Between the Great Divide

by Anam Zakaria

  Unlike the rest of Kashmir, this area shows signs of economic growth due to the remittances that flow in from Kashmiri expatriates. Billboards for designer lawns, signage of Mobilink—one of the largest telecommunication providers in Pakistan—and centres to teach English dot the surroundings. It is estimated that 70 per cent of the total ‘Pakistani’ population in the UK is of Kashmiri descent, the majority being from Mirpur and Kotli.26 Migration from Mirpur began towards the end of the eighteenth century, ‘when many Mirpuri boatmakers who depended on the water transport from Jhelum to Lahore Bandhar became unemployed following the introduction of rail by the British in the late 1860s… many of the unemployed Kashmiris from Mirpur went to the British Indian cities and found work in coal rooms of Merchant Navy ships which were upgraded from sailing to steam and needed stokers to work in a temperature of over 70 degrees. By the 1950s, the process of labour migration from Mirpur had grown into what sociologists call “chain migration” and thousands of Kashmiris, mainly from Mirpur district, were already settled in Britain. The (Mangla) dam building in Mirpur and the introduction of new immigration laws in Britain certainly accelerated the process. The number of migrants from Mirpur increased further through the 1970s, when families of the workers started coming in followed by “transnational” marriages through the 1980s and arrival of “Bays” and “Bavas” (elders) through the 1990s. (Based on the 2011 census) the Kashmiri population in Britain is estimated at about 700,000. Almost 99 per cent of these Kashmiris have their roots in the Mirpur division of Kashmir.’27

  Prior to the trip, in an attempt to learn more about the region, I had reached out to the Italian researcher and academic, Marta Bolognani, who has done extensive research on the expatriate Kashmiri community in Britain for over ten years. She told me that though the immigrants sent back a lot of money and often visited home in an attempt to stay connected to their roots, the Mirpuris (of which earlier Kotli was also a part) continue to battle negative stereotypes.

  ‘The Punjabis have always looked down upon them because the area does not really fall in Punjab and the Kashmiris have also always looked down upon them because they don’t share the rich cultural essence, the language, the traditions, that the rest of Kashmir does,’ Marta said to me over Skype, a few days prior to my trip. ‘The Kashmiris see them as Punjabis and the Punjabis see them as Kashmiris. They don’t fit in anywhere.’ This reminded me of a conversation with a Kashmiri from Indian-administered Kashmir who had scoffed at my attempt to write a book on ‘Azad’ Kashmir, telling me that the region was not really Kashmir at all, but rather Punjab. Prior to my research, I had been told by a number of friends in Indian-administered Kashmir that no one really spoke Koshur in ‘Azad’ Kashmir, that the language and culture had died. It is true that Koshur is only spoken by a minority in ‘Azad’ Kashmir. Several Kashmiris in Indian-administered Kashmir see being Kashmiri as being rooted in the language of the Valley, where the Koshur language has over time become synonymous with Kashmiri political identity.28 Holding language as the primary indicator of Kashmiriness, ‘Azad’ Kashmir then seems closer to Punjab than Kashmir, yet not fully Punjab either. The emphasis on Koshur is problematic because old and significant languages like Pahaari and Gojari are sidelined in the process. Anything that is not Koshur or Kashmiri gets lumped as Punjabi, diluting the richness of these indigenous languages. This is made even more complicated because even within the Kashmir Valley in Indian-administered Kashmir, many people speak Gojari and Pahaari rather than Koshur, just as people in Neelum Valley also speak Koshur alongside other languages. The Kashmiri identity, as explained in the preface, is today not just a linguistic identity but rather a political one, and people speaking distinct languages see themselves as Kashmiri rather than Punjabi. To reduce Kashmiri identity to a specific language is to deprive these people of an integral source of identity and belonging. Since the greatest majority of migrants (from ‘Pakistan’) in the UK consists of Mirpuris, it is no surprise that they have come to symbolize this marginalization of belonging and identity there.

