(…continued)
Let me now respond to the tweet, sans the unpleasant part,that has really triggered the essay. The tweet read, “Arabic and Persian is apart of our Islamic culture DNA along with Urdu and not alien like Hindi”.Where is this response coming from? The tail piece of my write up, which Ireproduce here for contextualising tweet and the response it elicited: “Assuch, I must confess that I used to find this “Ramadhan Mubarak” and “RamadhanKareem” very alien. I felt this import from outside was contrary to ourculture. But then you see how thedynamics of mixed cultures and globalization have interacted with Islamicbeliefs, rituals and behaviours all over the world. In many Islamic societies,these have been modified so that local rituals fit with modern milieu andvalues. All this is not tantamount to an act of cultural imperialism nor evenan instance of post-modem disorder. These are just new and evolving expressionsof existing practices”.
So, very clearly, I was not disowning any Persian or Arabicinfluences, if anything, I was positing a framework to understand it. For sure,one may disagree with it. Even dismiss it. I do have a more nuanced position onit, briefly touched upon below. For now, back to the Professor’s post.
I have only one conceptual issue: either all – Sanskrit,Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hindi — are a part of our DNA or none is. I am finewith either, but uneasy with this teleological hybrid formulation. Let meelaborate.
There is a complete consensus among scholars that Kashmiriwas written in Sharda script from ancient times, 8th century AD, to be precise.It was popularised at the Sharda Peeth temple, also an established centre oflearning in Kashmir. An intrinsic part of our cultural heritage, currently onlyunder administration of Pakistan. As Kashmiris, we can’t mentally secede fromit, either historically or intellectually.
Sharda as a script that belongs to the same family includesDevnagri, the script for Hindi and Sanskrit. One doesn’t have to be a linguistto see that Sharda is just like Devnagri and not anywhere close to Arabic,Persian or Urdu. Then how is Urdu a partof our DNA and why is Hindi alien? Sharda was the heritage of Kashmir, ourheritage, for 1,700 years. If thirty years is a generation, we are talking hereof fifty generations and more.
Yes, right now, it is not being used except by a few in theKashmiri Pandit community for religious purposes. How does that change thepast?
One may not agree with the Indic scholars that Kashmiri isderived from Sanskrit. But it isimpossible to dismiss G A Grierson, to whom we owe the preservation of ourgrammar, the one and only by Ichavara Kaul. But for his incredible work,Kashmiri would have shrivelled long ago to a just a spoken language.
Grierson’s view is “Kashmiri language is a very ancientlanguage, a sister and not a daughter of the form of speech which ultimatelydeveloped as literary Sanskrit.” That is in our homologous cultural DNA, if youask me. Not the whole, but a few nucleotides in the genetic code, perhaps!
True that over the years, there have been many a somatic mutationto the DNA. Sharda got replaced first by Devngari. Then there was a structuralbreak with the scripts of the Perso-Arabic family replacing it with the adventof Muslim rule in Kashmir.
It is neither necessary nor required to shut the Hinduheritage out, in order to own and appreciate the socio-cultural contributionsand economic consequences of the advent of Islam in Kashmir. For almost 7 to 8centuries now Kashmiri is written in the Persian script. Zain ul Abideenchanged the lingua franca of Kashmir. Most significantly, he didn’tde-historicize it; he de-communalised it. With that it has become a part of ourcultural DNA. These developments happened sequentially, though not in a linearmanner. So neither excluded the other as it evolved. What is then the need orcompulsion to airbrush the prior past?
Even more curious is the place of pride that has been givento Urdu in the tweet. While almost everyone finds it richer and flavoursome asa language, Urdu starts developing around Delhi in the 12th century. Its entryinto Kashmir happens in the 18th century. Remember there was a time no so longago, 1889, there were no Kashmiris — Muslims or Pandits – who were proficientin the Urdu language. Which is why the Maharaja had to get Urdu literate Punjabisinto his government service. Then how does it override other languages tobecome our heritage?
Extending the logic of the tweet, Arabian Nights will be apart of our DNA but not Kathasaritsagar, the 11th century Kashmiri collectionof tales only because it is in Sanskrit. How can Ali Baba and his forty thieveshave more resonance than Liaq Choor and his trusted disciple Mahadev Bhista. Toget back to the earlier point of schools as “institution of domination”, RobinHood, a British version of Liaq Choor, is what I was taught in Burn HallSchool; about Liaq Choor I learnt at home from my mother.
It will be enlightening to take a sample survey in anyschool in the valley; the kids in the English medium will know Robin Hood, thevernacular school kids will be aware of Ali Baba. Unlikely if anyone would haveheard about Laiq Choor. That is how the DNA has got “edu-engineered”.
Even in the two line tweet, the perpetual problem persists:the vernacular is conspicuous by absence. There is Islam, there is Persian,there is Urdu, there is Arabic, there is even Hindi, albeit in negation, whereis the vernacular? The problem is that the way in which DNA is getting defined,Kashmiri is lost in translation!
It might be instructive to see how Islam, which is also abody of thought and a civilizational culture across countries and continents,deals with the past. At home, there is nothing more relevant than theAwrad-i-Fathhiya, an invocatory prayer based on Quranic verses, Hadith andprayers of the Sufis compiled by Mir Saiyid Ali Hamadani.
Though widely believed it was composed especially forKashmiri Muslims, its cultural significance lies in its mode of intonation andrecitation as a practice. Its recital – a cultural legacy of Kashmiris — isset to meter of a bhajan. Why this is so is a fascinating ethnographic tale initself!
Sociologically, it completely overturned the metaphor, evenas it retained the “mode of articulation” for the ordinary murid, as a way oftransformational tool. This tradition draws from, and has support of Ibn Arabi,who calls it “remembrance as encountered reality”, a sacred dialogue in andthrough an experience.
This differentia specifica, has been trivialised (andharmed), by counterpoising it as Kashmiri Sufism aka Rishism versus Wahabism.More than such categorisation, it is important to understand the role of”public” history in the existential awareness of being a Kashmiri and beingMuslim.
Be that as it may, for now, it is hard not to conclude thatmajoritarianism works in almost identical ways. On the one hand we have thosewho want to disown the Muslim past of India. And on the other, those who wantsto disown the Hindu past of Kashmir. The former want to go back to an earlierpre-Islamic period to redefine their national identity defined by Hinduism. Thelatter wants to define their DNA by restricting it to a more recent past. Inthis, we as Kashmiris, only a handful that we are, are the losers. For me,being Kashmiri, as Naguib Mahfouz says in his context, “is not simply anadjective, but in truth it is life, a shelter and a sanctuary, a beginning andan end”.
Tail piece:
Hot on the heels of the twitter attack by the residentresistance intellectuals, I have been hauled over the coals by the displacedKashmiri Pandits over my column in GK. Ihave to say I am delighted to be at the centre of this controversy! By centre,I mean, equidistant from both extremes. In a certain way I have beenvindicated. One side calls me an “RSS stooge”. The other calls me a “WahabiIslamist bigot”.
These labels have nothing to do with me. These are anexample of the Rashomanian reality playing out in our situation; there is notruth except what you want to see. Or more appropriately what one is made tosee in a given situation within an ideological framework. Objectivity getsdiscounted by subjectivity because of positions, perceptions and prejudices.
( concluded)