“Through four short stories and conversations with the translators, the author views Hari Krishna Kaul’s literary works. They poignantly yet objectively depict the human experiences and socio-political upheavals in Kashmir through his unique satirical and surreal storytelling style.”
For Now, It is Night
By Hari Krishna Kaul
Translated from the Kashmiri by Kalpana Raina, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili and Gowhar Yaqoob
Published by HarperCollins: pp 219
Hari Krishna Kaul
Freny Manecksha*
In a room in Banihal, the gateway town between Jammu and Kashmir, three travellers take shelter for the night because of inclement weather and landslides. The nameless protagonist cannot sleep, mundane and existential questions swirl in his head.
Is the rain, the room with windows without panes, the biting cold, just a dream_ maya or illusion as Swami Ji, one of the co-travellers claims? Or, is reality the uncomfortable truth that Makhan, the second co-traveller suggests? That they have been cowards in not taking a stand with the taxi driver who insisted they halt in the guesthouse. What is reality? For the protagonist battling darkness, until the morning comes, it is night.
Not only does this cryptic tale, For Now, It is Night, barely a few pages long, become the title for this collection of short stories by the late Hari Krishna Kaul, it also sets the timbre for the rest.
The work of Kaul, who explored the social crisis and political upheavals of Kashmir, is wonderfully resurrected for a new generation of readers through this volume curated by his niece Kalpana Raina and translated in a unique collaborative effort by Raina herself, Tanveer Ajsi, Gowhar Fazili and Gowhar Yaqoub, in an Indian edition brought out by Harper Collins.
Acclaimed as one of the best modern Kashmiri writers, who switched from Hindi to writing in Koshur or Kashmiri in 1966, Kaul deployed satire, wit, surrealism, farce and absurdist elements to make incisive observations of the society of his times, drawing on his own experiences of living in Kashmir and then like many of the Pandit community, forced into exile.
He explores the territory of isolation, feelings of displacement, yearnings for a lost homeland, the subterranean conflicts within a family and community through the lives of ordinary people, giving the stories a universal appeal.
That his stories strike a chord in a continent far away is exemplified by the praise the book has received in the US edition.
The Brooklyn Rail wrote: “The sensations of reading Kaul are akin to those felt when watching the masters of slow-paced cinema like Bresson or Bela Tarr. As in a Tarr film, the point is not to extrapolate a larger meaning from a roadside encounter or a simple transaction; the point is to immerse oneself in the details of ordinary life and the texture of a moment.”
Whilst the characters are ordinary, this “texture” of mundane day-to day living is actually replete with strands of many turbulent socio-political events which rocked Kashmir, particularly in the eighties and nineties. Today, these events are recounted with a vicious bias in popular Indian cinema and political narratives.
“Acclaimed as one of the best modern Kashmiri writers, who switched from Hindi to writing in Koshur or Kashmiri in 1966, Hari Krishna Kaul deployed satire, wit, surrealism, farce and absurdist elements to make incisive observations of the society of his times, drawing on his own experiences of living in Kashmir and then like many of the Pandit community, forced into exile.”
Subverting the binaries
But as Gowhar Fazili, one of the translators, writes in his short essay, Kaul’s tragic unravelling of a place he calls home and his depiction of Kashmir’s people is not static. “Unlike a partisan trend in contemporary Kashmiri writing, particularly in English, that victimizes a community, demonizing the other whilst valourising the self, Kaul subverts the binaries of good and evil, friend and enemy, self and other.”
A teacher in political science and sociology whose writings have appeared in many journals, Fazili told me this recent publication of Kaul’s works provides an opportunity to bring to the table, stories of suffering of the two communities and to enable discussions without rancour.
In his essay, he says close attention to cultural and political nuances of the language can bring about interpretations with a better reading of Kaul’s dynamic open-ended quality of writing. Kaul’s stories, he says, “recover a nuanced multifaceted history of a crucial period of political transition and rupture in Kashmir (1970-2000) that lacks a social history.”
To Rage or to Endure
At a book reading event held in Mumbai, Fazili read out passages from the story To Rage or to Endure, which he said was among his favourites in the collection. I asked him how as a contemporary translator he interpreted this work.
