Kashmir's long jihad pitted the region's Islamic identity against India’s modernity-suffused vice. The social media commentary unleashed by the dance shows these beliefs are far from spent.
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.
