{"id":3218,"date":"2017-09-11T07:44:02","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T02:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/?p=3218"},"modified":"2017-09-11T07:44:33","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T02:14:33","slug":"how-to-defeat-hegemonic-discourse-is-the-question","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/editors-take\/how-to-defeat-hegemonic-discourse-is-the-question\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Defeat “Hegemonic Discourse” Is The Question?"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/fb:like>

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Punchline<\/u><\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

A Word with A Bibliophile <\/u><\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n

By
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Z.G. Muhammad<\/span><\/h4>\n
\u00a0On the teacher\u2019s day, I had posted a picture of my school teachers on the Facebook.\u00a0 The post caused a phone call from a school time classmate, a surgeon who has returned to his native land after serving Arabs for thirty years- thus obviously not fully conversant with a harsh and seamy side of the contemporary political situation at his birth place. Starting with reminiscences of school days, hailing our teachers and their commitment towards students our long conversation tapered to the Kashmir Dispute, the political situation as has been obtaining in the state for past three months and the books on Kashmir. He informed me, that he had just finished reading \u2018Kashmir the Vajpayee Years\u2019 by one of India\u2019s spy master.<\/span><\/h5>\n
It was him trusting every word of the retired spymaster in the book\u00a0 as gospel truth \u00a0about the protagonists of the resistance movement \u00a0that intrigued me to think about the gullibility of not only common people but also \u2018thinking minds\u2019 in believing what Italian theorist and politician Antonio Gramsci has called as \u2018hegemonic discourse\u2019. \u00a0<\/span><\/h5>\n
In the bibliophile crowd of our society, my classmate is not an exception in failing to understand \u2018undertow\u2019 hegemonic discourse in such writings and books. \u00a0There are many others who are not only swayed by such books but also unintentionally to the disadvantage of the cherished cause of their people strengthen the hegemonic discourse by attaching credibility to such works. That after 1990\u2019s have been published in a plethora- some with official patronage and some by writers of a particular mindset. For, a common bibliophile, without striving hard and reading between the lines it is hard to draw a line of distinction between an honest work and those meant to subvert a historical political movement. To know, how works like the one that my friend believed as a biblical truth one needs to understand the phrase \u2018hegemonic or dominant discourse\u2019, its dynamics and how it corrodes and erodes the people\u2019s narratives and conjures alternative narratives and making gullible believe them.<\/span><\/h5>\n
It is those in power that create a \u2018dominant discourse\u2019. The powers that be repeat it viciously and vociferously from every available means of communication to them that it becomes the accepted way of looking at or speaking about the subject.\u00a0 \u2018The dominant discourse rarely includes \u2018the perspective of the Other- the non-power other holding Other\u2019. The powers that be, look for the collaborators from the same society for orchestrating the sweet sounding alternative discourses as the \u2018new normal\u2019. \u00a0But, for the willing partners from the same society, the \u201cdominant discourse\u201d can never succeed in conjuring alternative narratives, blurring, and distorting the people\u2019s narratives at domestic or international level.<\/span><\/h5>\n
In 1947, first Prime Ministers of India, Jawaharlal used the services of the then National Conference leaders for carrying forward New Delhi\u2019s \u201cdominant discourse\u201d in the state. Nehru in Delhi had warned Sheikh Abdullah not to think of going to Pakistan to meet Jinnah. \u201cAny direct contact should be avoided\u201d (SWJN2, 4 pp 318- 319). Nehru told Abdullah what he wrote to Sri Prakasa, his Commissioner in Pakistan that Kashmir will bankrupt Pakistan soon and it will crumble. Nehru also told him that he \u2018on no account wanted Kashmir to become a kind of colony of foreign interest, he feared Pakistan is likely to become that if it survives at all.\u2019 (SWJN 2, iv p 270-271)<\/span><\/h5>\n
