out in [her] family’s stories of that time’. Yet, another element of P1’s family story is that Jagmohan also sent security force personnel to several mosques broadcasting anti-Pandit and threatening slogans on their loudspeakers. P1 tells me that his forces demanded people exit the mosque, where they all stood in niqabs (veil that covers the face but leaves the eye area uncovered), presumably concealing the faces of separatists or militants. The security forces looked at the shoes, and shot anyone wearing men’s shoes. It is difficult to ascertain the exact name or date of these events – they are likely an amalgamation of multiple instances of human rights violations by Indian security forces against Kashmiri Muslims during the counterinsurgency led by Governor Jagmohan in 1990 (Human Rights Watch, 1996). What is important here is the way in which P1’s family has held these two stories in tandem with each other. They are two competing visions of how victimhood was both mitigated and instigated by the Indian state and Jagmohan, in the same time period. Without realising, P1 is acknowledging these ‘opposing’ narratives need not be construed as a ‘zero-sum game’ (Rothberg, 2009), that both communities’ experiences reflect the acute violence of that time. P1’s family has internalised the stories of Pandit survival through the displacement and the preceding centuries, which invests them in a set of narratives that make it difficult to constructively empathise with other – Muslim – sources of grievance. This difficulty to engage constructively exists even while the family, in some sense, does remember the atrocities against Kashmiri Muslim communities. ⁵

Kashmiri Muslims offer parallel yet separate memories of 1989–1991, demonstrating the instabilities of memory production and the overlapping spheres of militant and military violence. Even privileged Kashmiri Muslims lived with a hum of dread during this period. M14 was in her third year of university in Kashmir when the militancy erupted in 1989 (M14, interview with author, 25 July 2021). She describes her upbringing during the 1970s and 1980s as ‘idyllic’ since she lived in a ‘posh’ neighbourhood and her father worked in the state government. While she identifies as having been ‘politically naïve’, she can recall the panicked, hushed discussions between her parents when she came home from university for the winter break in December 1989. The winter break was supposed to be a few weeks but extended by many months as the Valley was plunged into curfew and businesses and services ceased. And then, panic ensued when Pandits ‘dramatically disappeared from the Valley overnight’. It was not until M14’s Pandit neighbours fled that she felt the complete scale of the crisis. Before this, her family found it difficult to really accept what was happening around them. She remembers going to local mosques to pray where ‘people would chant and raise threats against Pandits’. At the same time, her wealthy neighbourhood was mostly shielded from the army presence. Despite the safety that her neighbourhood’s elite status brought, stories of the Indian army taking Muslim boys suspected of being militants still rippled through. Once Pandits left, she recalls the Valley’s anticipation that ‘India had planned something’. People around her expected the total force of the Indian state – the mass killing of the remaining population. As M14 barely manages a smile, she admits, ‘of course, nothing of that kind happened’. But this feeling of total vulnerability to the Indian state, threat of militant violence and the absence of trust or belonging permeated not only my interview with her, but with all Kashmiri Muslim interlocutors. She told me, ‘A seed was passed down through the generations, so by the time it got to the 1980s, we knew we didn’t belong with India’. ⁶

Kashmiri Muslims also recall a suffocating, powerless experience. M9 was a young teenager during the displacement and says Kashmir is still her ‘first love’ (M9, interview with author, 21 July 2021). M9 explains the acute dread of leaving her house in Srinagar during the militancy, fearing that she would be caught in cross-firing between militants and the Indian army. Home was not a safe haven as her family was anxious that militants would knock on their door and demand to use it as a hideout. She didn’t feel that the ‘army was there to protect her’ either. One specific memory in 1990 stands out. M9 remembers looking out of her window one night at a Pandit house across the street, engulfed in flames, mere hours after it was abandoned by her Pandit neighbours. She felt suffocated and powerless, as she cried into the abyss. In the mid-1990s, when M9 was nearing the end of high school, her parents sent her from Kashmir to Australia to live with relatives. Like most participants, M9 said she ‘does not want to get political’, but acknowledges that azadi, which militants claim to be inspired by, was widely supported by Kashmiri Muslims during the displacement. But even as an adult with her own children today, she cannot identify how azadi became dominated by Islamism and militancy. ⁷ Although all interviewees felt threatened by militant violence, this memory does not unify Pandits and Muslims, because militants acted in the name of Muslims.