The story, he said, is an allegorical account of loss that makes the effect of losing home and being displaced palpable through the vagaries of weather.
“The Kashmir of the narrator’s childhood nostalgia is represented through the love for soft cottony snow; its sudden turn to hostility through the icy cold winds and frost that came from nowhere and finally, the encounter with alien terrain after the forced departure from Kashmir becomes an encounter with the burning sun of the plains,” says Fazili.
Kaul, he adds, does not exaggerate the beauty or warm neighbourly relations that prevailed in Kashmir that was lost. “Nor does he texture the trauma of being forced to leave Kashmir with elaborate depictions of blood and gore. His view of the new world he is forced to reconcile with, the Indian plains with their violence is not flattering either.
“Kaul’s rage is measured and for that reason no less intense. His focus is on the effects of loss. What did it mean to host illusions about Kashmir, of the snow being warm, soft and cottony, like quilts of freshly carded cotton? Was the maintenance of this illusion a compensation for the lack, the lack of something illusory assumed to be possessed by the other, the long-separated brother, his wife or her supposedly soft quilts? How does it feel when such illusions get shattered? When everything, including the weather, turns icy and indifferent? What does it mean to be flung into the abyss and to lose one’s coordinates? How does it feel when the one on whom the hopes are pinned, represented by the almighty Surya that never sets, itself turns out to be helplessly stranded and out of control?
“At such a moment of collective distress, myths and legends, saints and heroes of the past and the moral visions they preach come into question. Gandhi and Lal Ded and their finely spun threads of wisdom become objects of ridicule. The fragile threads of interconnection between communities that have lived together for ages snap. Sustaining faith in ideals seems impossible.
“While rage in the wake of such loss is understandable what is the outcome of such rage? Who can afford rage and who can’t? What would it mean to endure the pain of loss and to live with it as though it were one’s home? The story slices the heart of the matter so that we can see what is at stake without at any moment becoming prescriptive,” he concludes.
Twins
I asked Tanveeer Ajsi, also one of the contemporary translators, an independent art historian and cultural theorist, for his incisive insights into the socio-political matrix of some of the other stories.
What were the references and historical allusions in Twins, a brief story told in the first person by a protagonist who confesses to strangling his twin brother, I asked.
This brother who was killed was described as one whose “pen carried weight,” who talked about communism, boasted about socialism and spoke of smoke rising from the cotton mills of Ahmedabad.
The protagonist counsels his twin, lectures him, tries to persuade him but he would laugh it off. “Eventually I decided to get rid of him. I would never flourish otherwise.”
One important historic marker, explains Ajsi, is that the story was written in 1974 around the time Kashmir was undergoing significant political transition and the entire sub-continent was in the throes of tumult.
“To my mind,” he says. “the story could be read against this background. The twin who is killed is precisely in the situation Kashmir’s ‘revolutionary’ who had been at the forefront of the struggle against the Dogra monarchy is facing. He is now having to come to terms with a pragmatic decision of accepting Indian rule and his watered-down position as the chief minister within the Indian Union.”
This revolutionary is of course, Sheikh Abdullah, once known as the Sher-e- Kashmir, now become a toothless lion. It is as Ajsi explains, a very difficult decision, which we see reflected in the story when the protagonist says, “Several times, I thought of strangling him, but whenever I stood before him, my strength ebbed and I was drenched in sweat.”
This, according to Ajsi, is the mirror image of what happened to Abdullah. The Sheikh has to throttle his revolutionary side. The Prime Minister of an erstwhile era has to come to terms with the diktats of the Indira -Sheikh accord.
There is another metaphorical irony. The protagonist, right in the beginning of the story, has gone to a Sahib to ask him to write the foreword for a book he wants to write. Ajsi reads it as symbolic of Abdullah going to India asking the Sahib, or in this case the Sahiba, to write the foreword for his new political innings, fiercely aware of the ominous feelings.
Ajsi reflects, “It is as if he knows that killing his own self will surely haunt him. It is a metaphorical take with the revolutionary self being what in Freudian terms we would call one’s ego… one’s self esteem… killing all that one stood for.”
