Incarnations

by Sunil Khilnani

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  Kapoor’s last film, Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), is known today mainly for a scene in which the heroine’s thin white sari is drenched under a waterfall: a moment of such transparent eroticism that nobody but Kapoor could have got away with it. By 1985, says Rachel Dwyer, a professor at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, he “was such an establishment figure that he could set the norm.”

  There’s political commentary as well as titillation, of course: for instance, a secret plot between an industrialist and a politician to build a factory whose effluent will contaminate Calcutta’s Hooghly River, a channel of the holy Ganga. While the corrupt are duly vanquished in the end, to watch that final film is to be reminded that, as associated as Kapoor came to be, retrospectively, with Nehru’s project, none of his work demonstrated faith in politicians.

  Perhaps the best expression of Kapoor’s political skepticism comes in Shree 420, when the tramp hero comes to a Bombay maidan to hawk sand he hopes to pass off as toothpaste. Crowds have gathered to hear a politician promise his listeners the world. Kapoor’s seller convinces the crowd that the politician is also a salesman, but with a product of lesser value. Toothpaste, he argues charmingly, will change your life more than hot air. As ever, Kapoor’s sentimental hope lies in individuals, not institutions. That his heroes weren’t bureaucrats deciding how many tractors to make helped give the filmmaker a worldwide reach he’d never imagined.

  Awara opened in the USSR in 1954, the year after Stalin’s death. Under the so-called Khrushchev thaw, there was suddenly new freedom in media and the arts. In that year alone, a stunning sixty-four million people, mainly young people, are estimated to have bought tickets to Awara. “Kapoor-mania,” as it was called in the USSR, became even more frantic with Shree 420 the next year. Soviets didn’t require Marxist solutions in their films; there was plenty of that on the state-run radio. They celebrated the songs, which became ubiquitous on the airwaves, and bought postcards with Raj’s image (cult collector’s items to this day). They made the young hero who pursued his desires against social traditions their own.

  On Nehru’s first prime ministerial visit to Russia, in 1955, the crowds who turned out to see him shouted out to the Indian leader: “Awara hoon!”—“I am a vagabond!” There would soon be many more enthusiastic young vagabonds, in East Africa, Romania, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iran, the Middle East, and China—even Chairman Mao was a Raj Kapoor fan. In Turkey, where Awara was made into a popular television show, the song “Awara Hoon” still matters enough that there’s a hip-hop version.

  Still, the legacy of Kapoor is strongest in India, and literal: he created a dynasty. Both his brothers became actors, as did all three of his sons, two successfully. His granddaughters Karishma and Kareena became major screen heroines, and his grandson Ranbir Kapoor, a celebrity, acted in Yeh Jawani Hai Dewani (“This Youth Is Crazy”) (2013), one of the highest-grossing Bollywood films of all time. It’s a silly film, but it stands out from the action pics and science fiction dominating the top-ten list because what doesn’t feel silly is the love story. Politics may have leached out of the Kapoor bloodline—at least as seen on the screen—but the deft command of romance endures.

  43

  SHEIKH ABDULLAH

  Chains of Gold

  1905–1982

  Should you ever get it into your head to publish, in India, a map of the country’s external boundaries that includes its northernmost state, the vast mountainous territory of Jammu and Kashmir, wedged between China and Pakistan, you’d better prepare to suspend disbelief. Approval will require, in addition to a “scrutiny fee” of Rs 2450, ratification by the Survey of India’s Boundary Verification Wing, a branch of the Indian government that specializes in geographical fantasy. It only approves maps that show India in possession of the whole of Jammu and Kashmir—something that, since the state’s accession to India in October 1947, has never been true. At that time, large parts of Jammu and Kashmir came under the forcible control of Pakistan, which continues to hold them. China, too, controls a substantial chunk, which it captured in its 1962 war with India. That leaves India with less than half of what the official maps claim. It’s an almost comical delusion, but one that bears witness to a contested history and to the fragilities of India’s self-image as a democratic nation.

