“Kashmiri youth have become wayward.” This may be a statement of the obvious. But the question is: what accounts for this?
Broadly, does this mean or imply cultural disintegration, a fragmentation of the self and its eventual dissolution? Is Kashmir losing its cultural soul?
And, more provocatively, did Kashmir ever have one?
These questions, as salient and important as they are, beg a further set of questions: what makes me, as an observer and student of culture in both broad and specific terms, raise them? What is their premise and predicate? Are there larger economic and global forces at work whose scope is so expansive that they throw cultures across the world under the proverbial bus?
An explication warrants and calls for a definition of culture first.
In her brilliant oeuvre, Patterns of Culture, the great anthropologist Ruth Benedict postulated culture as “being a more or less consistent pattern of thought and action […] where every society selects a few dominant personality traits from the great arc of human potentialities and weaves them into a unified, coherent whole.”
While there are other brilliant and cogent definitions of culture that must be omitted because of the paucity of space, I shall employ Benedict’s definition as a starting point to tease out an answer to the questions posed in this essay.
With respect to Kashmir, what “dominant personality traits” from “the great arc of human potentialities” were culled and woven into a “coherent whole”?
This is a difficult question to answer. But it would appear that, barring the poetic and literary genius of Kashmir, now dead and buried, Kashmiri people never had a dominant personality trait except during some tumultuous historical periods.
But a distinction needs to be made here. Kashmiris had a “lived experience” and a “habitus,” the traits and characteristics of which included the waane pyend, or corner store evening socialization and gossip among the youth, rof te chakker among women, a somewhat demure and timid nature, the unique character of Kashmiri weddings, and the nature of socialization among the polite sections of society.
There were, and still are, subcultures like the waatals, bands, and others.
But while this may, in a loose sense, refer to culture, it appears more akin to lived experience. The inference that can be drawn from this is that Kashmiri culture veered more toward literature and fine poetry. But this is elite culture, not mass culture. Did Kashmiris have this? Again, the answer may lie in lived experience and a shared “habitus.”
However, the sad feature of contemporary Kashmiri society is that both elite culture, literature and poetry, are now in a state of rest in peace, while the mass “culture” of lived experience is on life support.
The reasons for this can be teased out, but the entire onus cannot lie on the “wayward” youth of Kashmir.
Reasons first. Primarily, it appears that millennial capitalism, where production has been divorced from consumption, where foreign capital flows rule the proverbial roost, and where the economy is fetishized, is the “culprit.”
In such a system, consumption, or consumerism, becomes a surrogate for culture.
This fetishization and surrogacy are followed by Kashmiri youth lock, stock, and barrel, as they blindly imitate its most insalubrious aspects.
While this is a global trend, and some call it westernization, which it is not, because some salubrious aspects of “westernization” entail ethics, social responsibility, and integrity in socio-economic matters, at least in an ideal-type schema.
So why are Kashmiri youth gyrating to the siren song and pied piper of millennial capitalism?
One prong of the answer, which meshes into the other, is that the pull of millennial capitalism is so strong that it leaves the young culturally shattered, like roadkill. But this would not have happened if the young had confidence in themselves and their culture. How does this drool manifest itself?
I have a few anecdotal examples to offer here that may have a bearing on this. The best vantage points for observations and anecdotes that illustrate the argument are Kashmiri cafes and gyms. In the latter, I have had terrible experiences.
In cafes here, fake westernization and the pull of millennial capitalism are on eloquent display. Kashmiri yuppies, dressed in garishly ill-fitting and badly designed Western clothing, speaking English in fake accents, and eating food that is totally alien to them, though now normative across the world, are at their fake best.
Unable to really eat stylishly with forks and knives, and putting on airs that are at odds with their real selves, they perform a type of borrowed modernity. Even the waiting staff, mostly from rural areas of Kashmir, try to outdo each other in their fakery, which makes them seem like “modern clowns” or village idiots trying to find their bearings in the city.
In gyms, which I do not patronize, it appears from hearsay and observation that a “six-pack body” is the ideal. The name of the game behind this six-pack body is not a healthy lifestyle or even a passion for fitness. Rather, the premise is informed by power plays, showmanship, and the quest for female attention.
In essence, the gym power play is what I call “male surrogacy,” that is, a pretense of manhood and courage as defined by the latest social media influencer.
Part of this feeds into the matrix of gangs and subgroups formed on the basis of rivalries and petty power games. But Kashmiri youth gangs again appear to be more about posturing, like eyeballing, rude comments designed to pass off as bravery, walking with swagger, mutual insults, and so on, than anything serious.
While this is the most visible aspect of our youth’s drool over consumption, it is a far cry from my younger days, when smoking a cigarette, even surreptitiously, was seen as a crime, making a pass at a girl was considered abhorrent, and talking in a loud voice was seen as uncouth in the more polite sections of society.
This was a time when, to cite an example from my living memory, my grandfather, Haji Mir Qazi Basheer Ahmed, would walk the streets of the neighbourhood with his tasseled shalwar falling over his brightly polished shoes and a starched turban adorning his handsome face. Every passerby would lower his eyes and offer salaams in the politest possible tone.
It was a time when my maternal grand-uncle, Khwaja Mohiuddin Mattoo, was the person people looked up to in setting the moral, ethical, and even religious tone of a neighbourhood.
This was also a time when such eminences grises and their peers across Kashmir looked after the needy, the marginalized, and the vulnerable in their communities.
Lovingly and fondly, these greats of the past were called “totha” or “taeitt saeb,” beloved elders.
But those times and those people are now long gone. What remains are the wayward youth of Kashmir, where the noble, the ethical, and the faithful are invisibilized by the vulgarity swimming in the miasma-defined whirlpool of millennial capitalism.
As the economy becomes more financialized here, and as credit becomes a more dominant paradigm than a robust work ethic informed by political economy, and as the divorce between production and consumption deepens, things are likely to get worse.
With access to internet-driven consumerist titillations, modernization-induced rural labour migration to urban centers, and the corresponding pressure on land and other resources, the rural folk of Kashmir will perhaps naturally want to imitate their urban peers.
This grotesque imitation and dynamic will probably kill off the remnants of Kashmiris’ lived and shared experiences and habitus.
The facilitators of this sordid and ungainly end will, in all likelihood, be the wayward youth of Kashmir. Among its many tragedies, this will constitute yet another tragedy for Kashmir. Alas!
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