SURVIVAL OF KASHMIRI PANDITS – WHAT WE THINK AND WHAT OTHERS THINK ABOUT US
19TH January – A Holocaust Day
Our community, the community of Kashmiri Pandits, is a unique community because we are the only community that celebrates the birthday twice in a year – one as per our lunar calendar and the other as per solar calendar. The birthday based on lunar calender is variable and is decided by ‘ Janthri’ – every Kashmiri pundit’s household book. However, as the pandits got scattered and dispersed all across the globe, there may be few households lacking this Janthri and they might forget the due dates. But the one day that we can never forget in our lifetime is the Holocaust day of 19th January.
Survival of Kashmiri Pandits: What we think
Life is a struggle and everyone irrespective of gender, age, status, is striving for survival. The meaning of survival changes with time, priority, situations and circumstances. Similarly, for a kashmiri pandit community it has different meaning, different connotations and different interpretations depending upon the time frame and situation.
In 1990, when the mass exodus occurred, we not only left our palatial houses, our jobs but we also left our aspirations, our dreams, our places of worship and also our attire. It was a directionless mass movement with no defined and definite destination and the only goal was to survive with honour and dignity. There may be different view-points about our movement which happened that time, and some may say it was not a collective decision, we moved in bits and pieces, dint inform our close friends and relatives, so on and so forth. But we need to understand that the slogans like Raliv, Galiv and Tchaliv meaning either mix up, accept death or leave, created a fear psychosis and our parents/ grand parents, in their own capacity took the decision to leave and chose living the life. As it was a struggle for survival between life and death, an individualistic approach of leaving the valley was probably appropriate. The survival wasn’t easy and in fact the real struggle for survival started after migration. However, against all odds, the battle was won and the crux remains that we survived.
As now we have won the battle, why are we discussing about our survival yet again?
There are two main reasons for this:
The first and foremost reason is that even after a gap of 32 years of our being in exile, things have not changed for us at all. The targeted killing of our brethren who have been working under the PM package in valley recalled our past and the bad memories of past started to haunt us again. A good and a significant section of people of our community who are working there are again struggling for survival. Although this is a struggle for survival between death and duty and not between death and life, yet it is a struggle for survival again.
The other reason why we are discussing it yet again is that by now we have realised that our strength is not in our individual achievements, individual accomplishments and /or individual procurements. But our strength is in the two words, ‘Kashmiri’ and ‘Pandits’ used in our prefix irrespective of our surnames. Over the years, we have started sensing now that there is a marked dilution in the usage of these two words. The dilution of word Kashmiri may or may not bother us but the dilution of word Pandit is an alarming sign and hints towards the beginning of end of our lineage and heritage. Most often nowadays the word Kashmiri Pandit is being replaced by Kashmiri Hindu. All pandits are Hindus but all Hindus are not Pandits as all Sikhs are Punjabis but all Punjabis are not Sikhs. If it goes like this, time is not far when our culture will be merged amongst the hindus of other faiths in north India and our mention will get limited to literature n history only. So this time, after three decades of exodus, if we are talking about survival, we are neither talking about struggle for survival between life and death nor between death and duty but actually we are talking about the struggle for survival between us and our identity.
What Others Think
What others think matter to us equally as what we think about ourselves.
At the time when we left the valley and rushed to this place, despite the demography not being in favour, we were accomodated by Dogras and we need to be thankful to them. Our students were helped by various organisations like Shiv Sena and others securing their future.
Despite the atrocities we faced, we were not able to project ourselves and this was the reason that we were addressed as being cowards – the ones who cant fight back, by some section of society. But let me tell you, we all forgot the fact that we were only 2 percent and got bitten by the snakes and the real fighters do not run after snakes to bite them back, but they stay strong and in the process of their growth also pull others up as well, be that a critic or a well-wisher.
The perspective with which the outer world looks at us and our community has changed because of an awareness on social media. The movie ‘TKF’, a box office hit, a blockbuster with 300 crore plus collection and now shortlisted for Oscars too, all favourable parameters of success, projected our plight. But for a KP it was an emotion that was screened in a broad daylight and the parameter of success shouldn’t have been the routine parameters. The parameters of success should have been based on the reopening of number of cases of atrocities, visit of human right activists and NGOs to the camps highlighting the poor plight of KPs living there, a visit from an art and culture department for more such kind of documentaries and more importantly the political will to provide justice to the sufferers.
Not only this, even abrogation of article 370 and 35a, which was hailed by the major section of our community and is considered as a step stone for our cause hasn’t given the dividends yet, may be a too premature to comment right now. The reduction of state to union territory has nullified the value of our state subject, the document that was the only link between us and our homeland and the proof of our identity.
In addition, there are number of examples of how an outer world looks at us. Many are of the opinion that by moving out from homeland provided us with innumerable opportunities and we have got hold all across the globe. But they forget the fact that we have achieved all this at the cost of dilution of our language and culture.
To conclude, my dear friends, I again come to my starting point that Life is a struggle and we are not an exception. But our struggle is different. Our struggle is not only for survival now but it is for the safeguard of our language, our culture and more importantly our existence. We are the community with wandering roots or in other words we are a rootless community that lacks one single close knitted place. It is a high time to think about it and we all need to come together irrespective of our political and social affiliations, sit across the table and come up with a common minimum programme that benefits the community at large. We need to talk liberally in our own language, make libraries and museums, celebrate our festivals, cherish our rituals, promote our culture through art and literature and feel proud of being descendants of our lineage. An icing on the cake will be to fight for a homeland. But we need to be very particular about this and not rush for it as in Ramayana also, our deity lord Ram after being in exile for 14 years, returned back to his homeland and got everything one can dream of, but at the cost of losing his peace as he had to put Mata Sita on ordeal and had to fight in a battle field against his own sons.
Dr. Pawan Suri
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