In his memoir, Before I Forget, M.K. Raina recounts fragments of memory from a life spanning the entire history of Independent India. While tracing lived encounters with crucial moments in the political history of Kashmir and Delhi, Raina recounts his childhood in a mixed Kashmiri neighbourhood in Srinagar. He recalls events from familial life even as he traces his academic and professional journey as a freelance activist and educator who makes use of theatre and cinema in various contexts.
M.K. Raina,
Before I forget: A memoir,
Penguin India, 2024
His depiction of the neighbourhoods he inhabited, the institutions he was part of and the historical events he witnessed, add fresh texture to the accounts from Kashmir we are already familiar with. His perspective as a Kashmiri Pandit, and an artist who sees himself as “a child of India’s socialism” is a welcome addition to the diversity of such accounts of postcolonial Kashmir, and the tragic brutalisation of its people, that are being written from various subject positions. His complex narrative dents some of the loaded frames through which Kashmir, its people and their politics has been looked at, even as it lazily reinforces certain others. Yet, the rich, unfiltered, detail can serve as a useful resource for Kashmir scholars who reflect on the politics of memory, subjectivity and cultural interventions in the conflict.
All accounts are, in a way, a testimony against the self. Regardless of the intent, through what we emphasise, underplay or remain silent about, we invariably end up revealing more than we may have bargained for. Such is perhaps the case with this work as well.
An idyllic, romanticised memory of childhood and early youth spent in Kashmir portrays a secular cultural milieu that is eventually lost and, later in life, sought to be recovered through cultural interventions. The memory features Pandit-Muslim bonhomie, rare moments of trouble and a fun-filled childhood and youth in a mixed neighbourhood. It reveals discomfort with the conventional schooling prevalent in Kashmir and the narrator’s gradual drift towards music and performative arts as a consequence. This is followed by the author’s arrival at the National School of Drama in Delhi and elaboration of what the institution has meant for him.
The killing of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by a Sikh bodyguard and the barbaric, retributive, collective violence against the entire Sikh community in 1984 in Delhi receives detailed attention. Raina narrates the dilemmas of his role as an activist involved in relief work followed by a visit to Punjab with Syed Mirza to shoot a documentary.
The killing of Safdar Hashmi, a personal friend and a professional comrade, the shaping of protests, movements and organisations like SAHMAT in response, the cultural activism in response to the demolition of Babri Masjid and the detailing of the people involved, embodies a significant portion of the book.
One of the heaviest moments recounted is the departure of Raina’s family from Kashmir following the death of his mother, who was in coma at a hospital, coinciding with the rise of militancy and peoples’ uprising in 1990. It is this painful moment that brings Raina back to Kashmir while it was at its worst, leaving a profound emotional impact. In wake of her death however, Raina textures interdependence “from birth to death” through the traditional involvement of Muslim neighbours and peasantry in the funerary process, the practices that continued despite the prevailing circumstances.
Also read: M.K. Raina: ‘When I Bought My Ticket, I Packed a Few Clothes, Some Cash and Left for Srinagar’
He was an eyewitness to the troubled circumstances that lead to the Pandit exodus. The selective killing of Pandits by militants, the associated uncertainty and fear pushed most of the community to leave Kashmir. Raina notes the secrecy of the process; how even close relatives and neighbours did not inform each other, hurrying themselves to safety, while leaving others stranded. Texturing the loss of home in Kashmir, Raina dwells on collective trauma experienced by the community. Though he had left Kashmir earlier, and was not one of those who was forced to leave, he continued to associate with the parental house in Kashmir as his home and experienced the disruption of his base in Kashmir as a profound loss. In his words, “losing my home in Kashmir was like a hidden wound which needed to be healed.” He felt the loss on behalf of his parents, Babuji and Babhi, “I feel very sad for them for becoming homeless in their old age. It is like a dark and permanent mark left on my psyche.”