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  That embattled history took a crucial turn in the waning years of British India, when a powerful Muslim movement emerged to challenge the despotic Hindu dynasty, the Dogras, that ruled British India’s biggest princely state. Leading the campaign was an idealistic forty-year-old from a family of shawl makers who, as a boy, had been given darning tools instead of a pen. He had fought his family to get to a school; then he fought his teachers to get to a better one, and eventually secured a university degree in science. Then, in 1946, he launched the largest popular agitation ever seen in his part of the world.

  “We Kashmiris want to inscribe our own destiny,” Mohammad Abdullah said, as tens of thousands of people from the kingdom’s Muslim majority took to the streets of the capital, Srinagar. They called on both the Dogra maharaja and his British advisers to “Quit Kashmir.”

  The maharaja did what he usually did to his challengers, and locked them up. But Abdullah took consolation in the knowledge that a powerful friend in Delhi might come to his aid. Jawaharlal Nehru was at that moment negotiating delicately with both the British and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (39) over India’s future, but on learning of Abdullah’s imprisonment, he rushed north to defend him—only to be detained by Dogra forces himself. It was the first act of a political drama about two freedom fighters that is still in search of an ending.

  By the following year, princes across India had come to realize that summary incarcerations of their subjects were of no use. As the Raj was dismantled, the rulers of all the princely states were forced to fold their tents and join one of the new post-Partition countries. In Kashmir, where the religion of the ruler differed from that of most of his subjects, that choice was not straightforward. The Dogra maharaja wavered over whether to join India or Pakistan, or to declare his own independence. Abdullah emerged from prison with a somewhat clearer view: though he believed that the poor Kashmiri Muslims he represented should rule themselves, he thought it best to trust, temporarily, in Nehru’s promise to build a democratic state in a multireligious nation. Once Kashmiris had an elected government, they could deliberate over what their future should be.

  This reasoned position didn’t account for the tribal fighters (an estimated five thousand to eight thousand of them) who poured into the Kashmir Valley from the newly created West Pakistan two months after Partition, intent on capturing the state for Jinnah. Abdullah and the maharaja now found themselves in agreement: Kashmir needed outside military help and would have to accede to India to get it. And so began the second act. A week and a half into the invasion, Abdullah scrawled a note to Nehru, now the Indian prime minister, on a scrap of paper: “If I am able to carry on, it is simply because of you.” Days later, Indian forces repulsed the attackers from the Kashmir Valley, though Pakistan would henceforth control most of the northern half of the state.

  There is a famous photo of the two friends hugging each other shortly after the invasion was over. The photo looks more sinister now than it probably felt then. To Abdullah, this moment was meant to be a reprieve that would allow those people still under his control to move toward self-determination. For Nehru, it was the moment when the ineffably beautiful Kashmir, land of his ancestors, permanently entered the fold of independent India as its single majority-Muslim state. In the third act, characterized by betrayal, violation, and recrimination, Abdullah would come to see his old friend’s embrace as a stranglehold.

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  To some Indians today, the Kashmir conflict feels like a long-running sideshow. In truth, it goes to the core of India’s foundational commitment to political liberty. Originally intended to be evidence of the country’s religious p
luralism, Kashmir is still part of India only because twenty of the state’s twenty-two districts are essentially under martial rule. Designated as “disturbed areas,” these districts are where insurgents are claimed to be actively fighting the Indian government. In 2015, human rights activists applauded when six Indian Army men were given life sentences by a military court for the illegal killings of three Kashmiris. It was an exception that proved a rule of government impunity. According to Amnesty International, “Not a single member of the security forces deployed in Jammu and Kashmir over the past 25 years has been tried for alleged human rights violations in a civilian court.” In short, the rulers of Kashmir today are not unlike the Dogras under whose boot Mohammad Abdullah grew up—a boot that shaped, and eventually hardened, his politics, just as the Indian government boot shapes and hardens the politics of young Kashmiris today.

  Abdullah was born in Srinagar as a burden: his mother was the third and junior wife of a man who died just before she went into labor. Dispossessed of their share of family property, Abdullah and his two elder brothers were expected to make the cheap cotton shawls on which their extended, devout family depended. But the young boy discovered he had a gift for reciting the Qur’an that allowed him to get out of darning. Eventually, it would help him see more of the world than his shabby corner of Srinagar.

