Book Review: A Long Dream of Home- The persecution, exodus and exile of Kashmiri Pandits

Book : A Long Dream of Home: The persecution, exile and exodus of Kashmiri Pandits

Author: Siddhartha Gigoo and Varad Sharma

Publisher: Bloomsbury India

Pages: 352

Rs: 372

These stories needed to be told. And they also need to be heard. But the exodus and exile of half-a-million Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir valley has become just a subplot in the chequered history of the land. Twenty-five years since January 19, 1990, when thousands of Kashmiri Pandits started leaving their homes fearing persecution and death amid anti-India and anti-Pandit threats, and this subplot gets dimmer. Their ancestral orchards and homes lie abandoned, while they live in misery in rehabilitation camps in Jammu, or have relocated to the hot plains of India, trying to eke out a living even as they dream of their lost homeland.

It's against this backdrop that A Long Dream of Home, a collection of memoirs of Kashmiri Pandits, was published to commemorate 25 years since they were hounded out of their homes. Edited by Siddhartha Gigoo and Varad Sharma, it is one of the few documentation exercises carried out to tell the story of Kashmiri Pandits, the ethnic minority of the region.

A significant testimony of a community that has been ignored by many state and central governments, the book features haunting memoirs of three generations of Pandits and is divided into four sections. Part I: Nights of Terror features narratives of what Pandits witnessed and faced in Kashmir from 1989 to 1991. Part II: Summers of Exile has Pandits talking about how they have struggled to survive during the past 25 years. Part III: Days of Parting is about the horrific events and circumstances leading to the mass exodus of Pandits from Kashmir. Part IV: Seasons of Longing reveals the desire of the Pandits to return to their homes.

The book also contains heartbreaking pictures of abandoned houses and ruins of the temples of Pandits in Kashmir, along with the dismal living conditions of migration camps in Jammu province, where they lived after fleeing from Kashmir. Hundreds of Pandits still live in these areas.

The contributors to the memoirs come from all walks of life and age groups. People such as Sushant Dhar, who was one-and-a-half-years when his family left Kashmir, Vaishali Dhar, who lives in the migrant camps for Kashmiri Pandits at Muthi in Jammu, and Prithvi Nath Kabu, born in 1934, who worked as a teacher in Kashmir and also lives in Muthi. There are accounts from Kishore Pran, an award-winning writer, playwright, painter and filmmaker, Meenakshi Raina, a novelist who lives in Canada, Minakshi Watts, a poet-painter who runs a literary journal in Delhi, Ramesh Hingloo, founder of a community radio service – Radio Sharda, Rattan Lal Shant, a writer, Kashi Nath Pandita, a writer-educationist and Badri Raina, a writer-teacher.

While the writings tend to get repetitive, they cannot be dismissed as not 'engaging enough'. For they tell you of collective trauma and hopes and disappointments of thousands of people who have lost a way of life.

As Gigoo puts it in his essay Season of Ashes and describes how his grandfather was never the same after leaving Kashmir, "The first shock he experienced was when he crossed the Jawahar Tunnel, in Banihal. He was in a truck with his family, leaving Kashmir for Jammu in 1991. When the truck exited the three-kilometer long tunnel, the entire landscape had changed. Something changed in him that day. And the tunnel became the tunnel of forgetfulness, not just for him, but countless other elders who were leaving Kashmir for unknown places for the first time in their lives."