Tomorrow: A Never Ending Story
The second story that I asked to be dug out from the historical void and to be re-interpreted was Tomorrow: A Never Ending Story.
“Pagah as it is titled in Koshur, remains one of my favourite stories,” says Ajsi. “It is one of those rare literary sites upon which the evolution of Kashmir’s society and self can be traced from 1947 onwards and is an important marker in Kaul’s career. His subsequent stories have grown out of it.”
The story, he explains, is rooted in the subtle polemics of the Progressive writings of Kaul’s time when he rubbed shoulders with many of the members of Progressive Writers Association, whose ideological roots were anchored in communism. But Kaul made a distinctive shift in perspective away from the ideological rhetoric that its literary works deployed. He had seen past the hollowness of the world they represented. This is not to suggest, Ajsi emphasizes, that Kaul accepted the order of things. He did not, as Pagah demonstrates.
The story is about two boys, Sulleh and Makhan, Muslim and Hindu studying in a government school, inclined towards everything but their studies and fated to be in the same class IV forever.
Joined at the hip, but with two heads, Ajsi sees their commonality in the state of their families stuck in destitution. “On the school premises, they are punching bags for the teachers. The boys think up outlandish solutions to escape corporal punishment like rubbing sheep tallow on the hands to make caning less painful or then tying a knot in the shirt in superstitious belief. Outside the school, however, they are indispensable, they are objects of exploitation. They tend to the headmaster’s cow or assist the carpenters in a teacher’s house.”
Outside the school they also stand and watch children from the convent school embark or disembark from the bus in their plush uniforms.
“Kaul’s depiction of this duo, forever on the other side of the road from the bus, is a metaphorical representation of the chasm that separates the haves from the have-nots. They watch every day, waiting for a tomorrow that never arrives…Sulleh and Makan do not ever graduate. They remained trapped. On several readings, to my mind, this is representative of the political predicament of Kashmiris post 1947.”
With the departure of the British, he explains, anticipations of the local people grew. Kashmiri leadership had earned the affection and support of their people for promises of equal wealth and resources and agrarian reforms but these benefited only the privileged, those who already possessed some cultivable land.. it did the least for the landless.
Consequently, the higher echelons remained in place both in the administration and in society. Like the boys, the masses remained trapped in Kaul’s misery time loop.
Ajsi also reads the story as Kaul’s negation of the halcyon representation of Kashmir in the post revolution era. Through characters like Sulleh and Makhan he portrays the myriad social vicissitudes of Kashmir in all its complexity.
There is another remarkable feat of Kaul. It is the manner in which he uncovers uncomfortable truths, observe Ajsi. When Sulleh and Makhan in their disputes, hurl slurs at one another, Kaul folds the sequences into the communal cavity, thereby exposing the faultlines of a composite culture and the much touted, sweeping notion of Kashmiriyat. He draws attention to the temporality of such a state and the ability for it to explode at any time.
It is a hard look at Kashmiri society. “In the most piercing use of sarcasm, ridicule, irony, paradox, acerbity, cynicism and a generous dash of humour, Kaul creates the salad of images of Kashmiri society in all its manifestations,” Ajsi observes.
The ending in which the boys attend a celebration of Children’s Day at the stadium is yet again an illustration of broken promises. The boys are not even given the two pears they believe would be distributed to the public. When the show ends they stand at the gate and count the cars that go by.
The reference to the number 47 is in no way random. It is, according to Ajsi, a subtle reference to 1947 – the promised new dawn. And when the boys stop counting after 51, it is again no coincidence. 1951 marks the beginning of the political tumult which precipitated the fall of Sheikh Abdullah.
That Which We Cannot Speak Of
The next story that I picked up for dissection was That Which We Cannot Speak Of, believed to be one of Kaul’s best works, illustrative of his “verve and virtuoso as a writer.”
Ajsi applauds it as an almost complete portrayal of Kashmiri society. “It excavates to understand the tomorrow, to understand the different types of glue that binds Kashmiri society whilst also exposing the faultlines.”