  ‘Mirpur has always been considered backward in some way,’ Marta says. ‘Immigrants of Punjabi origin want to distance themselves from the Mirpuris, who still believe in marriages between cousins. This is because of the role baradari (kinship) plays in Mirpur. (‘Azad’ Kashmiris tell me that traditionally the baradari system has been a major source of social organization in the area.) It has an overarching influence and encourages marriage within the family. Many boys in the UK go back to marry Mirpuri girls. The baradari counts for more than anything else for them and this makes people think they are backward. Now, what is happening with the younger generations of migrants is that they are trying to move away from these traditions. They are trying to find justifications for not marrying within the baradari. And they turn towards Islam and the Quran to do this (that is, they turn to Islam to show that marriages outside the baradari are perfectly permissible). That has been one of the paths that has taken them closer to non-Sufi traditions of Islam. Theological study of Islam was what they could use to argue with their parents that they didn’t want to follow fatherly traditions and that they knew more about Islam and they knew what the Prophet would have done.’

  As Mirpuris turned away from indigenous culture, Kashmir began to hold lesser importance for them, says Marta. Rather, the Mirpuris clung on to the more universal interpretations of Islam. ‘While they still may feel very strongly about the independence of Kashmir and the Kashmir cause, they do so not as Kashmiris but more as members of the global Ummah, for whom Kashmir has got quite a unique place, like Palestine, when it comes to the oppression of Muslims in the world.’

  When I asked her if young boys from Mirpur and Kotli also joined the mujahideen in the 1990s to free Kashmir from Indian control, she told me that this hadn’t been the focus area of her research so she could not be certain of how prevalent the jihad sentiment was in the region. From her own work in and out of Mirpur, she could only share one such incident. ‘I was in Mirpur when a colleague pointed towards a boy playing cricket. He told me he had gone to a training camp but the mujahids there had told him he couldn’t play cricket anymore because it was a colonial game. He told them to fuck off and came back. He said giving up cricket wasn’t worth the cause.’

  I also hear that it is difficult to infiltrate Indian-administered Kashmir from this region because across the LoC is Jammu, which has a large Hindu population, unsympathetic to the militants’ cause. Therefore, it does not make sense for militant organizations to operate extensively from here or to try to recruit boys with the same zest as they do elsewhere in Kashmir. Furthermore, since this part of J&K was not as badly affected by the 2005 earthquake, the scope for organizations to set up here on the pretext of providing relief has been limited as well. Locals tell me the Jamaat-ud-Dawa does not have as much presence in the area as it does elsewhere in ‘Azad’ Kashmir.

  It is interesting to note that although ‘it is estimated that 70 per cent of the total Pakistani population in the UK is of Kashmiri origin’,29 in the 2001 census in the UK, only 22,000 people defined themselves as Kashmiri,30 even though unofficial estimates state that 500,000-700,000 persons of Kashmiri origin reside in the UK, the majority from Mirpur and Kotli. Marta said that many of these immigrants continued to refer to themselves as Pakistanis. Though the Kashmiri identity can pop up in odd places like the ‘Kashmir Curry House’, or ‘Kashmir Shawl House’ across Britain, as time passes by, less and less importance is given to Kashmir.31

  ‘Any grievances that they have with Pakistan are mostly in terms of practical matters, not political. For instance, Mirpuris have been asking the Pakistani government to build an airport in Mirpur because so many of them travel back and forth. Pakistan doesn’t want to do this because it would give too much power to Mirpur and take away business from Islamabad, where Mirpuris currently land. But other than that, they really have had to cling to the global Ummah identity… not necessarily militant Islam but a kind of a Salafi
movement, which goes against their grain as traditionally Mirpur has been a Sufi territory.’ Three Mirpuris are alleged to have been involved in the London bombings of 2005, waging a jihad against the West.32

