“I like being present in spaces where I am not welcome because you do not deserve to feel comfortable just because you’re racist or sexist or small-minded.”
Sachi Koul
I am Nilofar and I hail from the suburbs of a small town called Handwara in North Kashmir region. I recently had a fateful ‘rubaru’ with the ugly face of misogyny in my hometown where I was attending a Musical Fest in Handwara. At the fest our local heartthrobs, Waqar Khan and Kabul Bukhari, were enthralling us with their soulful voice as we grooved in blissfulness to their mesmerizing music. Never did we know that our moment of blissful enjoyment will spell doom for us with our lives being threatened and our families being subjected to ignominy.
Play Video to see Kashmiri Girls enjoy in a Musical Fest at Handwara college
Irony
Its ironic that the same people who usually propagate the slogan of ‘Azaadi’ have got no respect for my freedom, freedom of women. So it compelled me to think that have women always faced such predicament in Kashmir in the past or things were somewhat different? With these queries in mind I picked up some books from the library and took some assistance from our good old Professor Google to reach some logical conclusion.
History Insights
Let’s travel back to mid 14th Century when Kashmir first came under Islamic rule under Shah Mir. Since then the Valley has predominantly had a culture of Sufism which believed in ‘wahdat-al-wujud’ (unity of all existence), finding God in everything. In early history, Kashmir has witnessed powerful women rulers like Queen Didda and Kota Rani and boasted of some overpowering female mystics and poets like Lal Ded (14th Century), Habba Khatoon (16th Century), Arnimal (18th Century), Rupa Bhawani (17th Century) and many more in the recent times from commercial pilots to IAS, IFS, IPS and authors. Despite such prominent, the lives of common Kashmiri women, primarily, have always been inferior in status to men, but throughout history there are no records of suppression or subjugation of
women in Kashmiri culture.
The problems for women intensified when somewhere down the line we lost touch with our roots of Sufism and inadvertently moved towards Wahhabism. The intrusion of Wahhabi ideology into Kashmir can be dated back to early 1990s when the militants tried to ban beauty parlors, cinema halls, wine shops and instructed the women to wear the Islamic dress code in contradiction to our ancient Kashmiri Sufi culture. The year 2001 was a watershed moment for Kashmiri women when a militant group called Lashkar-e-Jabar fixed 1 st September as the deadline for wearing Hijabs and Burqas. They were actively supported in this heinous endeavor by Dukhtaran-e-Milat (Separatist Women Organisation). The effect of the same can be correlated with the exponential increase in the sale of hijabs and burqas that year. Since then the stature of women in the Kashmiri society has been on a steady decline in this conservative and a patriarchal society. I want to tell these people who issue guidelines on what a woman should wear and how she should behave - “You can incarcerate my body but not my thoughts”.
I see a change. Do you?
I am from a well educated family and still had to go through this ordeal, so I can’t imagine what millions of my other Kashmiri sisters are going through who are not lucky enough to have a platform to express themselves. In this 21st century, where the women have been to space and play a pivotal role in global affairs, we are still stuck with the outdated misogynistic mindset.
I have done my graduation from Pune and had attended a lot of music concerts there and in nearby cities. To draw a comparison, the exuberance in the public was the same or may be less than what I saw in Handwara, but the only difference was that there nobody is interested in what you are wearing or doing. Why can’t our Kashmir be like that where the women have got the right to equality and freedom to wear anything and do what they want. A welcome step towards this goal will be educating our sons and daughters and teaching them about the right to freedom of choice and gender equality.
Its high time that we as a society, for a change, need to ‘move back in time’ and embrace Sufism as a way of life once again, what our ancestors planned and chose for us. Let us take our women out from the passenger seats and make them our drivers on our journey to Naya Kashmir.
The Valley needs to progress with the world and rather than wasting our invaluable time in thinking what women are wearing and doing, we should think about bigger issues at hand like education, unemployment and development.
Educating women is the stepping stone for a prosperous society and one has rightly said “Educate a man, you educate an individual, Educate a Woman, You educate a family”. I am hopeful that in times to come no Kashmiri girl and her family goes through what I have gone through and there is no embargo on women in expressing themselves. We, like everyone would like to be accountable only to Allah and nobody else.
“Freedom cannot be achieved unless the women have been emancipated from all forms of
oppression”
Nelson Mandela
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