Pain is the truth; all else is subject to doubt. These beautiful words from J. M. Coetzee's famous novel Waiting for the Barbarians seem more relevant and closer to reality at present. Most surely, pain is the truth, a truth that never changes with the passage of time but only our awareness of it changes. Time- which is said to be the great healer does not, at times, relieve us of the pain that we may have suffered in the past. The scars of pain have a habit of lingering on and on. It comes to this: one who has suffered the pain, either through suffering itself or for not having suffered much, lives with this pain always.

Of late we as a nation have suffered more pain than anything else. We perhaps haven’t matured as yet doing all the things that give us pain and nothing else. But we have a hope, a hope of seeing ourselves free to move in the streets of Srinagar. We lost a our young blood in the last two decades. Recently the tactics have changed and now teenagers are the ones murdered mercilessly. We can’t afford to lose Wamiq, Zahid, Tauqeer, Tufail, Imtiyaz, Faizan and all those young souls every other day to remind ourselves that we are fighting a war of resistance against the Indian Empire. An oppressed nation like us can’t afford to lose so many teenagers to feed the movement. These young souls are the future of our nation so why put them at risk. True we suffer as a whole because of the oppression but there is a dire need to channel the anger in a way that will both save us from being endangered and also send the oppressor thinking that their time is up. Instead we are too timid to think revoking the draconian laws will help. It never does. And asking for the revocation of these laws is even more shameful and painful. I must not criticise the young protester on the streets of Srinagar where he is defying the Indian troops, since while these protesters are defying the oppressor, I enjoy sitting home spending holidays and reading imperial history vis-à-vis resistant literature. If I should criticise anyone, it is me myself, not the young warrior. What right do I have to do so? He lays down his life for my freedom, my being frets with pain. But this pain I hide from myself. This pain I try to forget knowing the prospect of danger if I expressed it. I, fearing the sword of the oppressor, tell myself I can’t be so “foolish” to let it be expressed. I tell myself I am a mature guy and I prefer to live a slave’s life as I am living now than to raise a voice. This “I” is not just me but a lot of the natives of this besieged nation. Had it been just me, it was just one nuisance but it pains me to have with me a sea of people who, unfortunately, are much wiser than I may assume myself to be. This rudderless sea of people suffers from the pain of loss but alas can’t voice it! They do voice it but in closed corners and, may be, shop fronts that too when it is dark not to be visible to others. They write books to score points that may help in a promotion in the offing but they can’t write against any injustice meted out to their innocent youngsters. The former gains them repute, the latter invites risk. This because they fear it may get them a reputation to be anti-establishment. My soul pains at the loss of these young ones. But more than the death of these young souls, it is the hypocrisy of this above class which pains me down to my spine. Perhaps, it would need a Pamukian writing wit to make an anatomical chart of these pains. This intellectual class has betrayed us more often than have the puppets of Indian rule. These intellectuals remain silent when needed and speak when needed not. It is they who call us hypocrites but they don’t know they possess more hypocrisy than we do. Truth never changes. They, somehow, ignore to know the truth but that doesn’t mean the truth will fade away. It remains and remains the true way. This intellectual class knows better than these street warriors about the resistant strategies of subjugated people. Why they prefer silence unlike the young ones is a cause for shame. If we don’t resist now, we will see the next people strangers in our own native land where there would be no native air to inhale but only colonial gases to suffocate us. That day it would be too late to reverse the hierarchy.

And as the pain continues, we desperately need an indigenous discourse much like Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night. We need to have writers who could write about the love and pain of our motherland. Nothing else will help us better than a class of writers who can. I hope we see them soon.

(Tanveer Habib is Research Scholar, Department of Linguistics, Kashmir University)

Lastupdate on : Sat, 14 Aug 2010 21:30:00 Mecca time
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Lastupdate on : Sun, 15 Aug 2010 00:00:00 IST