My article, "The Burden of Words: Exile, Memory, and the Politics of Naming in Kashmir", has understandably generated debate, for questions of memory, suffering, and language in Kashmir remain deeply sensitive and emotionally charged.
Indeed, as my friend Yusuf Kanjwal observed, the discussion generated by the article may have inadvertently achieved what conventional publicity seldom does in Kashmir’s modest literary world. A semi-autobiographical work that might otherwise have circulated quietly within a limited readership has suddenly entered wider public conversation and, by "local publishing standards, perhaps even moved toward bestseller status."
Such engagement, even when marked by disagreement, is necessary if history is to remain a space of inquiry rather than accusation. Yet much of the response rests less on what I actually argued and more on what some readers wished I had argued.
At no point did I deny the suffering of Kashmiri Pandits, diminish the tragedy of their displacement, or question their right to narrate their pain in their own words. Their suffering remains one of the deepest ruptures in Kashmir’s modern history and deserves empathy, dignity, and remembrance.
Emotions can’t Override Intellectual Inquiry
My argument was different. It asked whether history can still be discussed with clarity, context, and intellectual honesty rather than only through the heat of wounded memory. That is not denial. It is the responsibility of scholarship.
No serious student of Kashmir disputes that Kashmiri Pandits faced killings, intimidation, fear, and eventual displacement in 1990. Those facts are undeniable. I have myself written elsewhere about the climate of terror, threatening letters, funerals, the fear that spread through neighbourhoods, and the collapse of public confidence.
But history also demands a second question: what political, psychological, and administrative conditions made that fear so overwhelming that an entire community felt compelled to leave?
To examine that atmosphere is not to trivialise the threat. Fear does not cancel violence. But violence without context quickly hardens into myth, and myths rarely help societies understand their tragedies. Governor Jagmohan’s own references to “mass hysteria,” the rumours circulating in Srinagar about imminent bombardment, the collapse of institutional trust, and the atmosphere of militant assertion all formed part of the architecture of 1990.
Explaining that environment is not exoneration. It is an attempt to understand why the state evacuated rather than protected, why institutions failed to inspire confidence, and why neighbours who had shared centuries of coexistence suddenly found themselves separated by silence, fear, and suspicion.
The larger controversy, however, concerns language itself. The response accuses me of “policing” the word exile. That accusation fundamentally misreads my article. I never said Pandits cannot use the term. I merely raised a historical and conceptual question: what do we gain, and what do we lose, when a word historically associated with banishment across borders and severance from political belonging is applied to displacement within the same constitutional framework?
Words carry histories. Terms such as exile, migration, displacement, genocide, exodus or refugee are not merely emotional expressions; they also possess legal, political, and historical meanings. To examine those meanings is not cruelty. It is part of intellectual inquiry. If every examination of terminology is dismissed as an assault on grief, scholarship itself becomes impossible.
Layered Complexity of Kashmir’s Memory
Significantly, some of the most moving accounts written by Kashmiri Pandits themselves demonstrate how powerful language can remain without rhetorical excess.
In his memoir "When the Heart Speaks", Dr Upendra Kaul writes with immense emotional depth about loss, longing, memory, and separation from Kashmir, yet he does not invoke the vocabulary of “exile.” The pain is not diminished because the language is measured. In fact, it becomes even more human. His recollections are marked less by political absolutism than by tenderness, memory, and a continuing moral relationship with the land and its people.
Recalling a later visit to Kanikadal, he writes affectionately of how local Muslims “would not leave me unless I went to their homes, had tea and asked about all my cousins who used to live there” (p. 116). He further notes that 'many ordinary Kashmiri Muslims believed Governor Jagmohan had facilitated the Pandit departure so that security forces could act ruthlessly against the Muslim majority, while simultaneously not ignoring the targeted killings of Pandits that generated fear and accelerated the exodus' (ibid.).
Whether one agrees fully with those perceptions or not, their presence within a Pandit memoir itself reveals the layered complexity of memory in Kashmir. History rarely survives in binaries alone.
Equally significant is the moral balance that runs through Dr Kaul’s narrative. He refuses to allow memory to descend into the comfort of one-sided grief. The suffering of Kashmiri Muslims receives the same humane, compassionate, and dignified attention as that of the Pandits. In doing so, he restores balance to a fractured narrative and reminds the reader that suffering in Kashmir was never the monopoly of any single community. That moral generosity gives his memoir a rare emotional depth and intellectual honesty.
