Enveloped in layers of gold and silver gauze, draped in emeralds and pearls, her hands and feet dyed red, the nautch girl from Kashmir was called String of Pearls. Later, Lady Maria Nugent, wife to the commander in chief of the East India Company’s armies, would write how the dancer balanced a bottle of rose water on her head even as she crafted a bouquet from muslin. “Keep the one you like best,” the emperor of Kashmir and Punjab, Ranjit Singh, told a colonial envoy some two decades later, in 1832, “I have plenty more.”
“All little girls who promise to turn out pretty, are sold at eight years of age, and conveyed into the Punjab and to India,” the French botanist Victor Jacquemont wrote in 1832, using the same unsentimental prose he used to describe Kashmir’s plant life. “Their parents sell them at from twenty to three hundred francs—most commonly fifty or sixty.”
Last week, moral scolds in Kashmir erupted in outrage after a video surfaced of a student performing a Bollywood-inspired dance at the Government Medical College in Anantnag. Letting students from outside Kashmir into the state, many suggested, was polluting the minds of youth. One commenter demanded Kashmiris stop studying at colleges and join jihadists instead.
The streaming news channel Kashmir24 was inundated with angry comments calling on viewers to turn their eyes from the video to prayers, and even lamenting the education of women.“Kashmir is witnessing a drastic shift from Pir Vaer to Cxur Vaer,” or turning from a ‘Valley of Saints’ to a ‘Valley of Thieves’, the channel editorially declaimed.
Like all moral frenzies, this one often transgressed the thin line between cultural conservatism and parody—but there’s a dangerous politics that underlies it. Through the course of Kashmir’s long jihad, Islamists cast India as a predator seducing the region’s people with modernity. Kashmir’s jihadists cast themselves as the protectors of its religion, its culture and the bodies of its women.
For India to genuinely weave Kashmir into its cultural fabric, it needs to engage with the traumatic impact colonialism had on the state—a trauma in which a Hindu state was deeply enmeshed.
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The war against sin
“Long live Pakistan,” sang the hundreds of young men who, armed with axes and crowbars, had gathered to demolish Sabina Hamid Bulla’s home in downtown Srinagar. Early in the summer of 2006, Srinagar residents complained to police of pornographic clips circulating through mobile phones, involving a teenage girl. The girl gave an unsigned statement to police saying she was supplied with drugs and cash by Bulla for having sex with two State Ministers, a Border Security Force officer, 10 policemen, a senior lawyer and several well-known businessmen.
Four men were eventually convicted to ten years imprisonment for raping the teenager; the most high-profile accused were acquitted after the girl resiled on key parts of her testimony. To Islamists, though, the issue wasn’t rape: The Indian state, they charged, was engaged in the destruction of Kashmiri womanhood.
Elected to power in 2002, the People’s Democratic Party-Bharatiya Janata Party had sought to build bridges with Islamists in Kashmir, hoping it would draw them away from secessionism. Things didn’t go quite to plan.
From 2005, the Islamist leader Asiya Andrabi and her all-women organisation Dukhtaran-e-Millat began campaigning against what it described as a rising tide of “adultery, obscenity, and debauchery.” The organisation’s Mariam Squad vigilantes rounded on women not wearing the hijab and set up an anti-adultery hotline.
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The Hindu state and sex trafficking
The campaign drew on the trafficking of Kashmiri women, and the institutionalisation of sex work, during Dogra rule. Following a devastating famine in 1877-78, historian Shazia Malik has recorded, large numbers of families sold daughters into sexual slavery. The Maharaja cashed in, legalising prostitution and issuing licences from which the monarchy earned up to 25 per cent of its revenues. In 1880, there were 18,715 registered sex workers, graded by income: Class I prostitutes paid an annual fee of Rs 40, while Class III prostitutes were charged Rs 10.
From the nineteenth century, the Dogra state’s treatment of its subjects empowered English voices seeking annexation. The relationship of the Dogra state with sex work was among their lines of attack. The military officer Robert Thorp reported that the kidnapping of women to keep as concubines had state sanction. The missionary and anti-Catholic polemicist Arthur Brinkman joined the assault.
Little dispute exists that these accounts of large-scale trafficking from Kashmir misrepresented reality. From census data published in 1921, it is clear just a small part of Bombay’s sex workers—42 of 2,995—came from Kashmir. The women who served as nautch girls, contemporary accounts and modern historians like Pran Nevile show, came from Bengal and Tamil Nadu, as well as all other parts of India. In colonial India, the millstones of poverty and patriarchy ground with no regard for faith or ethnicity.
The end of legalised sex work in Kashmir was brought about during the flowering of its nationalist movement. Led by the Srinagar barber Muhammad Subhan Hajam, anti-prostitution reformers wrote pamphlets and proselytised sex workers themselves. Finally, the state’s legislative assembly outlawed sex work in 1931. Kashmir’s nationalists had begun building a new, moral society.
Lawyers for the accused in the sex-trafficking case, many decades later, would argue that the victim was a sex worker, whose family had been engaged in the business since 1954. Later, it transpired that rules enabling the registration of sex work had never been formally revoked. The fraught terrain of identity and sex remained, like a ghost.
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The war against Hindu India
From the outset of the jihad in Kashmir, Islamists sought to appropriate heritage: Film theatres were bombed; beauty salons shut down; women in public life, like the television actress Shamima Parveen, were tortured and executed. In 2001, as violence escalated, the Dukhtaran-e-Millat began its first campaign to force Kashmir’s women to cover up. Andrabi cast her struggle as part of a tradition that emerged with Hajam—though his close relationship with Hindu and Sikh social reformers was elided over.
This was part of a long struggle, the scholar Yoginder Sikand has written. Through the 1950s, the Jama’at-e-Islami set up networks of schools and cultural institutions to combat what it cast as “an Indian onslaught in the cultural sphere.” The Jama’at believed that “a carefully planned Indian conspiracy was at work to destroy the Islamic identity of the Kashmiris, through Hinduising the school syllabus and spreading immorality and vice among the youth.”
Leaders of the Jama’at party even alleged “that the government of India had dispatched a team to Andalusia, headed by the Kashmiri Pandit [politician] DP Dhar, to investigate how Islam was driven out of Spain and to suggest measures as to how the Spanish experiment could be repeated in Kashmir, too.”
Following Andrabi’s moral crusade, her mentor, the patriarch of Kashmir Islamists Syed Ali Shah Geelani Geelani launched the fateful mobilisation that would explode into street violence in 2008. Each campaign pitted Kashmiri Islamic identity against India’s modernity-suffused vice. The targets ranged from migrant workers alleged to have raped a teenager to a teacher whose students were filmed dancing during vacation. “I caution my nation,” Geelani warned, “that if we don’t wake up in time, India and its stooges will succeed and we will be displaced.”
Even though the ending of Kashmir’s special constitutional status has seen violence on the streets subside, the ugly social media commentary unleashed by the dance at Anantnag shows the beliefs which underpinned it are far from spent. For many Kashmiris, India remains a threat—their fears stoked by Hindu nationalists like Uttar Pradesh lawmaker Vikram Saini, who infamously proclaimed his supporters could now marry “fair Kashmiri girls.”
The construction of New Kashmir also needs a New India, willing to look past the wounds of history.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. He tweets with @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)