Finally, Raina elaborates on his return to Kashmir as a cultural activist with the objective of “healing, restoring and reclaiming” the lost cultural heritage. The two interventions include workshops with traditional folk theatre artists and orphaned children. “From 2000 onwards” he asserts, “my return to my hometown had not been to reclaim my home but to reclaim my legacy and my heritage, which has now become for me a journey of rediscovering my Kashmir”. As an activist, he uses “culture as an agent of change” intending to “to make a political point of cultural resistance”. He also applies “theatre and other art forms for the healing and physiological [sic] rehabilitation of children, youth teachers, etc…”
Since militancy was at its peak, his interventions initially involved secrecy, the camps were in hidden places “behind the Zabarwan mountains”, a kind of subversion, “entering through a needle hole” peppered with a casual reference to Governor Jagmohan’s “frozen turbulence”, a character much despised by Muslims in Kashmir for his brutal crackdown on the uprising.
The chapter titled, ‘Children without Fathers’, dwells on the author’s intervention in Kashmir among the children orphaned by “terrorists”. Curiously, there is no elaboration on why the children orphaned by the armed forces or the ones whose parents were disappeared by them were not included. Though their numbers were far greater, their existence doesn’t even receive a mention.
While interventions through art and theatre in conflict can be discursively productive, such interventions must be profoundly reflexive about their politics and the power dynamics of the place. Who is intervening on whose behalf and what is the politics of the institutions involved? Culture and heritage are an ever evolving phenomenon, deeply imbricated with the dynamics of the social and the political. Raina seems conscious of the fact that return to pristine purity of idyllic culture and heritage is a chimera and any meaningful intervention can only be through the forging of the new, more free and egalitarian art that interacts with actual life circumstances and struggles of ordinary people even as it makes use of the residue of the dead past. However, at times, the vocabulary deployed in the volume points to a conservative view of culture and heritage as a static artefact, detached from active politics that needs saving from the messiness of actual life.
Returning to his neighbourhood in Sheetal Nath Sethu, he notes, “the houses of my aunts and uncles still stood there, but someone else lived in them now”. One of the redeeming moments in the book is his realisation of distinction between houses and homes. On returning to his ancestral house, sold off by the family to a Muslim, he remarks, “I had no anger about anything. After all, what are houses and homes? You come on this planet earth, stay here seven or eight decades, and then leave it”. The home Raina seeks to recover and restore is the social fabric and cultural values that made it possible for different communities to live meaningfully together.
Sloppy spellings, particularly the names of people and places in Kashmir like “Warshad Mushtaq” for Arshad Mushtaq “Daksun” for Daksum, “Ash Mukan” for Aishmuqaam, Kulwama for Kulgam or Pulwama, and so on are a put off and need serious cleaning up.
Lives we recount can be examined, unexamined or partially examined. As a reader, one would want to know how the narrator’s consciousness evolved in response to the events that defy his expectations and beliefs. Such a reflexive memoir is a meditation on who one was and what one became in the process of experiencing and witnessing.
One does not notice a rupture or evolution in the consciousness of the author in response to what appear to be profoundly disturbing events. It is as though by recounting his life in a certain way, he was seeking confirmation of the values and beliefs he has always held on to. This may either be a narrative strategy or perhaps the experiences he has had have indeed remained unprocessed.
The author does not complicate statist categories like ‘terrorist’, ‘separatists’ and ‘security forces’, and deploys them without considering what they reveal and what they hide. Nor does he retrospectively attempt to understand the reasons for the unending political unrest, protest and killings in Kashmir. Thankfully, some of these reasons can be surmised from the casually recounted encounters and the reactions of individuals who people his narrative. For instance, the fear experienced by the Bhands in Akingam when he used BSF personnel to get in touch with them, or the reaction of his daughter Aditi when her driver was roughed up by soldiers on the way to Cheshma-e-Shahi and many moments where he faced the abusive wrath of the soldiers.
As exemplified here, one can live a life that is relatively detached from the political or at an awkward tangent. But as a cultural activist aligned with the Left, one would expect a sophisticated understanding and sensitivity to the social and the political. The lack of substantial critical engagement with the political in the narrative tends to reduce the unrest in Kashmir to communalism and terrorism, positioning the narrator as a detached healer and restorer of cultural “heritage”, while, despite aberrations, the essential self-purported secular and socialist credentials of the Indian state and nationalism are taken for granted.
Gowhar Fazili teaches Sociology at Krea University. He specializes in the anthropology of political violence, subjectivity and emotions.
