Paradise/Pandemonium? Kashmiri Identity in Question: A Study of Basharat Peer’s Memoir

Abstract

Though the term ‘nation’ refers to the concept of a shared cultural experience, there are huge differences too. In a land of diverse culture, these differences are more often realized by the people inhabiting the borders. Basharat Peer, the Kashmiri journalist and author in his non-fiction Curfewed Night: One Kashmiri Journalist's Frontline Account of Life, Love, and War in His Homeland, recounts the struggle of growing up in a land torn between two nations. Democratic development in Kashmir was hindered due to the belief that anti-India movements are necessarily pro Pakistani. The memoir portrays how India, the world’s largest democracy responded to the insurgency in Kashmir with the power of its armed forces. He also details how Kashmir began to lose its secularist nature with the burgeoning of several insurgent groups with the mission of establishing an Islamist nation. The significance of this study lies in its attempt to hear the voice of the natives which act as counter propaganda to the views propagated by the dominant discourses to influence the majority in the policy making of the government. It psychologically explores the ‘liminality’/identity crisis experienced by these people with the continuous intrusion and withdrawal of alien forces in their otherwise stable cultural set up.