https://orcid.org/0009-0000-4580-0069
ABSTRACT
Rahul Pandita is an acclaimed Indian writer and journalist. He is a 2015 Yale World Fellow, and the author of multiple bestselling non-fiction books, including Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement (2011) and Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (2013). He is known chiefly for his reportage on Maoist insurgencies in central and eastern India and the issues pertaining to Kashmiri Pandits in Northern India. His works focus on violence, displacement, and life for those with experience of forced migration. Our Moon Has Blood Clots is one of the first books to portray the events of the Kashmiri Pandit exodus and its aftermath. This conversation focuses on Pandita’s perspective on his writings and the plight of the exiled Kashmiri Pandits. It also covers the trauma experienced by the community, especially in exile, and the question of their approach towards a better future.
Rahul Pandita Photo credit: Ashish Sharma February 19, 2013
Introduction: The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits
Rahul Pandita is an Indian author and journalist best known for his works on the Kashmiri Pandit community’s experiences in India. His writing has won him praise from critics because of its empathy and storytelling qualities. The Indian historian Ramachandra Guha remarks that the memoir Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (Pandita Citation2013a) is a “powerful and moving book [that] throws a sharp new light onto one of the most tragic conflicts in the modern world”.Footnote1 Pandita is dedicated to preserving the memory and history of the struggle and tragedy of his community, and his writing draws on his own experiences as a Kashmiri Pandit. Our Moon Has Blood Clots, which details the forced migration of the Kashmiri Pandit community from the Kashmir Valley to other parts of India, especially Jammu, after 1989, is Pandita’s best-known book and was shortlisted for the Crossword Book Award.Footnote2 It illuminates the horrific uprooting that the community went through during that time. He has also authored the bestselling Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement (Pandita Citation2011), which is set in the district of Bastar in the state of Chhattisgarh, central India. In 2010, he received the International Red Cross award for conflict reporting from the Maoist-affected areas in central and east India. Apart from his books, Pandita is a prolific journalist who has contributed to prominent Indian newspapers such as The Hindu, The Indian Express, and The Times of India. Following his efforts, and the widespread reception of his book, the complicated problems surrounding the struggles of Kashmiri Pandits in Kashmir have become more widely understood. Several accolades and acclaim have been bestowed upon Pandita’s writing and journalism. He became the 2015 Yale World Fellow, and he remains a significant figure in Indian literature and journalism, mainly concerning matters related to conflict, displacement, and the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits.
In the late 1980s, Pandita and his community members, as Hindus living in a Muslim-majority region, were forced by secessionist groups, the Muslim United Front (MUF) and the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF), to leave their ancestral homes in Kashmir. In order to create a homogenized Islamic society in Kashmir, these groups threatened the Kashmiri Pandits through informal notices to leave Kashmir Valley or face death, eventually causing their exodus. Selective killings by militants followed, with some facing brutal deaths, especially prominent figures in the Kashmiri Pandit community. After 1989, the Kashmiri Pandits were explicitly targeted by militant forces who were backed by secessionist groups wishing to advance their communal agenda (European Foundation for South Asian Studies Citation2017). All these events led to the mass migration from the valley of Kashmir of Kashmiri Pandits seeking refuge in Jammu (in the southern part of the state) where they became “Internally Displaced Persons” (IDPs). Approximately 250,000 to 300,000 Kashmiri people were displaced (Malhotra Citation2007), uprooted not only from their homes but also from their centuries-old culture and traditions. They now constitute one of the region’s most prominent groups of internally displaced individuals (Datta Citation2016).
