In my younger days, the Mohalla of a given urban agglomeration in Srinagar city and its environs was the microcosm of Kashmir.
This was a region or even space where innocence, in relative terms, mutual bonds, affection, amity and brotherhood was normative. These normative themes cut across social boundaries, classes and even sects.
A given Kashmiri was not a Shia, a Sunni, a waatul, a shaykh, or a wealthy person. He or she was from either Zaene Kadal, Aeil Kadal, Bohir Kadal, Maisum, Safa Kadal, Sheshgaeir Mohalla, Fateh Kadal and so on.
This was the operating socio-cultural dynamic of the famed City of Seven Bridges, as I recall it.
Yes, sniping at each other and the locality that one lived in was usual, but it was good-hearted in the nature of small banter.
All this was jealously guarded and prized. The khoja, wealthy merchant, of a given locality was its patron, feeder of orphans and caregiver to the needy, the indigent and widows.
The sweeper or street cleaner swept streets and cleaned these not merely out of a sense of duty but an obligation and responsibility that stemmed from within. The corner store owner, Kaak, as most were fondly called, were stingy shopkeepers, but kept an eye on a Mohalla’s children and youth.
Waywardness meant a sneaky puff of a cigarette by a young man or stealing a furtive, shy glance at a girl or a woman.
A Kashmiri wedding, then a spartan and minimalist affair, was an event to be savoured and celebrated by all. The nosh, bride, was not merely the daughter of a given family, but the daughter of the entire Mohalla.
So was the zaamtur, groom, the honoured and respected son-in-law.
Time was kept and organized by the Mohalla elders, either in the cold chill of winter or sultry early summer mornings of Kashmir, walk to the Mosques or Khanqa Mualla, or Dast Geer Sahib’s, or Makhdhoom Sahib’s for the morning prayer.
Women would time themselves to these walks and the tip-tap sounds of the elders’ walking sticks. Out of sheer respect, our womenfolk, when they would wake to the tip-tap sounds of elders’ walking steps, would cover their heads with their dupattas.
It was beside the point that the Muhalla elder’s gaze had not fallen on a woman in contention. All this was neither vigilantism nor a check on people’s legitimate freedoms, nor moral policing, but an inbuilt, inherent mechanism of a duty of care and responsibility people believed they owed each other.
In modern parlance and in the jargon of economics, this constituted Kashmir’s social capital.
The question is, does our special and beloved Kashmir still have social capital? Or has it frayed?
It appears that both vertical and horizontal bonds of solidarity in Kashmir have gone with the wind. While it is easy to fault capitalism for this, like elsewhere, that would be reductive.
Capitalism in Kashmir is a warped variant of the same, where the unsavoury aspects of culture and the conditions that have obtained here for multiple decades have distorted it.
This is not to defend or promote vulgar market fundamentalism or untrammelled capitalism, where supply and demand become the arbiter of ethics, love, bonding and so on. But this is to suggest that merely blaming capitalism for the dissipation of our social capital is not enough.
It would appear that the problem lies in the titillations of modernity and modernization, the insalubrious bits of these and their uncritical acceptance.
I, as a modern Kashmiri Muslim, am not against modernization. We all need motor cars, nice houses, good and pleasant public spaces, the ability to travel and savour the legitimate joys and pleasures of life.
But if the price of modernization is a modernity where choice is seen as coeval with hedonism, deviance and licentiousness, and an (im)moral framework where everything is relative and everything goes, this is unacceptable to me.
As a Muslim, I see choice in moral and ethical terms and efforts to strive for perfection in these domains. Of course, being flawed humans, we can only try and strive, but that is what real choice is. Anything else is illusion and delusion.
Again, this is not to impugn material welfare and delegitimize it. No. But progress and development and modernization have to be defined by sobriety and proportion.
Normatively speaking, these have to be in harmony and consonance with nature, culture and faith. Any disproportion can or will skew us, as a society and as individuals.
But how is modernization, balanced, harmonious and sustainable, to be attained?
By mimicry that is only laughed at by those copied and sought to be mimicked? By osmosis, that is, by letting go of our authentic selves and then being taken over, mind, body and spirit, by trends and themes that are not ours? By rejectionism, resisting any influence, good, moral and ethical or even practical?
The answer is: none of the above.
To be authentic and really ourselves, we may have to dig deep into the reservoirs of our selves, collective, social and individual, and curate the best from these. In this schema, faith, salubrious aspects of tradition and morality have to assume primacy.
It is then, after a firm moral, ethical grounding informed by faith and tradition, that we can look to the world for matters where a genuine, mutually rewarding synthesis can be arrived at.
In other words, if this phrase is not an oxymoron, we have to be ‘practical romantics’. Is this possible?
I shall close with an anecdotal vignette, a prayer and a wish.
An elderly friend narrated a story to me. In the late sixties, when he was a child, a government official had to visit Jammu for a few days. He returned to his village as a celebrity, the first to have ventured to Jammu, about 200 miles from Srinagar.
Men, womenfolk and children of the village greeted him. The man’s elderly neighbour exclaimed in horror: ‘Look, how pale and thin he has gone in just a few days!’ She then asked: ‘Son, have you eaten batta, rice, the staple of Kashmiris?’
The young man replied: ‘Yes, I did at a hotel.’
The woman then asked: ‘What is a hotel?’ The man replied: ‘A hotel is a business establishment where batta is sold.’
The elderly woman recoiled in shock and horror. She said, ‘Oh my God, what has the world come to? Now even rice is sold!’
This touching vignette is true and reflects Kashmir of yore. Obviously, it cannot be restored in this pristine and romantic form, as much as desirable as it is.
But much can be reclaimed and the way forward charted in a way, form and idiom where we, our authentic self and our soul are primary, and the rest, as important as it is, is a mere corollary.
Ameen to this!
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