We Have A Story- Do You Know?

Dreaming Lit-Festival
Z. G. Muhammad

The literary festivals are a meeting of great minds. These are platforms for an open dialogue. When I am pushing my fingers on the keypad to write this column the Beach Luxury Hotel, in Karachi is abuzz with literary activities. The Karachi Literary Festival (KLF) produced by Oxford University Press (OUP) and directed by Ameena Saiyid launched in 2010 has been a story of grand success. Leading writers from Pakistan and different parts of the world have been every year participating in this festival. Each year there is a good participation from India also. From India writers of eminence like Rajmohan Gandhi, Nayantara Sahagal, Shamasur Rahman Faruqi and William Dalrymple have participated in this festival. Two Kashmiri writers Mirza Waheed and Bashrat Peer also have had the opportunity to be part of the KLF. This year also, there is a session on Kashmir in the festival titled Kashmir: The Never-ending Conflict with Mirza Waheed, Barkha Dutt, Jean-Luc Racine and Rafique Kathwari as participants.
For past six years, lovers of literature and bibliophiles across the globe have been passionately following these festivals. The main objective behind such festivals is to promote reading, writing and create an interface between authors and readers. Moreover to enrich the minds of the people. For the first time, the festival ran into a controversy, when a Shimla-born Bollywood actor, Anupam Kheer, one of the invitees to the literary festival created a hullabaloo over Pakistan High Commission in India not issuing him a visa – it is now beyond doubt he had not submitted his documents for stamping a visa. For making some brownie points in Hindutva camp, he generated a media hype about imaginary denial of visa. Interestingly, attributed some documentary on Kashmir that he has produced for denial of his visa. Perhaps he does not know that Kashmiri care too hoots for such so-called documentaries.
The media hype on the denial of visa to the Bollywood actor, who of late has turned darling of some fanatic television anchors for his bashing of Kashmiri Muslims brought the Karachi Literary Festival under spotlight in India. The television anchors in their overzealousness connected the literary festival to the Kashmir Dispute- as if the acronym KLF stood for Kashmir Literary Festival. The habitual Kashmir bashers on the corporate television channels once again reminded me of a famous couplet of Palestine Poet Mahmud Darwish, “He who writes his story inherits the land of that Story.”
A lot of our young generation, witness to scores of ghastly dramas enacted in the city centers, on their school compounds, in sleepy villages and humble hamlets in the dense forest have started telling their stories- the stories of pain, agony, and suppression lucidly in Kashmiri, Urdu, and English. ‘The uniqueness of the personal narratives is that they are history told by people who have experienced it, not by historian years later.’ These individual stories with ordinary persons as protagonists of the heroic struggles or macabre tales make the national narratives. It is the sacredness of these narratives that have steered the nations out of the whirlpools of despondency. Some weeks earlier at a short story session organized by a fiction writer’s group; I was convinced that the day was not far of when our boys and girls will tell the world their stories and stir the minds of the global leaders and shake the conscience of the nations. The writings of our young writers like the five young women who after working hard have come up with a book on the mass rape in Kunan-Poshpora Villages of Kupwara Published by Zubaan Publications are certainly going to prick the conscience of some genuine intellectuals in India. Notwithstanding, skepticism the day does not seem to be far of when Kashmir will find people like Jean-Paul Sartre, or poets like Robert Bly and David Ray in New Delhi squatting outside the Parliament demanding a resolution for Jammu and Kashmir, like the Évian Accords’.
Sitting for the day with the group of fiction writers, emancipated in as much as linguistic chauvinism as promoted by the government as a part of the dominant discourse is concerned, I started dreaming of an International Kashmir Literary Festival on the lawns of the Shalimar Garden. That couple of years back had shot into international headlines for a musical concert by Zubin Mehta- with over a million people caged for enabling a hundred and odd government functionaries to enjoy the music. Dreaming of holding sessions under the canopies of the majestic Chinars, I remembered a host of eminent writers and historians from the West and India, who could be key speakers at our literary festival. True, the list of writers and historians from Europe and America, who have been honest to our narrative during past sixty-seven years is quite long. Nonetheless, some names have become part Kashmir’s collective memory. These include: Stanley Wolpert, author of ‘Shameful Flight- the Last Years of British Empire in India’; Victoria Schofield, of ‘ Kashmir in Conflict’; Christopher Snedden, of ‘Kashmir The Unwritten History’; Sumantra Bose, of ‘Kashmir Roots of Conflict; A.G. Noorani of The Kashmir Dispute and great photographer Martin Sugarman for his memorable ‘Kashmir: Paradise Lost.’
A caustic and satirical editorial in an Islamabad English daily on Saturday about Pakistan observing February 5, as solidarity day with Kashmir on Saturday subtly delegitimizing the Kashmir cause made me think of holding a session between a group of Pakistan journalist and a group of Indian writers. A group of ten Pakistani journalists that was in the spotlight in 2012 for bribery including Hassan Nisar and Najam Sethi has been breathlessly advocating status quo for Kashmir. This group in session with Arundhati Roy, Gautam Navlakha, Swaminathan Aiyar and a couple of others would not only be an intellectual feast but would also testify that Kashmir narrative cannot die because of few ‘status quoists’ – it will continue to pulsate robustly.
To tell our story some day, we will hold our KLF.