In Our Moon Has Blood Clots, Pandita captures the harrowing experiences endured by his family and community and delves into their lives in exile by narrating the events that led to their forced migration after 1989. While memoirs typically involve a first-person account of past occurrences, Our Moon Has Blood Clots also represents the collective ordeal endured by those who could not directly bear witness. Pandita incorporates testimonies from other victims who faced adverse conditions after being uprooted from their homeland. For instance, he talked with people who had to live in government-allotted one-room houses in a newly built township in Jammu. Based on the quality of living there, one of the inmates refers to it as “Jagti Taavanship (Jagti Hellhole)” (Pandita Citation2017, 238). These testimonies offer powerful insights into the history of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, opening the imaginative capacity to comprehend that community’s past and the present. This interview focuses primarily on Our Moon Has Blood Clots and the related issues that emerged after its publication. Pandita talks in detail about why he chose memoir over fiction for this book. He discusses issues like trauma, attachment to home, and the poor living conditions that his community members experienced after they migrated. He further challenges the description by some in the Kashmiri Pandit community of the exodus as a genocide comparable to the Holocaust. In doing so, he warns against losing a sense of proportionality, remarking that the Holocaust intended to completely eradicate Jewish people as an ethnic group, while the exodus involved selective killings and forced displacement, which led to mass migration and the cultural effacement of Kashmiri Pandits. He suggests that his community members should move on with their lives without ever forgetting about what happened to them in Kashmir. The interview was conducted over a WhatsApp voice call on October 26, 2023. The call was recorded and then transcribed.
Can you elaborate on the significance of the book’s title, Our Moon Has Blood Clots? Also, the initial edition was subtitled The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits, and later it was changed to A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir. What made you change this?
I think what is personally very important for me as an author is to get a title right. Different writers have different processes by which they write a book, but I am a journalist and trained as a journalist. When we were growing up as journalists and proposed an idea to the senior editors, they would say: “Tell this to me in one line; what is the story?” So, that is what the title of the book does. I need to get the title of my book right, and once I get it, the concept of the book really flows from there. So, in this case, the title of the book is taken from the lines of a poem by Pablo Neruda, which is mentioned on the first page of the book. It is called “Oh, My Lost City”, where he writes of “an earlier time when the flowers were not stained with blood, the moon with blood clots!” It signifies that there was a time when there were no black dots on the moon. As far as the story is concerned, I think it really fits well with what I wanted to do through this book. I wanted to tell everyone that our moon has these blood clots, and it is no use hiding them or brushing them under the so-called carpet. We should talk about them and confront them. Only then is any kind of reconciliation or healing possible. The same happened with Hello, Bastar (Pandita Citation2011). The book’s basic premise was how a group of Maoists entered Bastar for the first time in June 1980. I thought they were literally saying hello to Bastar. And that is how the concept of Bastar came to me.
And as for changing the subtitle in the later editions, there is no specific reason. When the book first came out, I wanted its subtitle to be the one we later adopted: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir (2017). But my publisher felt very strongly that there was literally no literature or exhaustive account of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits prior to this book and he wanted to keep it as The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits. So, the second subtitle had no deeper meaning except that I wanted it. I felt the story of exodus and exile in today’s world is very universal. It’s happening everywhere, in the Middle East, Europe, the entire Arab world, and across our country, and I thought the title, A Memoir of a Lost Home, would resonate with a larger audience. And it really has.
Why did you write your story as a memoir, not a novel? Would it have affected the authenticity of the story?
That is a very pertinent question. When I became a journalist, a lot of prominent journalists in this country were going to Kashmir because Kashmir was the “sexy insurgency”. But since I came from that area, I knew I did not want to get into that bhedchaal (herd mentality). I reported from Kashmir also. But that is not where I went first. Because of exceptional circumstances, my work took me to Bastar, where I worked for many years, at a formidable time of my career. And since I had some things to say about Bastar, some people were impressed and happy with my work because it suited their narrative. But at some point, I wanted to tell the story of Kashmiri Pandits, my own life story.
Some of my friends advised me to write it as a novel because sometimes they felt some things get sugar-coated. So, my friend Patrick French and I had long conversations about this. French is a well-established and celebrated writer who knew about these things much better than I did. Meru Gokhale, a leading publisher in this country, also was clear that this should be a memoir. Then I also became convinced that that should be the form it takes, and it became the first authentic document about the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. It is almost a journalistic account about them, part memoir, part reportage account. However, later I realized some truths are better confronted through fiction than non-fiction. But if I had to do this book again, I would write it as a memoir because it resonated with readers and gave my people documentation. There are people, youngsters, part of my diaspora, who, many years after the exodus, sometimes asked their parents or grandparents about what happened. So, in the last ten years they have found it easier just to buy my book and gift a copy to whoever wants to tell the story, and it has worked well for them. I think that has been its biggest strength.