  In the 1920s, after college in Lahore, Abdullah was admitted to the most prestigious place an Indian of his faith could go for a modern education: Aligarh Muslim University, in the United Provinces. There, hearing Iqbal (35), himself of Kashmiri origin, speak passionately about injustices against Muslims in Kashmir, he felt “transported into a strange world,” in earshot of the “trumpet of Israfel.” But returning to Kashmir in 1930, he felt the oppression of the Dogras afresh.

  Despite having a master’s degree in chemistry, Abdullah couldn’t get a government job: the Dogras had reserved most of these for Hindus. If recruits were scant in the small Pandit community in the Kashmir Valley, administrators brought in other Hindus, from the Punjab. Some educated Muslims got around that bias by sucking up to the Dogras and their officials, but Abdullah was repelled by the idea of ingratiating himself with them in order to secure a position for which he was already qualified. Instead, he settled on being a schoolteacher, and passed his evenings in reading clubs, with other educated young Kashmiris, building a political base.

  Bearded and in possession of a fine baritone voice, “Master Abdullah” by his midtwenties had become a popular orator, speaking on Fridays from the platform of Srinagar’s wooden Jamia Masjid. Telling the history of Kashmiri Muslim dispossession and demanding rights from the Hindu princely state, he sometimes spoke so movingly that people wept and tore their clothes. Yet it wasn’t until the Dogra slaughter of more than twenty protesters on July 13, 1931 (Martyrs’ Day, as it is now known), that a mass movement to defend the rights of Muslims truly began in Kashmir. It was, Abdullah later wrote, the Kashmiris’ Amritsar 1919 moment.

  As the Dogras responded with martial law, Abdullah became the leader of a newly formed movement, the Muslim Conference. Soon known as the Sher-e-Kashmir, or “Lion of Kashmir,” he successfully united the valley’s many sects and factions around the call of “Islam in Danger.”

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  It’s a truism of power to this day that the ability to organize people around a cause is a gift others will soon seek to co-opt. Jinnah, down in the plains, was following Abdullah’s resistance closely and assumed he would be a ready recruit to the growing Muslim League. Yet when the two men met in 1935, Jinnah’s more conservative views put off Abdullah, who was not just younger and less politic, but far more socially and economically progressive. As they ended their meeting, Jinnah warned him that Hindus could not be trusted, adding ominously, “A time will come when you will recall my words. But it will be too late then.”

  Abdullah left his first encounter with Nehru, a few years later, bowled over. Nehru, then at the peak of his career as a glamorous rebel nationalist, was leading a drive to attract more Muslims to the Congress movement. The burly Kashmiri with a popular touch was Nehru’s kind of Muslim: not so preoccupied with religion that he failed to be a spokesman for the social concerns of the poor. Nehru had been waiting, he told Abdullah, for someone to “awaken the Kashmiri people from their slumber.” Despite divergent class backgrounds, they developed such a warm friendship that soon Abdullah was hosting Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi (46), on her honeymoon. Only much later would a disillusioned Abdullah note bitterly that Nehru kept the Arthashastra, Kautilya’s (4) ruthless guide to realpolitik, “by his bedside.”

  Nehru believed the Lion’s charisma could draw others besides Kashmiri Muslims to the nationalist movement: constituencies such as Kashmiri Hindus and Sikhs. So he was heartened when, in 1938, Abdullah (beard now shaved) vexed the Muslim League by announcing he would turn his own Muslim Conference into a secular party. The following year, he launched the new All Jammu and Kashmir National Conference, and draped it in a notion of Kashmiri cultural and religious tolerance known as Kashmiriyat, which asserted that the Islam practiced in the valley was more syncretic than Islam elsewhere. It was a debatable construct, and the new conference remained primarily Muslim, but from it came, in 1944, a radical social and economic manifesto that would fundamentally change Kashmir.

