The Beauties of Kashmir: Nila Gupta's Representations of War from a Distance

Abstract

Abstract: This essay examines Nila Gupta's literary representation of the conflict in Kashmir in her short story cycle The Sherpa and Other Fictions (2008). Born and raised in Canada, Gupta has a diasporic perspective and a feminist political stance that values women's solidarity and political involvement across borders. Her short stories explore the feminist thesis that the sexual crimes committed against girls and women at times of conflict are a direct consequence of the appropriation of women's bodies for symbolic uses within the dialectics of patriarchal nationalisms. However, her stories' restrained style and their publication in a small activist press preclude easy commodification in a global market avid for narratives of ethnic violence. By reading Gupta's creative texts in relation to academic studies of communal sexual violence and nationalism, humanitarian reports on refugees and gendered violence and journalistic accounts of the conflict, this essay attempts to assess the power of literature to offer nuanced and complex representations of violent conflict and its consequences. Special attention is paid to the representation of life in the officially designated ‘migrant camps’, to the difficult issue of the social stigmatization of rape victims and to the many ways in which women are implicated.

Keywords:

• rape
• transnational feminism
• diaspora
• representation
• Kashmir conflict
• refugees
• Nila Gupta's stories

Acknowledgement

This research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation as part of the project ‘Globalized Cultural Markets: The Production, Circulation and Reception of Difference’ (Reference FFI2010-17282). I am grateful to my colleague Andrea Ruthven and two anonymous reviewers for their truly helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay, and to Helen Carr for her careful editing.

Notes

¹The short story cycle enjoys particular favour among Canadian women writers, Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House (1970) and Alice Munro's Lives of Girls and Women (1971) being classic examples of the genre. More recent examples from South Asian Canadian authors are Rachna Mara's Of Customs and Excise (1991), Shree Ghatage's Awake When All the World Is Asleep (1997) and Nalini Warriar's Blues from the Malabar Coast (2002).

²The title of this essay, ‘The Beauties of Kashmir’, alludes ironically to the world-famous scenery of the Kashmir landscape that used to figure prominently in South Asian literature and film productions, in stark contrast with the contemporary landscape of ‘a bloody war zone’ (Gupta 2008: 34); it also alludes to the conflation of this idyllic landscape with the popular objectification of women (‘the beauties’) as embodiments of the nation.

⁴See the Sumach Press website, at http://threeoclockpress.com/sumachpress/aboutus.htm (accessed 10 January 2012).

³We must be aware that the marketing campaigns designed by corporative publishers often exploit contemporary audiences’ fascination with violence by emphasizing, in their promotional summaries, the most tragic episodes described in the narratives. The representation of communal gender violence in the post-9/11 context has become an even more loaded issue, as these narratives may be quickly commodified in a market avid for the spectacle of terror where the Muslim man is a favourite villain. I have approached this issue in more detail in a number of essays dealing with the ideological exploitation of fiction by Indo-Canadian authors in the global cultural markets (see, for instance, Martín-Lucas 2012).

⁵The Sherpa woman referred to in the name of this first story and of the whole cycle works as a loose linking thread, appearing at the very beginning of the volume and at the very end, in the story ‘The Tin Bus’, and framing the collection of narratives around a female figure who symbolically embodies many of the tensions and political themes in the stories, as can be inferred from the following comment in the last story: ‘Because of the war, no more trekking here. No more livelihood. Her way of life is going fast. She's a ghost. Everything now is exports, silicon chips, satellite televisions and American videos’ (Gupta 2008: 165).

⁶A report released in July 2011 from the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons has raised the figures to ‘more than 70,000 dead and more than 8,000 disappeared’ (Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons 2011).

⁷Gupta is never complacent in her portrayal of high-class characters and she subtly criticizes their liberal urge ‘to help’; in Mona's view, the trips to the refugee camps are ‘missions of charity the Hindu tea ladies were always concocting to escape the confines of their married lives. Mona had grown to despise charity, an act born of self-serving blindness and poverty of imagination’ (Gupta 2008: 102).

⁸The testimonies and medical reports on rape in the refugee camps of Jammu and Delhi are numerous (see Munshi 2008). The truth is that after over 20 years, a whole generation has grown into adulthood in these provisional camps, and, although life conditions are bad for men and women, women's life experiences in the camps are tougher, being responsible for the whole family in a context where men are most often absent (killed, disappeared, imprisoned) or unemployed, being mostly either ‘elderly men’ or ‘idle youths’ (Gupta 2008: 104). In such dire conditions, many women are forced to resort to prostitution, which is also rapidly increasing the number of women in the camps affected by HIV/AIDS (Munshi 2008).

⁹The title of this short story plays critically with that promotional image of Kashmir in Hindi films as ‘number one honeymoon vacation site’ (Gupta 2008: 20). To the ‘lovers dancing in the hills of Kashmir’ (34) in the films, Gupta makes her character Mandir state that: ‘Kashmir is a bloody war zone! These stupid lovers are prancing in fields of land mines’ (34). This is one more instance in the cycle where Gupta critiques typical representations of Kashmir.

¹⁰In her press statement quoted at the beginning of this essay, Arundhati Roy (2010) makes reference to Asiya and Nilofer Jan, the two women raped and murdered in 2009 in the infamous ‘Shopian case’, which provoked massive protests. For a detailed report on this case, see the Independent Women's Initiative for Justice in Shopian (2009).

¹¹See also Giles and Hyndman's comprehensive anthology Sites of Violence (2004).

¹²Menon and Bhasin provide an outstanding extensive analysis of the ‘Recovery Operation’ as another form of communal exploitation of women's sexuality in terms of national purity in ‘Abducted Women, the State and Questions of Honour’ (1996; see also Kabir 2009).