  I reach out to Shams Rehman again, who hails from Mirpur, to further my understanding and explore how he, as a Mirpuri, views the situation. He tells me that the reason a lot of Mirpuris identify as Pakistanis is because of the conditions they had arrived in. ‘Most of the people who migrated to Britain were from the rural areas and had little or no experience of living in a city… they were economically deprived, seeking jobs and better incomes in the UK. These people became whatever people asked them to become because they wanted work, they wanted money, they wanted to live here in Britain. They were uneducated, they didn’t know how the system worked. In fact, many of them still don’t know how it works. They didn’t see the importance of asserting their Kashmiri identity or Pahaari-Pothwari language because when they arrived, the British officials said, You are Pakistani because you are using a Pakistani passport. And they said, Yes, that is fine… make us Pakistani but give us work. They didn’t have any issue with whether they were called Pakistanis or Indians or British as long as they got work. Then when they were told that the language they spoke was Punjabi (given the similarities in the Punjabi and the Pahaari-Pothwari languages), they said, Okay, that’s fine too. It was later on, when people really asked them, What is your language? that they said, It’s not really Punjabi, it is Pothwari.’

  Shams tells me that when he first arrived in the UK in 1988, he was surprised to see the attitude of his uncles, cousins and grandparents who were already settled there. ‘I asked myself, What are they doing? Why are they feeling so inferior about their identity and their language? I was shocked to see them behave like that. You won’t believe it but I started to observe that if there were ten Mirpuris in a room speaking their own language—the Pahaari-Pothwari language—and one Punjabi entered the room and started to speak in Punjabi, all ten Mirpuris would try to speak Punjabi. And obviously, not all of them could speak it fluently, so when the Punjabi left, they would poke fun at each other and say, Haw, you can’t speak it properly. And there I was, sitting there thinking, why can’t that one Punjabi speak Pahaari if he needs to communicate with these people? Why is it that they have to change their language in order to fit in? But it was reflective of the hegemonic relationship… the politically unequal relationship between the Pakistanis and the Kashmiris. It is expressed in every aspect. And so, when people doing the census ask them if they are Pakistani, they continue to say yes… it is then the job of researchers to look at how their reality has been constructed. What has gone into them feeling so subjugated, feeling like they can’t assert their own identity…’

  Shams explained that one of the reasons some Mirpuris had got involved in hardline Islam also had to do with their marginalized status in Britain. ‘The Sufi saint Mian Muhammad Baksh was from Mirpur and his book, Saif ul Malook, is one of the most read books. So Sufi Islam and Sufi culture were always predominant in the region, with small pockets of Wahabi Islam… for instance, where I come from, Akalgarh—now known as Islamgarh—there was some Wahabi influence, but largely it was a Sufi place. When Mirpuris moved to Britain, however, since most of them were from economically poor, rural areas, they were over-represented in textile mills and other factories, and they started living in inner city areas, which were closer to their workplace. Here they became even more marginalized because of their socio-economic status and because they were cut off from the major towns and cities. In a sense they were ghettoized. When there was a global Islamic fundamentalist upsurge, which I believe was around the time that Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was published,33 there was major mobilization among the extremist mullahs in Britain. And since every fourth Muslim in Britain is a Mirpuri and every second or third Pakistani in Britain is a Mirpuri, they became the main kind of customer base of any ideas, political or religious. It is not that all of them were fanatical Muslims. It was mostly the third-generation migrants who got attracted to this rising political Islam, thinking that Muslims were being suppressed by Western powers and that they needed to do something about it. They linked it to their marginal economic status… the fact that they lived in the back alleys, in impoverished conditions. Of course, this was the general sentiment among the Muslim community at this time as well but because Mirpuris are so large in number in Britain, they became predominant in the movement.’

  Rising global fundamentalism may have had its impact on some Mirpuris as it has in other places around Pakistan and the world. Glorifications of self-proclaimed ghazis (holy warriors) like Mumtaz Qadri perhaps arise out of that. However, I am also reminded of another incidence of violence motivated by religion in the region. The ‘tribal’ raids of 1947 resulted in a massacre in Mirpur, a massacre nowhere acknowledged in the mainstream state narratives of Pakistan.