G. Thomas Couser (Citation2012) writes in Memoir: An Introduction: “If the events are not recounted, they may be forgotten; memoir serves to archive them for subsequent generations” (21). Do you wish your subsequent generations to know about their community’s past? If so, why?
I think they should. I don’t know whether you have seen my newspaper articles, especially the few articles in the Times of India in the last couple of years. The best advice I give Kashmiri Pandits today is to accept that they have no future in the Kashmir Valley. Even if there will be normality in Kashmir tomorrow, it is a very closed normality today as we speak. But it will never be normal for a Kashmiri Pandit. I tell them that they should adopt cosmopolitanism, be liberal cosmopolitans in their outlook and have a world-class education, whether in India or South Africa, no matter where they are. They should give their children the best education, consider themselves universal citizens, and move on with their lives now. But it is essential for a community not to let go of its history. Subsequent generations should know where they came from and what happened to their forefathers, especially exiled people.
I think that the concept of memory is crucial. We have seen in the last three decades the subsequent whitewashing of the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. There are already things happening to portray them as evil landlords who were evicted because of some revolution. That is why telling future generations about what happened is necessary, because 30 or 50 years later, if they are in some bar or on some train, and someone comes to them and says, you are a Kashmiri Pandit who was evicted, they should be able to counter that as a fake narrative. That is why this book is important. After all, a newspaper article tells a limited story, but the book is forever. It remains an authentic documentation of oral history and recorded history. So, it should be shared widely, especially among my people, so that they can move on with their lives.
In the book, you mention one incident where your friend’s daughter, who recently started going to school, told her teacher that she had no home as the one she had was burnt down. Do you think that sharing the stories with subsequent generations can lead to intergenerational trauma? How can it be dealt with?
Many people now prefer not to tell their stories to their children, especially those who have gone to different countries, because it also leads to confusion in some cases. First, they are in an alien country where they must synchronize their identity with a different culture while living there and fulfil expectations like singing the national anthem. Then, they are also told that they are from India, which is a more significant identity than a Kashmiri identity. And on top of it, you also say that you’re from Kashmir and you are a Kashmiri Pandit. So sometimes, I have seen in my interactions with people, especially in the diaspora, that they prefer not to confuse the kids further. But as they grow up a bit and are more mature, the parents explain their exodus, and I don’t think at that stage in their lives it leads to any trauma. The young girl mentioned in my book, an adult now, was only a child then. In her case, the parents overdid it a bit. Otherwise, people talk about exodus with their kids because they are only concerned about the fact that this is something that they should know without it affecting their everyday life, and it has not in most cases. It does not show any generational trauma and is a non sequitur in this context.
Memoirs are based on one’s memories, which are highly subjective and change depending on a person’s present circumstances. How did you balance the objectivity and subjectivity of the events discussed in Our Moon Has Blood Clots?
It’s a highly event-based book. There are a lot of events in the run-up to what happened to us. There’s a cricket match in 1983, another cricket match in 1986, the death of a militant on September 14, 1989, and so on.Footnote3 And I had a very distinct memory of all these events. But of course, as you said, it’s based on fact. And I think writers of memoirs, like W.G. Sebald and Primo Levy, talk exhaustively about memory. That is where the journalistic regimen and discipline come into the picture. For instance, I have a memory of two Border Security Force (BSF) personnel who died outside my home. I have a very faint memory of it. But then, every event, small or big, described in this book has been researched and authenticated by other sources. Everything is quoted from newspaper reports, people and journalists who have seen and witnessed those events first-hand. I have referred to police documents that are recorded in the unfolding of these events. For example, I wrote that a man called Hamid Sheikh was arrested and wounded, and the next day, a picture of him appeared in the Kashmir Times where he’s displaying this victory sign after his release, and there’s a bottle of talcum powder behind him; anyone can go to the Kashmir Times archive, and the picture is right there (Pandita Citation2017, 74). So, it is all completely authenticated, the circumstances through which people died. Now, Naveen Sapru, for example: I have spoken to eyewitnesses who saw that happening.Footnote4 For instance, B.K. Ganjoo’s wife was very reluctant to talk about his death.Footnote5 I have not been able to speak to her, but I have spoken to his brothers and relatives, and to police officers who were there. I have talked to his colleagues.
