Harris Khalique is a poet and writer who writes in Urdu and English.He has written six books, namely Divan (English poetry), If wishes were horses (English poetry), Purani Numaish (Urdu poetry), Saaray kaam zaroori thay (Urdu poetry), Aaj jab hui baarish (Urdu poetry), Unfinished histories (Essays in English, co-written). 

Tarique Rehman Fazlee is a man of many talents, wit being one. He called me theother day and asked, "Sir, why don't you mediate between Pakistan and India? Kashmir is your land after all." They make fun of me, friends in Karachi, Delhi and Lahore. I do not fit the Kashmiri stereotype. No pink cheeks or blue eyes. The only brother I have is even darker than I am and the family can hardly make out the difference between Pahari and Kashmiri vernaculars. 

I can't always carry the pictures of my relatives who may qualify as Kashmiris. Even the slight hump on my nose and the cultivated likeness for asafoetida cuisine may only convince an indulgent  anthropologist of their exclusive Kashmiri pandit origins. 

I do not fit the Kashmiri stereotype because I am not Kashmiri. I am and I am not. My ancestors converted to Islam and left Kashmir long ago (although, some decades after the Nehru ancestors did without converting). With their hoof marks stamped across the length and breadth of northern India, Lucknow was to be the final destination. Perhaps because many Kashmiris had settled there, the Avadhi court promoted a culture of harmony and the subjects were tolerant to each other's whims. They lived in Lucknow and prospered. Most learnt and practised Greek medicine, established a  teaching hospital and medical college, built a mosque, patronized art and music, men kept concubines and women threw lavish parties. 

The stint was soon to be over. Some glory was lost to the choice of being rebellious to the British masters and rest to the decadence that marked the age. In Lucknow they were called Kashmiris and elsewhere Lucknavis. Gradually, Kashmir was edged away from their courtyards to remain only in the kitchens. Urban Hindustani became the main language of the household and Farsi as the second. 

Most continued to learn Sanskrit. None from the main trunk could speak tongues like Purbi or Bhojpuri, since they had migrated from Kashmir and not from the villages and suburbs of eastern or central India. Anyway, what is left of those happy times is a state-owned, dilapidated college in India and an exasperating family spread over countries that used to be one. 

My mother's relations were dwellers of UP, Delhi and the Punjab. Her aunt and uncle raised her in Muzaffarnagar and Lyallpur (now Faisalabad). Being a Muslim family of teachers, lawyers and public servants under the Raj, they were interested in poetry, cricket and religion. 

I grew up to see only one grandparent alive. And he, my maternal grandfather, never mentioned if his family came from Kashmir. May be they had, may be not. When I was a kid and did some mischief, my mum would quote a Farsi couplet about Afghans, Kambohs and Kashmiris and jokingly tell me that I am low caste and mean like all Kashmiris. My father would sip from his bowl of salty tea and look on. 

Let me now pick some crumbs of history off the floor. R.K. Narayan, the master storyteller, begins his essay 'The problem of the Indian writer' by stating, "All imaginative writing in India has had its origin in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the ten-thousand-year-old epics of India." Elaborating his point by various examples he continues, "These traditions were modified by historical changes. Let us skip a great deal of intervening history and come down to British times." 

The problem is that the intervening history Narayan chooses to skip produced Amir Khusrau, Shah Latif Bhittai, Bulleh Shah, Abdul Qadir Bedil, Vali Deccani (whose tomb was ransacked in Gujarat recently) and above all, Mirza Ghalib. Even during and after the British times, from Dr Mohammed Iqbal to Saadat Hasan Manto, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Qurratul Ain Haider, Josh Malihabadi, Firaq Gorakhpuri (whose real name was Raghopati Sahai) and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, all were rooted in that intervening history. 

This skipping of a 'great deal of intervening history', in Narayan's words, on the one hand and the insistence on that history being the only period of magnificence on the other brought about the communal partition of British India, riots on regular intervals and seething intolerance. Gujarat pogroms of 2002 simply take that one notch further. 

My parents lived and worked in Pakistan, somehow managing to stay on the bottom rung of the middle class. Born in Karachi I was to finish kindergarten when the country got dismembered. I am told that a couple of years earlier, carrying me as an infant, my parents had visited East Pakistan. The car got attacked by angry Bengali youth who yelled and swore at them on finding out they were West Pakistanis, without guessing for a moment that they could be unreservedly against the exploitation of Bengal. 

