(Enforced) Migration, (Up)rootedeness, (In)separability and (Post)memory in The Garden of Solitude and The Infidel Next Door

Abstract

This article argues that expressions of postmemory—a form of relationship that a generation has with its antecedants, as proposed by Marianne Hirsch—are writ large in the descendants of the Kashmiri Pandits who fled from the Kashmir Valley in the 1990s and before then. Through a close reading of two novels by Kashmiri writers, Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude and Rajat Mitra’s The Infidel Next Door, this article analyses the prevalence of guilt, curiosity and the yearning to (re)connect with a lost home that is evident amongst subsequent generations in relation to their parents’ and grandparents’ forced migration from Kashmir. We demonstrate that the idea of postmemory provides a useful framework for understanding the feelings of simultaneous attachment to and generational distance from the past.

Keywords:

• Kashmiri Pandits
• Kashmiri trauma fiction
• migration
• postmemory
• subsequent generations
• The Garden of Solitude
• The Infidel Next Door

Acknowledgements

We are thankful to the anonymous South Asia reviewers for their thoughtful comments. Their thorough insights enabled us to give this paper a meaningful shape. We extend thanks to Prof. Jagdish Batra, Professor of English at the O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, India, for his interest in our research on Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri trauma literature, which encouraged us to write this paper, and we thank Prof. Kama Maclean for her kind role and patience in dealing with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. According to Marianne Hirsch, the term postmemory ‘[d]escribes the relationship that the generation after bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by the recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation’: see Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 8–9.

2. Ibid., p. 5.

3. Ibid., p. 6.

4. Ibid., p. 82.

5. For a wonderful overview of the relationship between postmemory and trauma, see Samuel O’Donoghue, ‘Postmemory as Trauma? Some Theoretical Problems and Their Consequences for Contemporary Literary Criticism’, Politika (26 June 2018) [http://www.politika.io/index.php/en/notice/postmemory-as-trauma-some-theoretical-problems-and-their-consequences-for-contemporary, accessed 10 June 2019].

6. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, in Barbie Zelizer (ed.), Visual Culture and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), p. 221.

7. Marita Nadal and Mónica Calvo, Trauma and Literary Representation: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 3.

8. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, p. 6.

9. Caruth, in her pioneering book, proposed the definition of trauma as ‘an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’: see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 11.

10. Chitralekha Zutshi, ‘We Must Remain Mad in Order to Be Sane’, Los Angeles Review of Books (26 Dec. 2015) [https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/we-must-remain-mad-in-order-to-be-sane/, accessed 25 Sept. 2019].

11. Meenakshi Bharat, Troubled Testimonies: Terrorism and the English Novel in India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015), p. 57.

12. Jagdish Batra, ‘Book Review: The Infidel Next Door by Rajat Mitra’, IndiaFacts (17 Jan. 2019) [http://indiafacts.org/book-review-the-infidel-next-door-by-rajat-mitra/, accessed 15 June 2019].

13. Haley Duschinski, “‘Survival Is Now Our Politics”: Kashmiri Hindu Community Identity and the Politics of Homeland’, in International Journal of Hindu Studies, Vol. 12, no. 1 (April 2008), pp. 41–64.

14. Rajat Mitra, The Infidel Next Door (New Delhi: Utpal Publications, 2019), p. 1.

15. Batra, ‘Book Review’.

16. ‘Dakshina is a Sanskrit term that refers to an offering or gift, typically to a guru or priest. The word comes from the Sanskrit, da, meaning “offering” or “giving”; kshi, meaning “to abide” or “to dwell in”; and na, meaning “knowledge”. The dakshina is considered a duty, or dharma, and is part of the universe’s cycle of giving and receiving’: for detailed information, see ‘Dakshina’, YOGAPEDIA (1 May 2018) [https://www.yogapedia.com/definition/5415/dakshina, accessed 18 Aug. 2019]. A gurudakshina is an offering demanded by a guru in return for his teaching and training.

17. Mitra, The Infidel Next Door, p. 55.

18. Ibid., p. 55.

19. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, p. 1.

20. Marianne Hirsch, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, in Poetics Today, Vol. 17, no. 4 (Winter 1996), pp. 659–86 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1773218, accessed 16 June 2019].

21. Siddhartha Gigoo, The Garden of Solitude (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2011), p. 192.

22. Ibid.

23. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, p. 5.

24. Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images’, p. 221.

25. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, p. 221.

26. Ibid., p. 36.

27. Gigoo, The Garden of Solitude, p. 196.

28. Hirsch, ‘Past Lives’, p. 664, emphasis added.

29. Gigoo, The Garden of Solitude, p. 195.

30. Mitra, The Infidel Next Door, p. 73.

31. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, p. 8.

32. Mitra, The Infidel Next Door, p. 59.

33. Batra, ‘Book Review’.

34. The notion of Kashmiriyat lacks a precise definition, yet its symbolic meanings are largely related to the regional identity of Kashmiris: see Mridu Rai, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights, and the History of Kashmir (London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2004), p. 224.

35. For succinct arguments on Kashmiriyat, see Chitralekha Zutshi, ‘Introduction’, in Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir (London: Hurst & Co., 2004), p. 3.