I was also conscious that if this book came out, it would be scrutinized. People would try to find faults in my story because the aim would be to contradict it which I feel is wrong. In the days following the release of my book, the Kashmir-based newspaper Greater Kashmir carried five reviews of it, which is unheard of. You usually write one review, and that’s it. They were so alarmed by my book that they carried five reviews in seven or eight days. But none of those reviews could point out one mistake in my narrative.
Our Moon Has Blood Clots gives the idea that apart from witnessing violence in 1990, the major trauma of the Kashmiri Pandits lies in their attachment to their homes and homeland. The loss of their ancestral home is a significant blow to their minds. You mention in your book that the statement “Our home in Kashmir had twenty-two rooms” became your mother’s personal anthem. Do you think losing a home causes more trauma than witnessing a violent event?
The difference is that losing a home is also a sudden event. In most cases, you will lose a home in a matter of a moment. There is a build-up of violence which creates tension, and one fine day, events become so dire that you are forced to leave your home. But circumstances after that decision sometimes last forever. That is precisely what happened to many Kashmiri Pandits. They lost their homes, but then had to re-establish themselves in completely alien territory. Although it was our own state, we came to Jammu, but it’s very different from Kashmir, geographically as well as culturally.Footnote6 It’s like the rest of India for us. Most of us are not used to living in those conditions which are completely different from those in Kashmir. Then, the apathy of the people of Jammu is also natural. I am not trying to blame these people, even in my book. Jammu is such a small city; suddenly, around 200,000 to 300,000 people land in your city, and you don’t know what to do with them. They are culturally different, and their language and food habits are unfamiliar. But that leads to a lot of trauma. You have a very different, distinct idea of home. And suddenly, you are living in this goddamn refugee camp in a tent, and with the utmost difficulty, you get the chance to live in one room where the landlord does not understand you, you do not understand the landlord. You have a very different lifestyle, and he is not used to that lifestyle. So, in some cases, you will face difficulty and that leads to a lot of trauma.
I think, in my mother’s case and that of many people I know personally, the trauma of living as a refugee was much worse than the trauma of losing a home. It is surprising that this is what Patrick also noted. I remember meeting him a day before Our Moon Has Blood Clots was launched at a function in Delhi. We were together in a cafe, and he said: “I read a lot of similar books about what happens to people when they’re displaced because of violent extremism.” It has happened in Rwanda, it has happened in Africa, even in India. There’s a constant displacement happening because of this or that, and for violent reasons. But he said: “For the first time, I have read an account of what happens after displacement. The life of a refugee is so difficult and complex.” You have to live on a day-to-day basis, you have to deal with stuff daily, you have a family of four or five people, and there’s no water or shelter. There is this uncertainty. The uncertainty kills you sometimes. I am 48 years old, and my parents were younger than I am today. My father was 44, and they had to leave that place. Suppose if someone tells me today that I have to leave my house suddenly, I’d be devastated. I wouldn’t have the strength to rebuild or restart my life anywhere. Today, I am much more exposed to life, to the outside world, than my parents ever were. I have many more avenues, better equipped in life than they were. But even now, I can’t imagine restarting my life. I cannot imagine what would have happened to them facing that uncertainty in 1990. So, I think that there was far more significant trauma for our parents’ generation in being a refugee than the physical displacement.