I visited Bangladesh in 1995 for a few weeks to find myself folded up by the burden of Urdu, Punjab and the Pakistan Army. It was the same time when Karachi went through the most terrible episode in its history. Armed youth were killing each other in thousands and the military and the police were killing them in real and fake encounters. The children of immigrant Muslims from India, those who had a claim to creating the country, challenged the state. It marked the culmination of the identity crisis in Pakistan. 

Once a Pathan taxi driver told me how Pathans tore the pyjamas of Karachiites to make them wear shalwars. A student leader from a Sindhi nationalist party shouted at me, "bloody Urdu-speaking scum of the earth". A friend from Lahore insisted that I am clumsy because of the Hindustani blood in me. I am also a witness to the despicable arrogance in many who migrated from India and passing on that condescension for old natives to their future generations. 

After reading my Punjabi poem a so-called Urdu-speaking friend asked me sarcastically that why do I need to establish Punjabi antecedents? And which is next, crude language that Pathans speak? Or Seraiki maybe? To his utter disbelief, I shared how much I wish to read and write in all Pakistani languages. Besides, my crooked lineage, unlike his blue blood, allows me to establish many antecedents, Punjabi being one. 

I felt terribly annoyed in Delhi in 2001 when two Indian Muslims jumped on my throat literally asking me to withdraw jihadis from Kashmir. As if I was the one who commandeered the army in Kargil. But putting anger in context makes you sympathize with it. In today's India, secular Muslims go through a test of fire to prove their chastity and faithfulness. They made me go through the same Agni Pariksha.Here you go with a reference to the Ramayana. 

In Pakistan where people are either in love with the idea of secular India or consider everything Indian as an open or disguised plot for absolute Hindu ascendancy, it is difficult to put an objective view across. For those who believe that India is as great as Nehru's independence speech of 1947, Pakistan is always at fault and Indian Muslims are having a ball. Look at all the film stars, musicians, dress designers, etc. Those Muslims who make a fuss are insistently backward, according to them. 

Whereas, the anti-Indianism in Pakistan stems from mistrust, conservatism, RSS and the state of minority rights in India - be it Muslims, Sikhs or Christians - and, more recently, India's military overtures towards Israel. People know that many Abdul Kalams have been made presidents of such republics. Ottoman Turks used Armenian generals to massacre Armenians, Stalin was Georgian who consolidated the Russian empire in the name of the Soviet Union. Marshal Tito, himself a Croat, didn't do enough to check Serbian superiority in former Yugoslavia. 

After Partition, Jinnah said in an interview that he intends to retire in Bombay. Gandhi expressed his wish to settle in Pakistan to bring the countries closer. One can't be sure if the two-nation theory and the ideology of Pakistan are the same or two different things, the latter not being the only logical conclusion of the former, but by all means the premise for partition was to establish a long lasting peace in the subcontinent. 

Pakistan continues to define itself as non-India and India continues to browbeat all its neighbours. The path to progress is peace, fostering the inalienable bond between the countries in question and mutual respect. How? The issue is beyond the range of international relations and defence analysts. The subject of international relations is to history what plumbing is to mechanical engineering. Where a billion people continue to live under abject poverty and a constant threat of extinction by nuclear and conventional war, the onus for taking the process of truth and reconciliation forward falls more on  writers and historians. 

Fear and violence are the warp and weft of life in Kashmir. The tears of mothers who lost their sons  and daughters are thicker than blood. My father quotes from Prem Nath Bajaj and insists that the sentiment of grief in Kashmir is centuries old. Friends keep sending me emails suggesting that India is malicious. At the same time the fathomless sorrows of Sindh, thousands of young men killed in Karachi, hundreds of thousands in Bangladesh, Shia-Sunni divide, plight of women, minorities and the poor across Pakistan, continue to haunt me. Every town in the subcontinent is to me what Toba Tek Singh was to Bishen Singh. 

So dear Tarique Rehman Fazlee, I cannot mediate between India and Pakistan. I am an unresolved business of Partition myself. I am not Kashmiri. I am Kashmir. 
 
 

Writer's email: kasheeri@hotmail.com and harris@spopk.org.