Muslim memories of the displacement are also shaped by the Indian state’s counterinsurgency operations in the 1990s and more recent posturing. Before the Indian government unilaterally revoked Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status, M9 felt that India was where Kashmir should be (M9, interview with author, 21 July 2021). She was in Srinagar when it was revoked in August 2019, and she spiralled back into her feelings of dread and helplessness from 1990. In the days leading up to the revocation in 2019, speculation and rumour spread through the Valley. The Internet had just been cut, and M9 knew that this signalled that something bad was imminent. She rushed to the Srinagar airport with her two young, scared children, who mirrored her fear in 1990. Here, a Hindu group was chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (Glory to Lord Rama), opposite to a Muslim group chanting ‘Allah Hu Akbar’ (God is Great). Slogans, which can at once create a sense of solidarity, left M9 feeling that ‘this is it, I am dead’. This echoes P2’s feelings in 1990. M9 and her children were able to board a flight right before the communication blackout that followed the revocation. M9 says her last experience in Kashmir made her feel ‘degraded’, and powerless, yet she still ‘craves to breathe Kashmiri air’. She acknowledges that Pandits have been feeling this for 30 years. Her personal experience and awareness of Pandit perspectives may allow her to see her community’s implication in their displacement. ⁸

Privilege and precarity

Kashmiri memory cultures provide a framework for each community’s grievances while restricting each community’s ability to recognise their own implication in structural violence, both before and after the displacement. Such recognition is the first ‘condition for a disengagement from implication and the construction of solidarity with those who suffer from our indirect entanglements’ (Rothberg, 2019: 145).

Pandits felt excluded from political discourse and politically disunited, which suggested to them that Muslims controlled political discourse in Kashmir and that Pandits should have adopted a more muscular Hinduism. P5 remarked that the Pandit community was too ‘cowardly’ to be ‘patriotic’, in contrast to Kashmiri Muslims who were openly and collectively ‘anti-India’ (P5, interview with author, 4 July 2021). P5 spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Punjab, and returned to his natal household in Srinagar every summer. He was 13 when his family received news that all their relatives had fled Kashmir. As a Kashmiri adolescent outside of Kashmir, he remembers feeling othered by his Punjabi peers. This was partly due to their vocal judgements that he and his community were cowardly, compared to the stereotypical image of the visible and valiant Punjabi community. But P5 said that these qualities were also identified with and embedded in his psyche by his own family in Srinagar, which meant ‘no one would stay and fight’ against their displacement. Deploying essentialised vocabularies of Pandit and Muslim identities, his observations offered three distinct images. The first is of a disunited and weak Pandit community. The second sits in contrast, whereby the Muslim community is united behind uniform discourse that gave rise to a ‘masculine, militant stereotype’ (Manchanda, 2008: 662). The third image bears the nationalist flavour of Kashmiri Pandits after the displacement, where their opposition to Kashmiri separatism is constructed by way of Indian, Hindu nationalism (Datta, 2020: 3). Pandits feel that they should have channelled the muscular Hinduism of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh organisation or Bharatiya Janata Party in the face of Muslim political discourse when they lived in the Kashmir Valley. ⁹

Muslim interviewees focused on their community’s weakness in relation to India, not on their demographic strength in relation to Pandits. M7 said that India and Pakistan thought Kashmiris could be herded (M7, interview with author, 17 July 2021). M7 was a child in the 1950s, and grew up while the Indian government imprisoned Kashmir’s first Chief Minister and hero of the Indian independence struggle, Sheikh Abdullah. He tells me that this set off a cycle of distrust and betrayal with Kashmiris and the Indian government. M7 considers that the azadi movement was an explosion of the simmering resentment towards India that he, and other Kashmiri Muslims, had felt for decades since Partition. M7 recounts that the azadi movement’s strength was that it drew on a unique Kashmiri identity – Pandit and Muslim – that differentiated the Valley from India. M7 remembers that there was ‘no discrimination anywhere’ between Kashmiris and no ‘religious colour to their fate’. This characterisation of azadi runs counter to Pandit interlocutors’ memories and suggests M7 does not believe his community had elements of strength in relation to Pandits before the displacement. Similarly, M7 explicitly rejects any memories of resentment directed at Pandits because of their traditional employment within government and perceived proximity to the Indian state. If many Pandits worked in the state government, M7 said it was ‘because of merit, [Pandits] were more educated and common people didn’t mind this’. M7 thus deemphasises communal tensions before the displacement. This deemphasises his community’s complex implication in the displacement, and perhaps, seeks to sanitise memories of resentment towards Pandits. ¹⁰

To remember and heal

What could healing look like in Kashmir? In the 1990s, at the height of militancy and military occupation in Kashmir, transnational movements offered legal and political strategies for societies ravaged by conflict and trauma – such as South Africa, Rwanda, former Yugoslavia. These healing strategies have not garnered substantial traction in Kashmir or among Kashmiri diaspora advocating for their notions of justice and truth. Personal connections between Pandits and Muslims dilute the narratives of persecution and invasion, while they simultaneously heighten feelings of betrayal and make it difficult to believe one’s own community could be implicated in the pain inflicted upon the other community.