Kaul does not adhere to any focused plot in this story. It meanders through a number of events with amazing brevity and flow. “Written in the first person it draws from his life as a professor and is a tour of Srinagar encompassing an impressive battery of characters or situations, traversing multitudes of events, crossing mythology, history, literature, politics, fraught with religious and communal trajectories. The characters include louts, professors, barbers, politicians along with their quintessential trades.
“What I find very beautiful is the way Kaul does not shy away from his quirks as a Kashmiri Pandit, ripping his very own identity, in a very courageous way. Through detours and sharp turns, he examines areas of life that his contemporaries had not explored in such detail.”
Despite his exile, unlike other writers, Kaul remained unbiased, asserts Ajsi. And whilst he exposed rather than rebelling he was critical of people in all spheres, people of all castes and creeds.
In the absence of a political, social and cultural history of Kashmir, Ajsi notes, it was Kaul who punctuated his stories with historic references. Those who read him discover how important it is to make sense of past events to try and see the present. In this story, Kaul speaks for a community but doesn’t make divisions in the name of religion or communal conflict.
It tells one of what is simmering under the surface, which has been controlled by society’s shared living spaces and negotiations that don’t come easily. But, in this story, Kaul makes an important departure, according to Ajsi. He crosses over to the terrain of essentialising and creating a homogenised “other” and this is located in attributes of Muslim masculinity reduced to one name – Maqbool.
Indeed, one of the features that had stoked my curiosity was how a number of characters from varied walks of life were named Maqbool, or then referred to as Magga, the affectionate form I was told for a Maqbool.
The name, explains Ajsi, is used to symbolise the legacy of Maqbool Butt. The co-founder of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation, he was regarded as a freedom fighter by Kashmiris and hanged in Tihar jail in 1984 for a double death sentence.
Kaul wrote this story in 1985 at a time when there was fervent response to this execution. Kashmir was enveloped in protests with demands that his remains be brought back home according to his dying wishes. Kaul captures the mood and its repercussions on Kashmiri Pandits, who were seen as being in cahoots with the state.
“It is astonishing how Kaul extracts extraordinary detail from ordinary people and places them against this complex historic political backdrop, with a swashbuckling confidence no other writer could have achieved,” he says.
Ajsi who has written extensively on the performing arts and theatre, also elaborates on how Kaul, who also wrote plays for radio, draws on the tradition of khirkat or twisted talk, a form of indirect speech which was used by Kashmiri folk theatre known as Bhand Pathare.
He illustrates this by taking up the incident at the wedding of Jawe Lal’s daughter. Jawe is a relative of the protagonist and Maqbool Hussain Mir has generously offered his house to them as a venue to host the wedding because the locality of Ganpatiyar in which the bride lived was not considered grand enough by the groom’s family.
But this very offer, suddenly becomes sacrilege. How can sacred rituals be performed in a mlecch house, complains the priest. How does one view the transgression of crossing boundaries and spaces?
This and many other sequences with insinuations enable Kaul to explore the communal conflict in myriad forms that both Hindu and Muslim communities circumnavigated. The resentment felt by the majority community towards the minority for the allegiance to the powers that be and the bitterness of the minority community – all this is expressed in sotto voce or hushed tones.
“It is indicative that Kaul did not fail to see that evil exists. He did not confront it though. He wanted his stories to create a space for reflection. He believed his fundamental role as an artist was to un-layer the context. Kaul thereby epitomises ways of seeing and various ways of being Kashmiri.
“The story ends very hurriedly. Is it a conscious bid for fear of spilling the beans about something in which there has been an implicit understanding that silence must prevail?” wonders Ajsi.
Kaul’s stories thus have a timeless quality. “ They refuse to stay put. They leap out of their historic, social, cultural context and confront us of our various beliefs and ideological moorings,’’ concludes Ajsi.
*Freny Manecksha is an independent journalist and author of Flaming Forest, Wounded Valley: Stories from Bastar and Kashmir (2022); and Behold I Shine: Narratives of Kashmir’s Women and Children.(An earlier version of the article had mis-spelled Tanveer Ajsi’s name, which has been corrected)
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