36. Mridu Rai, an Indian historian, in her prize-winning book, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects (p. 225), says: ‘The evocation of Kashmiriyat was given currency in Kashmiri politics precisely from a bedrock of religious affiliations. In other words, there were several moments when the political strategy for various groups, whether Kashmiri Pandit organizations or the Kashmiri Muslim dominated National Conference led by Sheikh Abdullah, or even lyrics of Mahjoor, chose to build bridges across religiously defined communities to evoke an “older tradition” of culturally based regional coexistence’.

37. Ankur Datta, ‘The Dull Pain of Simmering Anger: Affective and Emotional Experiences among Displaced Kashmiri Pandits’, in Himalaya, Vol. 41, no. 1 (2020), p. 51 [https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol40/iss1/9, accessed 6 April 2021].

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid.

40. With reference to rituals and festivals particular to the Kashmiri Pandit community, Khalid Wasim Hassan writes: ‘Though there are differences among Brahmins in rest of India, Kashmiri Pandits consider themselves different from the rest of Brahmins and higher in the hierarchy and they follow their own rituals and festivals. For example, Heerath, Navreh and Tiky Tsoram are some of the religious festivals celebrated only by Kashmiri Pandits’: for more details, see Khalid Wasim Hassan, ‘Migration of Kashmiri Pandits: Kashmiriyat Challenged?’, Working Papers 237, Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bengaluru, 2009, p. 3.

41. Gigoo, The Garden of Solitude, p. 172.

42. Jagdish Batra, ‘Tracing the Trajectory of Cultural Interface in Diasporic Situation: A Study of Anita Desai, Jumpa Lahiri, Kiran Desai and M.G. Vassanji’, in The Commonwealth Review (2019), pp. 37–51 [44].

43. Gigoo, The Garden of Solitude, p. 210.

44. Ibid., p. 215.

45. Ibid., p. 218.

46. Ibid., p. 219.

47. Ibid., p. 232.

48. Andrea Corsale and Monica Iorio, ‘Memory, Landscape and Sense of Belonging’, in Sabine Marschall (ed.), Tourism and Memories of Home: Migrants, Displaced People, Exiles and Diasporic Communities (Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2017), n.p.

49. Mitra, The Infidel Next Door, p. 82.

50. Ibid., p. 85.

51. Ibid.

52. Ibid.

53. Ibid., pp. 92–3.

54. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, p. 33.

55. Śaśiśekhara Toshakhānī and Kulbhushan Warikoo, ‘Preface’, in Cultural Heritage of Kashmiri Pandits (New Delhi: Pentagon Press, 2009), p. xxiii.

56. For a detailed study of vicarious trauma, see E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), p. 106.

57. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, ‘Testimonial Objects: Memory, Gender, and Transmission’, in Poetics Today, Vol. 27, no. 2 (2006), pp. 354–83 [https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2005-008, accessed 18 June 2019].

58. Gigoo, The Garden of Solitude, p. 206.

59. Ibid., p. 192.

60. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, p. 37.

61. Ibid., p. 38.

62. Regarding the emphasis placed by Hirsch on photographs and their relation to the past, see Jennifer Howell, The Algerian War in French-Language Comics: Postcolonial Memory, History, and Subjectivity (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), p. xxxiii.

63. Gigoo, The Garden of Solitude, p. 202.

64. Ibid., p. 114.

65. Ibid., p. 115.

66. Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), p. 90.

67. Craig Larkin, ‘Beyond the War? The Lebanese Postmemory Experience’, in International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 42, no. 4 (2010), pp. 615–35.

68. Mitra, The Infidel Next Door, p. 129.

69. For a thorough review of The Infidel Next Door, see Dagny Sol, ‘The Infidel Next Door—A Book by Rajat Mitra’, Jagritbharat (5 June 2019) [https://www.jagritbharat.com/good-reads-the-infidel-next-door-a-book-by-rajat-mitra/, accessed 18 June 2019].

70. Larkin, ‘Beyond the War?’, p. 618, emphasis added.

71. Mitra, The Infidel Next Door, p. 129.

72. Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux De Mémoire’, in Representations, Vol. 26, Special Issue, ‘Memory and Counter-Memory’ (Spring 1989), pp. 7–24 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2928520, accessed 1 Aug. 2019].

73. Mitra, The Infidel Next Door, p. 175.

74. Ibid., p. 176.

75. Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, in Poetics Today, Vol. 29, no. 1 (2008), pp. 103–28 [111].

76. Mitra, The Infidel Next Door, pp. 114–5.

77. Ibid., p. 223.

78. Ibid., p. 184.

79. Ibid., p. 298.

80. Batra, ‘Book Review’.

81. Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p. 9.

82. Ibid.

83. Gigoo, The Garden of Solitude, pp. 242–3.

84. Geoffrey Maguire, The Politics of Postmemory: Violence and Victimhood in Contemporary Argentine Culture (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), p. 11.

85. Lisa S. Starks-Estes, Violence, Trauma, and Virtus in Shakespeare’s Roman Poems and Plays: Transforming Ovid (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 26.

86. Corinna Assmann, Doing Family in Second-Generation British Migration Literature (Berlin/Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2018), p. 75.

87. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 12.

88. Marianne Hirsch and Nancy K. Miller, Rites of Return: Diaspora Poetics and the Politics of Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 9.

89. Maria Rice Bellamy, Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), n.p.g.

90. Simona Mitroiu (ed.), Women’s Narratives and the Postmemory of Displacement in Central and Eastern Europe (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 4.

91. Larkin, ‘Beyond the War?’, pp. 618–9.

92. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, p. 34.