Kashmiri Pandits have been denied official inquiry and accountability for the displacement, which complicates their quest for return. India’s apex judicial institution, the Supreme Court, has on multiple occasions rejected applications by Kashmiri Pandit organisations to probe into the killings during 1989–1991 and the displacement of Kashmiri Pandits (Mahapatra, 2017; Press Trust of India, 2019). The Indian government has not accepted the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ (OHCHR, 2019) recommendation to establish independent investigations into civilian killings in Kashmir since the 1980s, including of Pandits (p. 15). The Jammu and Kashmir and Indian governments still use ‘migrant’ to refer to Pandits living in ‘migrant camps’ in Jammu (Relief and Rehabilitation(M) Government of Jammu & Kashmir, n.d.) although Pandits insist they should be called ‘refugees in their own country’ to acknowledge the duress under which they left (Datta, 2016b: 17). The Jammu and Kashmir and Indian governments have introduced employment and housing programmes to facilitate Pandit’s return to the Kashmir Valley (Mushtaq, 2008), but this has not induced large-scale rehabilitation due to ongoing security concerns. The ‘mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits’ is hypervisible in Indian political discourse, but it is also under-recorded and largely unresolved, leaving Pandits feeling invalidated and excluded (Kaul, 2010: 52).

The Indian army has not been held to account for allegations of disappearances, excessive force, and sexual violence against the Kashmiri population. Most casualties in the conflict and counterinsurgency in the Kashmir Valley since 1989 are Kashmiri Muslims, at the hands of Indian security forces (OHCHR, 2018, 2019). The Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act 1990 (AFSPA) grants security forces immunity from prosecution in civilian courts which has ‘created structures that obstruct the normal course of law, impede accountability and jeopardise the right to remedy for victims of human rights violations’ (OHCHR, 2018: 5). The number of Kashmiri civilians killed and disappeared since 1989 is reported to be above 50,000 (Madan, 2008: 2). The lack of records or punishment of perpetrators for state-sanctioned violence against Kashmiri Muslims is a deliberate legal and military strategy on the part of the Indian government to avoid scrutiny for its actions in Kashmir.

In my interviews, Pandits rejected any responsibility for the state-sanctioned violence against Kashmiri Muslims while simultaneously remembering their own experience of violence. For P13, reports of the Indian army presence and tactics were ‘exaggerations’ (P13, interview with author, 22 July 2021). P13’s family was one of just a few Pandit families in his mostly Muslim village. He recalls his idyllic childhood in the 1970s and 1980s, where both Pandits and Muslims worked in business and agriculture and there was ‘no segregation’ or violence. However, P13 experienced violence soon after he moved to his uncle’s house in Anantnag in 1988 to finish high school. He was at a bus station when it was blown up by militants. P13 remembers seeing blood on the debris and hearing people screaming. He still went to his tuition that day, and his ‘uncles gave [him] a thrashing’ for not immediately returning to the safety of their home. This fear and stress compelled P13 to leave Kashmir for Pune in the early 1990s. P13 developed periodontal disease, where his gums and the surrounding bones became infected and inflamed. It was not until he visited a doctor in Melbourne who was originally from Jammu that he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after multiple failed operations. This doctor from Jammu knew P13 was from Kashmir, and said to him, ‘[P13], these diseases are because of your mental state, we need to fix that first’. Since then, P13 instituted and continues to follow a regime of yoga, meditation and prayer. This doctor’s diagnosis provided P13 with the framework to understand how violence affected him. Despite this trauma, P13 was not able to completely engage with Muslims’ trauma in Kashmir. ¹¹