In the book, one of the inmates living in Jagti township claims that living in exile is even worse than the experience of exodus, and he calls the township “Jagti taavanship” (hellhole). Do you think the effects of traumatic events that your community witnessed in 1990 were compounded because of the miserable conditions Pandits were put into?
Even after 20 years of exodus, you had to live in such conditions. People are in a much better situation now. And barring a few families, I don’t think we need any support now. We are almost a 100 percent literate community in that sense. But, in those days, it was a hellhole. I have visited it several times. It was a terrible place, especially for the older generation, my father’s generation; it’s been very traumatic for them, and especially someone like my father used to living in Pahalgam in a huge house; he was not necessarily a rich man, but it was a very peaceful life. You have everything, and there is no shortage of food and water. There is a stream outside your home, and you have cattle and no worry in the world. And suddenly, you come to this “taavanship” [hellhole] where you live in a small room with leakages, power outages, and whatnot. There are sockets, but there is no wiring in it. So, it becomes a tipping point where you start cursing your life. You have withstood all the goddamn trauma for 20 years, and after 20 years, you go into this goddamn quarter, and you think that, okay, life will be okay. And then you look at the socket and see that there is no goddamn wire in it. It’s a minor thing compared to what the person has seen in the last 20 to 25 years. But sometimes, that becomes a tipping point: “Is this what I deserve in life? That after 25 years, the government has given me a living quarter. And I’m just trying to charge my phone, and I can’t charge because there’s no wiring inside”? So that sometimes becomes a tipping point in a person’s life, where he experiences a breakdown.
In one of your articles, you wrote: “The return of the Pandits to Kashmir Valley seems like a distant dream unless the wounds of the 1990s exodus are healed” (Pandita Citation2013b). Can you see any possible way of healing these psychological wounds caused more than 30 years ago?
I have changed my opinion about this in the last few years because circumstances change as years pass, and we see things differently. As I mentioned, reconciliation is impossible now because things are happening in a certain way in Kashmir. Maybe the political process will start tomorrow, and terrorism will come to an end, and then the Kashmiri Pandits might be able to go back. But I think they should not. First of all, there will never be perfect conditions for them to return. It is, and it will remain at its heart, a homogenized society and also a very radically conservative society. From the recent examples, especially in the last few years, we have seen what kind of behaviour, events, and results are caused by such relocations. It will be challenging for Kashmiri Pandits to return to such a conservative society with so much religious extremism. Not only Kashmiri Pandits but no modern, liberal, plural, cosmopolitan person could survive there anymore. I know of several so-called moderates, which is a very vague term, but moderate Kashmiri Muslims of my age or people who are younger than me, who do not want to go back to Kashmir Valley.Footnote7 When religious extremism hits you in a certain way, it also leads to a lot of hypocrisy.
I keep on telling the younger generation the future is cosmopolitanism. Make life wherever you are, whether in the USA or Portugal in Delhi or Kanpur, no matter where you are. Take your gods everywhere and make small shrines. Look at the Kashmiris who shifted in the 17th or 18th century to places like Lucknow, Allahabad, and Jaipur. God knows where and who they are, but it’s okay. They don’t need any certificate. They observe their festivals much more aggressively and much more perfectly than a new-age Kashmiri or a new Kashmiri does.
Since it is said that the experience of trauma varies from one culture to another, how do you think the trauma experienced by Kashmiri Pandits differs from the experience of the Holocaust?
