Jana Gund- Legendary Woman Rebel of Kashmir

Nostalgia

Women in Resistance

By

ZGM

Sue Monk Kidd, American novelist, and memoirist have said it and said it rightly, “Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”  The stories that came to us from our forefathers through oral tradition made our generation conscious about the primacy of our identity and sense of belonging to our land- gave us “a feeling and recognition” of ‘we’ and ‘they.’

Every one of us has a story to tell about the resistance and culture of our land- these stories need to be told in written word or passed on to generation next through oral tradition. For the “hegemonic discourse” grabbing every inch of public space lots of stories about the men and women in the forefront of the resistance movement were never told. I was reminded of this the other day when a young journalist doing a story on the ongoing girl student protests enquired from me if women in Kashmir at any point in time in the past have been part of the resistance movement. Instantaneously, images after images of women in the forefront of the resistance movement – overwhelmingly from the have-not’s families started appearing on the back of my eyes.

In a throttling atmosphere, as had been obtaining before the birth of children in my generation and chokingly permeated during our childhood, I remember, it were our mothers and grandmothers who like  Caribbean slave women resorted to folk dance rouf  and singing for venting out  resistance  and ‘offer up prayers to the God.’ They would get together after being free from their routine domestic chore – cooking etc. in one or other compound or an open space in our Mohalla. Through their songs, they not only lamented the continuation of the serfdom, incarceration of their husbands and children but also sought God’s intervention for ending the tyrannical rule. Moreover, they subtly perpetuated and passed on the narrative to our generation. Nonetheless, lots of women in a generation before us not only joined the men in the movement but also led it. One of my grandmother’s friend Saja Appa, a great devout of Mirwaiz Molvi Muhammad Yousuf Shah during our childhood invariably visited our house on the way to the Jamia Masjid. She had lots of stories to tell about the women volunteers. One, of the story that still lives in memory, is of Jana Gund a Muslim Conference volunteer- perhaps for being a daredevil, the “elite” of the society had nicknamed her as Gund.   Somewhere in the late thirties, when   Mirwaiz Yousuf Sahib and some other Muslim conference leaders were arrested, she all alone had brought the then main commercial hub of Srinagar- Zaina Kadal and Maharaj-Gunj to a grinding halt and stirred massive protests.  Some parts of the story have faded from my memory– as I remember the intensity of the protests had made the Dogra administration to release the Mirwaiz without further ado.

She was not the only lioness, who dared the mighty but there were many of them like Zoona and Raja whose names still survive in the familiar narrative. I remember having seen some of them as a young child at the Hazratbal mosque actively guiding the women. In 1964, during the holy relic movement and 1965 agitation, I remembered having seen some of them with black ribbons tied to their heads and black flags in their hands leading the massive protest rallies in the city and raising slogans. The rubicund face of a robust middle-aged women volunteer from Khanyar has got etched in my memory. In raising slogans, she outsmarted some legendary sloganeers with great lung power like Rehman Sodagar.  She lived hardly at a distance of half a mile from our home. On Fridays, I would often spot her at the Jamia Masjid disciplining children and women at prayer time. In 1965, I saw her leading the large women protest rallies against the arrest of the Awami Action leader, Mirwaiz Molvi Mohammad Farooq.

Published in Greater Kashmir on 7-5- 2017