Equally striking is Dr Kaul’s account of his continued service to ordinary Kashmiris irrespective of religion or politics. Even after displacement, he helped many young Pandit migrants secure livelihoods and professional opportunities, some eventually rising to prominent corporate positions (p. 113). Yet what touches the reader most deeply is his account of treating a poor Kashmiri Muslim patient and personally spending money to ensure the patient received medical care. The patient later returned the amount Dr Kaul had spent, but the episode transcends money altogether. It reveals a moral universe in which compassion survived even when society itself had fractured (p. 112).
Those passages are profoundly moving precisely because they rise above the vocabulary of bitterness and permanent estrangement. Even after displacement, Dr Kaul’s relationship with Kashmir was not framed through civilizational rupture but through memory, ethical responsibility, and an enduring human connection with people left behind. One comes away from those pages not with anger alone, but with tears.
Disagreement Turned into Moral Accusation
Classically, exile implied enforced separation from homeland accompanied by political expulsion or statelessness — from Dante and Ovid to Faiz and Edward Said. The displacement of Kashmiri Pandits was undoubtedly traumatic and unconscionable. Families lost homes, neighbourhoods, livelihoods, and centuries-old emotional anchors. Yet it also remained displacement within the same nation-state.
The Indian state, Parliament, courts, and public institutions addressed it as internal displacement through relief camps, rehabilitation schemes, employment packages, and return policies. To recognise that distinction is not to reduce suffering. It is to place it within a framework of accountability and remedy.
Pain does not become greater or lesser because of vocabulary. Tragedy does not need rhetorical enlargement to become morally legitimate. Ironically, the rebuttal itself demonstrates the very concern I had raised by transforming a disagreement over terminology into a moral accusation, as though debating a word amounts to insulting human dignity. But dignity cannot depend upon one sanctioned expression. Grief remains real irrespective of vocabulary.
Nor did my article seek to monopolise memory. On the contrary, it argued against monopoly. Memory in Kashmir has never remained private. It enters manifestos, speeches, commemorations, textbooks, courtrooms, and political claims. Once memory enters the public sphere, it inevitably invites examination. That examination is not meant to silence grief but to test narratives against the historical record.
Questions about whether Jagmohan’s administration facilitated departure, whether mosque slogans emerged from centralised direction or local opportunism, whether the collapse of governance deepened panic, or whether Kashmiri Muslims themselves also faced killings, crackdowns, disappearances, torture, and prolonged militarisation during the same years are not attempts to dilute Pandit suffering. They are attempts to complete the historical picture.
Kashmir’s tragedy did not belong to one community alone, even though each community experienced it differently. Kashmiri Pandits suffered displacement and the loss of homeland. Kashmiri Muslims endured killings, crackdowns, torture, custodial disappearances, fear, and prolonged militarisation. Sikhs faced massacres such as Chattisinghpora.
Even ordinary labourers from Machil, associated with the army as porters and helpers, were later identified as civilians after being killed in what became a deeply controversial episode. Likewise, memories of Kunan Poshpora, allegations of sexual violence, enforced disappearances, the enduring pain of the “half widows” whose husbands never returned, and the discovery of unidentified graves in different parts of Kashmir continue to shape the region’s collective memory and troubled history.
No Narrative can be Monopolised
Families across regions carried grief in different forms and in different languages. To acknowledge this wider landscape does not erase the distinct pain of Pandits. It restores the fractured image of a society where suffering had many addresses.
The danger arises when one narrative claims exclusive moral authority and treats every question as betrayal. The moment that happens, history ceases to be inquiry and becomes doctrine. Democracies survive not by sanctifying one vocabulary and outlawing all others, but by allowing difficult conversations to remain open.
What Kashmir requires today is not competing martyrdoms shouting across barricades of memory. It requires the moral courage to see suffering without monopolising it, to question language without muting grief, and to seek truth without converting scholarship into ideological warfare. Complexity is not confusion. It is often the only honest response to history.
A writer’s task is not to inflame inherited wounds or deepen inherited divisions. The pen loses its moral purpose the moment it becomes an instrument of vengeance or propaganda. Its duty is not to weaponise memory, but to illuminate it. A pen should function as a lamp — casting honest, nuanced, compassionate light into the darker recesses of history, fear, prejudice, and resentment. Kashmir has already bled enough from guns. It should not continue to bleed from words.
Only through such engagement — uncomfortable, imperfect, but truthful — can memory move beyond accusation and history move beyond slogans. Only then can return become more than rhetoric, and reconciliation more than a ceremonial word.
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