“Kashmiryat,” said Kaushalya Kaul, my husband’s grandmother, wistfully, trying to explain to me the ethos embedded in the word.



It was July 2014 and I was on my first visit to my husband’s ancestral home in Srinagar. Summer mornings in Srinagar carry a nip in the air, and the two family matriarchs, Kaushalya Kaul, 87, and her sister, Usha Kak, 79, chose to sit in the sun, out in the tiny patio, for their morning tea. I sat with them, listening to tales about the extended family, enjoying the inexorable allure of nostalgic stories about the Kashmir Valley. History, when told as a personal narrative can be refreshing, and between them, the grandmothers, a part of one of the oldest Kashmiri Pandit families in Kashmir, have a treasure trove of anecdotes.



As stories unfolded and the conversation veered towards militancy and the exodus of Kashmiri Pandit from the Valley, I asked Kaushalya Kaul about a government plan to rehabilitate Kashmiri Pandits by creating separate zones for them. At that, the joy on her delicately-lined, imperturbable face faded ever so slightly and she frowned. It made her uncomfortable, she said.



So when the Jammu and Kashmir government announced this week that it would facilitate the creation of separate residential zones, or “composite townships”, for Kashmiri Pandits to encourage their return to their homeland, I could imagine the family’s discomfort. While researching this piece, I spoke with Sanjay Tikoo, president of the Kashmir Pandit Sangrish Samiti, which is an organisation representing the interests of Kashmiri Pandits who never migrated from the Valley, and later told my mother-in-law, Urvi Puri, that he does not think it is a great idea. “Of course, none of the Pandits who stayed back think this is a good idea,” she responded.



'State within a state'



My mother-in-law’s family, the Kauls, never really left Kashmir. They stayed on. Their movements in and out of the Valley have been job, education or weather related, never connected to the conflict. The family still has its home on Exchange Road, a few minutes’ walk from the famous Lal Chowk area in Srinagar. It was once an entirely Pandit neighbourhood, but is now a mixed mohalla, with both Muslims and Hindus, although it is mainly Muslim. The Pandits constituted the administrative class in the Valley, associated with culture and traditions, the armed forces, and the Kauls are typical of this profile. Jayalal Kaul, my husband’s great grandfather was the principal of Sri Pratap College, a scholar and eventually secretary of the Jammu and Kashmir Academy of Art, Culture and Languages. His sons Bhavanesh Kaul and Amarendra Kaul both left Srinagar in the 1940s to study at Benares Hindu University and Allahabad University.



Bhavanesh and Kaushalya Kaul eventually returned to Srinagar in the early 1980s, after his retirement, and then stayed through the years of militancy. They were not alone. Several members of the extended clan retained their state government jobs and stayed on in Srinagar. It was only when their advancing years made the brutal winters difficult to bear in a strife-torn Srinagar did the family eventually find it necessary to find a base in Delhi and move out. But, save for a few years in the early nineties, when the militancy was at its peak, making travel in and out of the Valley difficult, the family spent most of the year at the 80-year-old redbrick house on Exchange Road. When the Jhelum raged last year, family members were stuck for days, along with the rest of the submerged city, to be eventually rescued by volunteers in a dinghy.



The hardships associated with the Pandit history, the exodus from the Valley, the loss of life and property, the sale of homes for a pittance to start life over in the squalor of refugee camps, is not this family’s pain. Not their story. Jayalal Kaul, perhaps in an act of foresight, built an outhouse on the property and encouraged a caretaker family to move in. To this day, Hansraj and his family stay there, and perhaps their presence was instrumental in keeping the house safe. Or maybe it was just plain luck.



Many were not so fortunate and not so cushioned. Are the proposed townships the answer for these families? At first instance, such townships conjure up images of shoddily built ghettos. Those who see parallels with the Palestinian situation, call them settlements or even a “state within a state”. While some reactions around the proposed plan exaggerate its segregatory impact, the truth is very little is actually known about what this means in specific terms.



Composite culture



But a few questions come to mind. How many of the displaced Pandit families (by one estimate 62,000) might actually relocate? There is a real fear that these will turn into real-estate rackets, as families move in and then sell their homes to locals in due course. A new generation may not even want to relocate. Some families may still be in refugee camps, trapped in their deracinated existence, but many, particularly the young, have made their way into better lives.



Even if the government’s “build it and they will come” philosophy pans out, Tikoo points out the obvious flaw. Tikoo’s family was one of those who refused to leave through the militancy-fraught nineties and his organisation has been lobbying for a future for the Pandit community in the state. “The question to ask is whether the bureaucracy is equipped to handle such settlements," he said. "Where are the jobs, the ration cards? It is a known fact that the governance in the state is a problem.”



For many in the Pandit community, the uneasiness implicit in such enclaves, and their implied segregation, goes against the ethos of their composite culture and the graciousness of Kashmiryat. Mohallas were always mixed neighbourhoods and there were never any exclusively Muslim and Hindu areas. People were deeply entrenched in each other’s lives and often participated together in festivities, including weddings. It was common practice for Pandit families to visit Muslim shrines and dargahs. My mother-in-law has distinct memories of visiting the shrine of the Sufi saint Dastageer Sahib (it was burnt in 2012 and is being restored) with her grandmother. “This was Sufi Islam for you," she said. "Visiting the Muslim places of worship was common practice amongst the Pandit community.”



It’s understandable that any implied exclusion makes Kaushalya Kaul and her ilk uncomfortable.



