When a few years ago I wrote a book about Kashmir in 1947, I harboured the hope that it would be translated into Hindi and Urdu, and so gain a wider readership in south Asia. I wondered whether it might perhaps appear in French, Italian (the book opens with my account of a meeting with Sister Emilia, an aged, inspiring Italian nun serving in Kashmir) and other European languages. It hasn't happened - yet. But A Mission in Kashmir has now, much to my pleasure, been published in Tamil. It's been translated by B.R. Mahadevan and published by New Horizon Media. The cover is excellent - I trust the translation is every bit as good. Do let me know! Courtesy of the publishers, I have rather more copies of my book in Tamil than the one, 'trophy' copy I require. So if you are in the UK, read Tamil, and would like a copy of this book, get in touch, and I'll send you one.
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Four years ago I wrote a book. It's about how the Kashmir conflict started in 1947. A Mission in Kashmir was published in India and did rather well there. It's now out of print, and as a service to the world I have posted the full text on line. The book was never published in Britain - and although it was, and is, available online (from Amazon for instance), it was never distributed in bookshops over here. So while I have had the pleasure of seeing my book on sale in Delhi, Srinagar and elsewhere, I've never seen it in a bookshop in the UK. Until today. When I came across a copy in the Oxfam bookshop in Highgate. Priced at £4. I am curious to know how that copy got there, but it was nice to see it on the shelves. But my dilemma - do I buy it myself or not. I have a few copies left, but not all that many. And I do keep doling out copies to those with an interest in the subject. And it is a bargain price (though the India cover price isn't that much higher). What did I decide? Yes, there is now another copy of A Mission in Kashmir in my study. A question prompted by Mirza Waheed's stunningly powerful debut novel, The Collaborator - set in the Kashmir valley in the early 1990s, during the worst violence of the separatist insurgency. My answer is, broadly, yes - and it's a theme I have pursued in a little more detail for a blog on the History Workshop Online site. Novels are worthy of attention and an audience in their own right, but they also illuminate a historical as well as a creative truth. Cover: Islam Gull :A gem of an issue of Granta, writing from and about Pakistan. Amid a cornucopia of riches, with the emphasis more on reportage than fiction, I was taken particularly by Fatima Bhutto's article. Mangho Pir is a Sufi shrine outside Karachi, where the crocodiles are revered as saints, and tended by the Sheedi community (in India, the word would be Sidi) - those of African descent who congregate in small clusters all the way along the Arabian Sea coast from Oman to Karnataka. The Karachi Sheedi have great prowess as dancers and sportsmen - but otherwise are part of the ignored, forsaken underbelly of south Asia. Jane Perlez writes of Jinnah, and the way he is memorialised in current-day Pakistan. Sarfraz Manzoor tells his warm but unsettling story of a British Asian 'marrying out'. And the peerless Basharat Peer humanises the story of the continuing conflict and despair in the Kashmir valley - powerful writing, though its inclusion in a volume entitled, starkly and simply, 'Pakistan', packs its own punch. Mohammed Hanif, whose 'exploding mangoes' is perhaps the most powerful representation in fiction of modern Pakistan, contributes a short story - the human incident behind a riot ... a lovelorn, revolver-wielding, police thug who fires off at random to avenge his humiliation at the hands of a much more worldly-wise Karachi nurse. Andy Roth, the Parliamentary profiler, columnist and obituarist, died yesterday - and there's a fitting obituary in today's Guardian by Ian Aitken, the paper's former political editor. Even more fitting, on the page opposite there's an obituary by Andy of a one-time Tory MP. My guess is there's a few more to come posthumously under his byline.
Todays Guardian obit - the one of Andy Roth, not the one by him - has a charming photo of its subject, Fedora-clad and mischievously good humoured. I remember Andy from my time in the Lobby 20 years and more ago, a generous and convivial colleague, happy to gossip and enlighten the much more junior specimens of Lobby life. Ian Aitken's obituary fills in Andy Roth's back story - his flirtation with the hard left, period as a foreign correspondent and adventurer, and then the wounding clash with McCarthyism that sent him into exile in Britian. There's more in the wiki article and its links. A decade or more after I moved on from Westminster, I got in touch with Andy Roth again. Reading the memoirs of one of the American correspondents in at the beginning of the Kashmir dispute in 1947, she mentioned going trekking at that time with one Andy Roth. Was it him? 'I certainly was Margaret Parton's companion'. he replied by e-mail, 'and was in at the start of the Kashmir war, which was started by a Pakistani Army friend who took French leave with a dozen troops and four machine guns.' I enquired further - his friend was Akbar Khan, later imprisoned in Pakistan's first treason trial. 'Major Akhbar Khan was a confident veteran of the Indian Army', he reminisced - I have his e-mail in front of me, 'who had fought his way up the Italian peninsula during World War II. I met him through his wife's family, the Shah Nawazes. A son of the family ... was with me at Columbia University when I was a graduate student there, 1939-40. His sister, Taazi Shah Nawaz, a novelist, was formerly a Communist, but by the time I reached the subcontinent, a fervent supporter of an independent Pakistan. Her sister was married to Akhbar Khan.' 'Akhbar Khan detested the "brown Englishman" who was Pakistan's first PM and tamely accepted the terms of partition and took matters into his own hands.' A glimpse on a hidden and contested moment in South Asia's history, and an indication of why Andy's sketches and profiles were such a commanding success. It's not often that the epitome of the muscular Anglican missionary, Cecil Tyndale-Biscoe, gets a write up in the daily papers - but he makes it to today's Guardian, thanks to the ever engaging Ian Jack. Tyndale-Biscoe spent much of his life in Kashmir. He is remembered as an educationalist. The boys school in Srinagar which bears his name still flourishes.
Ian Jack writes of the missionary as the man who introduced football into the valley - a very suitable way to mould men. Tyndale-Biscoe also spent a great deal of time tackling what he saw as the vices of his time - a lack of manliness, and the prevalence of sodomy and brothels. His autobiography was entitled, with an immodesty of which he would have been entirely unaware, Tyndale-Biscoe of Kashmir. He didn't "stay on" in independent India, but moved to what was then Rhodesia - a story in itself - and died there in 1949. It's not easy to assess opinion in Kashmir about the best option for the region's status. That's true both sides of the line of control that partitions the former princely state between India and Pakistan.
So all the more intriguing, then, that a big opinion poll has been conducted across Kashmir asking people whether they believe the state should be independent, part of Pakistan or part of India. The involvement of the much respected scholar of contemporary south Asia, Robert Bradnock, adds a measure of authority to the survey. Here's where you can find a brief write-up - look out particularly for the findings from the India-ruled Kashmir Valley, the epicentre of the conflict. |
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