Hellfire in heaven

With Kashmir, Manreet Sodhi Someshwar ends her moving Partition Trilogy. The first book, Lahore, dealt with the conflagration that flared up in the northwestern part of a then unified India at the time of Partition, and the many innocents that conflagration consumed, even as Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel and Lord Mountbatten fought hard to contain the fire.

The second book, Hyderabad, gave us a behind-the-scenes glimpse of all the machinations that went on to bring the extremely recalcitrant Nizam to the table to sign the Instrument of Accession, how it became a battle of nerves after a while, and yes, how many innocents paid the price for that eventual if uneasy peace.

In her concluding work, the focus shifts to the beautiful valley of Jammu & Kashmir, in which she presciently shows readers how that ‘jannat’ was from its early days a seething, simmering cauldron. A story that is, as the writer puts it, ancient and current, layered and complex, deep and unsettling.

Just two months into independence, India and Pakistan stand in a tense face-off. Loathe to alienate the citizens of his Muslim-majority state, and reluctant to anger the Dogras living in Kashmir, Maharaja Hari Singh is in a cleft-stick position, lacking both the will and the political resources to act. Poonch in western Jammu is in revolt mode. Britain is in wait-and-watch mode, and then, the newly created state of Pakistan decides to act. They orchestrate incursions into Jammu from across the Punjab border as well as send in a horde of tribals, with some of these kabailis holding very suspect credentials, but seemingly being Pakistani army regulars.

And so, this crude and cruel cohort rides into the land of the chinar, wreaking havoc, death and devastation at all their pit stops. But India hasn’t exactly been caught unawares; the Kashmir units are all deployed immediately after the Maharaja, his back to the wall, signs the Instrument of Accession, and the Indian pushback is an effective one.

Just like in the other two earlier books, Sodhi Someshwar unspools events as witnessed and experienced by subaltern characters who come to life on the page, soon getting the reader to root for them. Here, we have the girl with golden hair and silver skin, Zooni Gujjar, married to the much older Masud Ahmed who is preparing to fight against India. Zooni’s village comes under attack, and she has to escape with her ‘co-wife’. Zooni’s tracks are tumultuous and most interesting in their trajectory, with her eventually becoming a guide and sniper to the Indian army in the mountainous terrain she knows so well.

Then we have Sepoy Malik who we first met in Lahore, still haunted by his Tara, who is forever counselling him to help the women of Kashmir since, as she points out, it is women who inevitably bear the brunt of all suffering in wars. There is Durga Mehra, widow of the district commissioner of Muzaffarabad, who rises above her affliction and sets up a centre to help train other widows, rape victims and rescued women refugees in domestic crafts. We watch Sheikh Abdullah, the Lion of Kashmir, as he grows in stature and becomes the first head of administration in Kashmir after the war. We watch a tired and somewhat defeated Sardar Patel defend his strategising. We watch the Mountbattens prepare to leave the land they had grown to love, and in Edwina’s case, prepare to leave the man she had grown to care for. We watch Pandit Nehru try his level best to contain the inferno consuming the beautiful vale, the land of his forebears. The author skillfully plots the war manoeuvres, taking us along with the characters as they fight pitched battles in Srinagar, in Baramulla, on the mountaintops. The sentiment is kept tightly reined in, as events overtake each other in rapid succession, writing a new history for this land of emerald forests and crystal peaks.

Sodhi Someshwar states that she wrote the Partition Trilogy with the hope that the books will provide fresh stories about a period in time that still thrums and reverberates today. Readers of these three political thrillers will find the old saying coming true, that we need to know our history so as not to repeat it.