  Bal K. Gupta, survivor of the attacks and author of Forgotten Atrocities: Memoirs of a Survivor of the 1947 Partition of India, writes about the fall of Mirpur to the Pakistan Army and the ‘tribesman’ and of the massacre of Hindu and Sikh prisoners in Akalgarh, Kas Guma, Mirpur courthouse, Mirpur riverbed, Mirpur city and Alibeg. According to Gupta, Alibeg prison was originally a Sikh gurdwara, converted into a prison for the Hindus and Sikhs of Mirpur.34 Though I checked most of the major Pakistani bookstores, I couldn’t find the book. I assume that it has purposefully been made unavailable. However, I managed to extract the following from his memoirs: ‘As a ten-year-old child I, along with 5,000 Hindus and Sikhs, was held prisoner in the Alibeg prison. On 16 March 1948, only about 1,600 prisoners walked out from Alibeg alive. I was one of them.’ Gupta goes on to write that in November 1947, there were nearly 25,000 Hindus and Sikhs living in Mirpur. During the city’s capture, close to 2,500 were killed in the infernos that erupted due to Pakistani artillery fire, while another 2,500 escaped with the retreating Jammu and Kashmir army. The remaining 20,000, he writes, were marched in a procession towards Alibeg. ‘Along the way, Pakistani troops and Pathans killed about 10,000 of the captured Hindu and Sikh men and kidnapped over 5,000 women. The 5,000 Hindus and Sikhs who survived the 20-mile trek to Alibeg were imprisoned. In March 1948, the Red Cross rescued 1,600 of the survivors from Alibeg. Between 1948 and 1954, around 1,000 abducted Hindu and Sikh women were recovered from Pakistan and Azad Kashmir.’35

  In Jammu in Indian-administered Kashmir, where many Hindu and Sikh survivors later settled, there is a road called Mirpur Road and a memorial. They serve as a testimony to all those who lost their lives, families and homes in the communal violence that followed Partition.

  ***

  We have made no arrangements for our overnight stay on this trip. Sharjeel is confident that we will find space in one of the local hotels. He has heard there is a private guesthouse on top of a hill and asks us to drive upward until we arrive at a rundown building. The property turns out to be deserted; the paint is crumbling and there is not a single person visible in the vicinity. We are stretching our legs after the long drive when we hear a door squeak open. A middle-aged man walks out. We tell him we are looking for a room and I can see his face crumple in discomfort. ‘No one really comes here to stay anymore,’ he says in Urdu. Situated close to the LoC, the guesthouse gets shelled frequently, and has been abandoned by locals and tourists. He says we are welcome to stay but that there is no running water. Deciding to stay at the government guesthouse in the city below instead, Sharjeel says he wants to offer his prayers before we head out.

  As Haroon and I wait for him to return, we strike up a conversation with the keeper of the guesthouse. I tell him that I have heard that unlike in Neelum Valley, firing continues year after year in this region. He nods and tells us that the mountains behind the guesthouse serve as the LoC. ‘When firing happens, the mortars reach till here. Last year we had a wedding planned in the lawn but the family had to cancel at the last minute because of the firing.’

  I learn
from him that firing particularly takes place in the month of August. As India and Pakistan celebrate their respective Independence Days, the region is often riddled with mortars across parts of the LoC. Some people believe this is Indian reaction to Kashmiris reportedly hoisting Pakistani flags in parts of Indian-administered Kashmir.36 Wanting to crush any pro-Pakistan sentiment in the Valley, Indian forces send a strong message across the Line of Control, cautioning Pakistan to stay out of its business. Others like the guesthouse keeper tell me it has more to do with August being the grass-cutting season. ‘A lot of people cross over by mistake while they are cutting grass near the LoC. Others go on purpose. The mujahideen also cross over during this season, hiding under the long grass before it is cut. The Indian forces fire to either attack these mujahideen or pre-empt them from crossing over.’