How can Pandits and Muslims work towards reconciliation without official accountability, and without re-wounding each other? Despite the harrowing subject matter of displacement, militancy and military occupation, the most difficult part of the interviews was answering, or failing to answer this question. M14 – a Kashmiri Muslim woman I referred to earlier – shared an anecdote that expressed healing and anger together (M14, interview with author, 25 July 2021). M14 tells me that she had once shared a video on her Facebook of Arundhati Roy critiquing militarisation and the Indian army in the Kashmir Valley. Roy is a non-Muslim Indian author who is critical of Hindu nationalism and various policies of the Indian government (Roy, 2019). By speaking in support of Kashmiri Muslims in the Valley and decrying the violence enacted against them, Roy was, according to M14, approaching Kashmir in ‘non-communal terms’ (meaning not driven by religious identity). M14 tagged her Pandit friend in the post, to share what M14 believed was a novel approach to Kashmir. At this point, M14’s voice cracks as she recounts:

‘She (the tagged Pandit friend) responded angrily to the post. Then she messaged me privately and told me what had happened to her before she left Kashmir. She told me what her family went through. I had no idea. I don’t know what your nani (maternal grandmother) went through, and I don’t know what your mum went through. I would be lying if I said I did. There is a lot of pain that those people went through. I apologised to my friend for the post and for even tagging her in it.’

M14 had essentially expected her Pandit friend to take a ‘non-communal’ stance without recognising, or even knowing the violence that her Pandit friend and family had been subjected to by Islamic militants. It should also be noted that Roy, like many outspoken Indian intellectuals, has been the subject of criticism and controversy. In 2005, she shook hands with and posed for a photo with Yasin Malik, the Chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) which is a Kashmiri separatist organisation that previously used violent tactics and is alleged to have intimidated and killed Kashmiri Pandits during the late 1980s (India Today, 2022). To complicate matters further, since the JKLF renounced violence in 1994, Malik has engaged in talks with the Indian establishment, including with former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2006 and has spearheaded various political campaigns for Kashmir’s secession. However, in 2022 Malik was convicted of terrorism charges and sentenced to life in an Indian prison (Al Jazeera, 2022). The Indian media and government’s shifting approach to Kashmiri Pandits give further context to the anger and betrayal M14’s friend likely felt. The legitimacy of collective Pandit memories of being targeted and displaced by militants is subject to the Indian public’s mediations and remediations of Kashmiri separatism, and of the cultural and political mood of the time.

Inadvertently, M14 and her friend engaged in the process of moving memory from a competitive to a multidirectional understanding (Rothberg, 2009). Despite living with and loving her Pandit friends and neighbours, M14 had not recognised or engaged with their suffering for decades, presumably as M14 grappled with her own community’s adjacent suffering. However, M14’s remorse and recognition of the Pandit experience show that remediation can lead to awareness of her own status as an implicated subject.

We see various interlocutors distancing themselves – whether intentional or not – from the atrocities committed against the other community. Despite such serious subject matter, P13 (who I discuss earlier) offered a somewhat endearing description: all Kashmiris have the ‘same genetics . . . [they] are emotionally high all the time [and will] never listen to each other’ (P13, interview with author, 22 July 2021). P13’s words convey both intimacy and distance coexisting between communities, reflecting the textured relationship between these two communities that became jagged after 1990 (Bhan et al., 2020). But when M14 shared the Facebook anecdote with me, I saw the potential of listening and remediation, and the possibilities for both reconciliation and re-wounding. Pandits and Muslims could potentially understand each other, but the silence around each other’s pain has been left to fester, with years of lost conversations. ¹² For Pandits and Muslims to truly move towards acknowledgement of each other’s suffering and a more complex understanding of how they are implicated in that suffering, they need to dislodge some of the metanarratives and historical narratives of victimisation that shape their own memories.

Concluding remarks

Pandits are a dispossessed community in exile and Muslims have lived through militancy and military occupation. But historical explanations and political actions fall short unless we listen to the stories about the everyday realities of living with displacement, occupation and trauma. While the remembered pasts of Kashmiri communities overlap, they are not identical, and this is reflected in the personal narratives and cultural memories of the more recent event of the displacement. Notwithstanding deep personal bonds and shared memories between Pandits and Muslims, interviewees danced around but did not completely reconcile with each other’s stories of the displacement.

I have shown that it is important not only for Kashmiris to hear the perspectives of others, but also to begin to see some of the silent narratives from the past that shape their own perspectives. This memory-work with Kashmiri diaspora in Australia offers a nuanced understanding of how the art of storytelling can allow communities to become attached to their historical grievances and obscure conversations about the future. While many memories seemed to be competitive between communities, there were glimmers of hope, as in the case of M14 and her friend, for a more multidirectional, and possibly reconciliatory, approach to memory. By scrutinising their own community’s narratives, Kashmiris may become more open to considering implication, and more open to the productive dialogues that Kashmiris need to move forward – whether in diaspora or in the Kashmir Valley.