Those conversant with Abdullah\u2019s speeches in 1948 to 1951 will be remembering it was this \u201cdominant discourse\u201d that was orchestrated by the National Conference from roof tops, Radio Kashmir, State Field Publicity Organization and fully controlled media. Nehru utilizing the services of some important Bombay based communist\u2019s writers had launched a pamphlet and poster war on the tiny population. Booklets, pamphlets, and posters in gaudy red color were published and glued to lamp posts. \u00a0An iron curtain was drawn against butchering of humanity in Jammu with the state immunity. Because of the then civil society failing to rise to the occasion and deconstructing the \u201chegemonic discourse\u201d and telling truth about killing fields in Jammu for a couple of years, Sheikh Abdullah\u2019s speech with famous one liner, \u201cPakistan does not have a paper pin\u201d \u00a0had influenced public mind more particularly the peasantry.<\/span><\/h5>\n
Minus, Ghulam Ahmed Mahjoor\u2019s poem \u201cAzadi\u201d that exposed the myths about so-called freedom there was no writer, journalists or poets worth his salt to deconstruct and demolish the hegemonic state discourse. Mahjoor\u2019s verse like Nabir Sheikh knows what Freedom means, There’s restlessness in every heart, But no one dare speak out \u2013 <\/em>do hold a mirror to the suffocating times but it was \u00a0some European writers and historians\u00a0 who subsequently demystified tragic Kashmir story and largely deconstructed the\u00a0 alternative narratives that the state had passed on as history of the Dispute. It was Ian Stephen\u2019s 1955 book \u2018Horned Moon\u2019 that exposed the Jammu massacre of 1947 before the world leaders or Alastair Lamb, dug deep into 1947 happenings and deconstructed the \u2018dominant discourse\u2019 about the Kashmir dispute. It was a couple of years, Lamb’s research on the instrument of accession and were for the first time was augmented by historian Dr. Abdul Ahad in his book Kashmir Triumph and Tragedy and Late Pampori in \u2018Kashmir in Chains (1819-2010)\u2019.<\/span><\/h5>\n
Some weeks earlier another important book in proximity to this genre of Kashmir literature, \u2018Kashmir Exposing the Myth Behind the Narrative\u2019 by Khalid Bashir Ahmed hit-the-shelves across India. The book, though largely focussed on the role of a particular community at different points of time in our history while exposing the mythical narratives does supplement the main peoples narrative by deconstructing the dominant discourse about the migration of Kashmiri Hindus and talking candidly about the dubious role played by New Delhi media vis-\u00e0-vis majority sentiment in the State. (The books call for a full-length review and a debate.)<\/span><\/h5>\n
True, a lot of young journalists and writers born in the eighties and nineties, have been documenting their story. But so far there no institutional effort for deconstructing the dominant discourse and prominently bringing the whole truth in the public domain at the state and international levels.<\/span><\/h5>\n
Published in Greater Kashmir on 11-09-2017<\/span><\/h5>\n
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\u2018<\/p>\n

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\u00a0\u00a0<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/fb:like><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

 
\nPunchline
\nA Word with A Bibliophile
\nBy<\/p>\n

Z.G. Muhammad
\n\u00a0On the teacher\u2019s day, I had posted a picture of my school teachers on the Facebook.\u00a0 The post caused a phone call from a school time classmate, a surgeon who has returned to his native land after serving Arabs for thirty years- thus obviously not fully conversant with a harsh and seamy side of the contemporary political situation at his birth place. Starting with reminiscences of school days, hailing our teachers and their commitment towards students our long conversation tapered to the Kashmir Dispute, the political situation as has been obtaining in the state for past three months and the books on Kashmir. He informed me, that he had just finished reading \u2018Kashmir the Vajpayee Years\u2019 by one of India\u2019s spy master.
\nIt was him trusting every word of the retired spymaster in the book\u00a0 as gospel truth \u00a0about the protagonists of the resistance movement …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editors-take"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3218"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3220,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3218\/revisions\/3220"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}