I think it would be unfair to compare the Holocaust with the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandit community. The exodus happened on a much smaller scale. The Holocaust is among the worst of genocides to occur in the course of human civilization. But if we look at it on the very micro level, the other counterpoint to this is that if a family has lost a child, a son was shot somewhere, or some family member died of depression or something, for them, the entire world has collapsed. So, how does it matter whether the scale of the Jewish Holocaust was more significant or not? For them, it is a holocaust in itself. But that apart, theoretically speaking, writers or academics sometimes have to be a little sensible about this. And the most important thing I keep on saying in the context of journalism is that you sometimes have to have a sense of proportion. The importance of proportion is missing from our narrative or idiom today. Look at this crisis between Israel and Palestine. We take such extreme positions from both sides as if there is no nuance to it. Of course, what happened to the Israelis is terrible. But what is happening in Gaza is also a terrible thing. We should be able to see both of these things at the same time. Someone who has been given mental faculty, a cortex and a cerebellum should understand such basic things. So I tell Kashmiri Pandits that sometimes they get very emotional; that is where Our Moon Has Blood Clots comes in handy, because in academic circles, sometimes you stand up in some university – for example, in Stanford in the USA – and say: “Oh, we faced a genocide, or people got displaced, millions of people were raped”; and because you’re so emotional about this nobody takes you seriously when you call this a genocide. It’s not genocide; you have no idea what genocide is. So, we have to use these words very carefully. I have never used terms like “genocide”. It must be kept in mind while dealing with stuff like this.
In the movie The Kashmir Files (Agnihotri Citation2022), one of the characters calls it a “genocide” and not simply an exodus, while comparing it to the Holocaust. Do you agree? Why or why not?
No! I think it’s ethnic cleansing. We have to be very careful about these things. It has also led to almost a 100 percent displacement of people from a land where their forefathers had lived for thousands of years. There’s recorded history of so many centuries. Then, the complete cultural effacement of people, their way of life, language, and everything is gone. But as responsible people such as artists, film-makers, or academics, we are accountable for the truth. So, we cannot loosely use terms like “genocide” because it’s also an insult to people who faced genocide. You have absolutely no idea what the Holocaust is. Have you seen what the Holocaust is? Have you seen what happened in Dachau, Auschwitz, or Treblinka? Please read it up a bit, and then we’ll come to the usage of such terms. But I think these are longer-term battles. And sometimes, we need to keep quiet because our emotions or sentiments are involved. And sometimes, when you say these things or shout them at the top of your voice, it leads to a certain catharsis, which is sometimes required.
Why do you think the issue of the Kashmiri Pandit exodus received less attention initially? Only after your book’s publication did two Bollywood movies appear on the subject (Agnihotri Citation2022; Chopra Citation2020). One even became one of the highest-grossing Hindi movies of 2022. Do you think your book played a crucial role in bringing this issue into the limelight after more than 20 years since it occurred?
Nobody was writing about it because nobody cared. And in our scheme of things, it was never fashionable to talk about Kashmiri Pandits. If you look at all foreign journalists, and I don’t blame them, even if I go to a foreign country, I will see where a lot of action and excitement is. The “sexy story”, as I call it, was in Kashmir Valley, so they all went there. But journalists in our own country have to be held responsible for total ignorance about what happened. I have gone through all the archives, which is very exhausting. Even after writing this book, I visited various newspaper archives like The Times of India, Hindustan Times, Tribune, and India Today, small newspapers and prominent newspapers. There was so little reporting about the exodus. A refugee camp for Kashmiri Pandits was established in Bombay, and some feature writer went there and spoke to three or four people. And that’s the end of it. Some early reports were published in The Times of India and a couple in India Today. And that’s it, as if nothing had happened to 300,000 to 400,000 people in their own country. The way they were killed and massacred, brutalized on the streets, this story should have come out. But, in later years, right-wing populism became popular in India. And somehow, this story became associated with the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and the right wing. It gained some traction much later in life. But I think that is why some of these stories must be told with a certain authenticity. I know people in US universities, in think tanks, and among the European diplomats who have read this book, and they had never heard the story. And they said: “We have been visiting Kashmir valley for the last ten or 15 years; how come we never heard these stories?” But I think that has been, in many ways, the strength of this book. It broke that dam, basically. It’s been translated into all major Indian languages: Tamil, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Kannada, Bengali, Odia, and Hindi. So, it is read everywhere now.
All your books are non-fiction based on serious sociopolitical issues. Have you considered writing a creative fictional work based on your experiences?