  Srinagar during the 1940s was a haven for Indian and European Communists, and with their guidance, the conference called for women’s rights and a redistribution of land to the tiller. It also took a page from Stalin, envisaging distinct nationalities coming together to form a union like the USSR without losing the right to secede. To Abdullah, this offered an alternative to the divisiveness of Jinnah’s two-nation view and to the Congress’s one-nation acquisitiveness. After 1948, when, following Nehru’s military intervention, Abdullah took on the role of Kashmir’s prime minister, some of the manifesto’s ideals became law.

  His greatest achievement was to dismantle Kashmir’s system of landownership, which had served the interests of the Dogras until accession ended their rule. All holdings above twenty-three acres were abolished, without compensation to landlords, and land was redistributed to peasant cultivators, most of them poor Muslims. The reform massively expanded Abdullah’s loyal following and laid the basis for the emergence of a Kashmiri middle class. In place of the starvation, forced labor, and beggary that had been common under the Dogras, Abdullah created a largely egalitarian society. As the journalist and writer Basharat Peer points out, it was a revolutionary achievement in the context not just of India, but of South Asia (one matched only by Kerala, in the south). Yet amid post-Partition religious mistrust, that social transformation quickly took on communal overtones.

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  Around a third of the land in the valley was once owned by Kashmiri Pandits, who, in the late 1940s, formed just 5 percent of the population. It was this Hindu community that lost the most in the land reforms. Almost immediately, Hindu nationalists in Kashmir and across India began accusing Abdullah of the sort of systematic dispossession for which Kashmiri Muslims had once blamed the Dogras. That outrage, shared by leaders in New Delhi with Hindu sympathies, eventually fastened on the special autonomy that Abdullah had secured for his people in the country’s 1950 Constitution.

  Nehru saw that losing India’s only majority-Muslim state to Pakistan would tarnish his vision of India as a multireligious nation. So the autonomy given to Kashmiris, under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, was unique among Indian states. Kashmir’s elected assembly would now have greater legislative powers than other state assemblies, and would be able to decide for itself on what terms it wished to associate with India. The fury over these concessions increased exponentially in 1953, when the Hindu political leader Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, founder of the precursor to today’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), arrived in Kashmir to protest policies that restricted other Indians from settling in the state. Abdullah imprisoned him, and he died in his cell of a heart attack.

  T
he treatment of Mookerjee was not a one-off. As the state’s new leader, Abdullah had inherited many of the repressive powers of the Dogra rulers, and he used them to silence critics. Lacking the sort of political deal-making and negotiation experience that was part of the Congress culture in British India, he ran Kashmir as a one-party state. When elections were held in 1951 to form a Constituent Assembly for Kashmir, he permitted no opposition to his party—a pattern of antidemocratic rule Abdullah set, and that would long outlast him.

  Many Kashmiris might have tolerated Abdullah’s autocratic style had he been able to provide them with more of the autonomy so resented by the Hindu right. But Nehru dragged his feet on a promised plebiscite, fearing that independence or even Pakistan would be the Kashmiris’ choice. Abdullah’s efforts to give the people of Kashmir a say in their political future came to nothing. Meanwhile, the protagonists of the Cold War were trying to extend its theater to the subcontinent—a circumstance that would help to seal Abdullah’s fate.

  In May 1953 he had three meetings with U.S. senator Adlai Stevenson during an American fact-finding visit to India. Later, Stevenson acknowledged only hearing an earful of charges about conspiracies and bad faith, but Abdullah hinted that he had been promised American support should he decide to declare Kashmir independent. To Nehru’s intelligence officers, Abdullah was becoming seriously troublesome and “antinational”; before a popular uprising began, he’d have to be curbed.

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  Late in life, Abdullah recalled a moment during his negotiations with Nehru over Kashmir’s constitutional relationship with India. Leaning over, Nehru had whispered, “Sheikh Sahib, if you waver in embracing us, we will put gold chains in your neck [sic].” In August 1953, the chains were finally pulled tight.

  Unconstitutionally, Abdullah was stripped of his position as Kashmir’s prime minister and arrested; among the charges was “establishing foreign contacts of a kind dangerous to the prosperity of the state.” His Nehru-vetted replacement was a corrupt deputy who proved to have little support apart from that of the Indian Army. The “world has not seen a more glaring rape of democracy,” Abdullah later wrote to Nehru from prison.