Yes. In the last few years, some things have happened. My work, frankly, is not restricted to Kashmir. I have more significant concerns about this country. I have bigger concerns about the state of this world. For example, I am fascinated with the concept of cognition and with the idea of human behaviour. At some point in time, I would like to tackle those issues. In the last few years, I have understood that you sometimes come much closer to truth through fiction than non-fiction. So yes, there is something of that sort on [the] cards, and I would like to write fiction at some point.
Thank you so much for your time.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Madhav Dubey
Madhav Dubey is a research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. His research is focused on trauma studies, graphic narratives, and migration. His research paper on the representation of trauma in Malik Sajad’s graphic memoir Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir appeared in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
Nagendra Kumar
Nagendra Kumar is professor of English in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. He specializes in English language, literature, and communication studies. His research papers have appeared in journals such as ANQ, Southeast Asian Review of English, South Asian Popular Culture, South Asian Review, Critique: Studies in Fiction, Asiatic, Media Watch, Rupkatha, Caesura, Contemporary Voice of Dalit, IUP Journal of English Studies, and Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
Notes
1. The memoir was republished in 2017 by Penguin with the title Our Moon has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir. The quote occurs on the cover page of both editions and on Rahul Pandita’s official website: https://rahulpandita.com/.
2. The Crossword Book Award was established in 1998 by the Indian book retailer, Crossword, aiming to compete with western literary awards such as the Booker Prize and the Pulitzer Prize.
3. On October 13, 1983, the first-ever international cricket match was played in the Sher-e-Kashmir stadium in Jammu and Kashmir, between India and the West Indies team. However, the whole stadium shouted pro-Pakistani slogans and booed Indian players (Pandita Citation2017, 51). On April 18, 1986, India and Pakistan played at Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE), in the final of the Austral-Asia cup. Pakistan won, and people in Kashmir celebrated their victory (Pandita Citation2017, 53). Pandit Tika Lal Taploo, an advocate and president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Kashmir chapter, was shot dead by militants near his home in Kashmir. For further information, see the European Foundation of South Asian Studies: https://www.efsas.org/publications/study-papers/the-exodus-of-kashmiri-pandits/.
4. Naveen Sapru was a telecom department employee, killed on Habba Kadal Bridge in Srinagar while returning from office, and his killers danced around his body (Pandita Citation2017, 86).
5. B.K. Ganjoo was a telecom engineer killed by militants in his home while hiding inside a rice barrel (Pandita Citation2016).
6. Jammu is a city in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir, India.
7. Pandita is referring to the idea that, even today, after more than 30 years of the exodus, people are reluctant to relocate to Kashmir, because religious extremism persists.
References
- Agnihotri, Vivek, dir. 2022. The Kashmir Files. Mumbai, India: Zee Studios.
- Chopra, Vidhu Vinod, dir. 2020. Shikara. Mumbai, India: Vinod Chopra Films.
- Couser, G. Thomas. 2012. Memoir: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Datta, Ankur. 2016. “Dealing with dislocation: Migration, place and home among displaced Kashmiri Pandits in Jammu and Kashmir.” Contributions to Indian Sociology 50 (1): 52–79. https://doi.org/10.1177/0069966715615024.
- European Foundation for South Asian Studies. 2017. “The Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits.” https://www.efsas.org/publications/study-papers/the-exodus-of-kashmiri-pandits/.
- Malhotra, Charu. 2007. “Internally Displaced People from Kashmir: Some Observations.” Indian Anthropologist 37 (2): 71–80. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41920041.
- Pandita, Rahul. 2011. Hello Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement. New Delhi: Tranquebar Press.
- Pandita, Rahul. 2013a. Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits. Delhi: Random House India.
- Pandita, Rahul. 2013b. “Why the Return of Kashmiri Pandits Is Still a Distant Dream.” The New York Times, June 3. https://archive.nytimes.com/india.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/why-the-return-of-kashmiri-pandits-is-still-a-distant-dream/.
- Pandita, Rahul. 2016. “There Are No Goodbyes.” The Hindu, May 13, 2016. https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/there-are-no-goodbyes/article5594303.ece.
- Pandita, Rahul. 2017. Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir. New Delhi: Random House.