The
unnamed narrator of The Collaborator, Mirza Waheed’s debut novel, a finalist for
the 2011 Guardian Best Debut Novel award, is a 19 year old Kashmiri Muslim boy,
who is burning with hatred; he is seething with rage; he is incandescent with
anger. The hatred, the rage, the anger are directed at the Indian army,
representing the might of the Indian state, that has been fighting what the
Indian government describes as the proxy war with Pakistan-trained militants,
who cross the LOC—the Line of Control—the de facto border between the Indian-
controlled and Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. In this brutal war, the Indian army
has indulged in wholesale torture of the Kashmiri Muslim youths, rape of
Kashmiri Muslim women, and wanton destruction of their properties—according to
the protagonist of the novel.
The
period is sometime in the 1990s and the secessionist movement in Kashmir is at
its deadliest. The dreaded and despised Indian army is everywhere in Kashmir,
terrorizing and brutalizing its people.
The
unnamed protagonist belongs to the Gujjar
community in Kashmir—the nomads. However, the Gujjars have put down roots in a hamlet called Nowgam, near the
LOC, where the tiny community has lived since the independence and partition of
India. In the peaceful and innocent days of his childhood the narrator has
played cricket with his close childhood friends near the border, oblivious of
the watch towers and sentry posts that always existed on either side of the
border. All of this belongs to a past that is becoming increasingly
mist-filled. The 1990s have arrived, and with it the secessionist movement, to
which Pakistan is providing more than just moral support. The hamlet and the
area surrounding it are of strategic importance to Indian army, as it is one of
the major passes in the mountains through which the jihadists and Pakistan-trained militants infiltrate into India. A
proportion of them is foreign nationals such as the Arabs and the Afghans and
the Chechens; but there also many Kashmiri youths who crossed the border into
Pakistan, received training in Pakistani camps, and are now attempting to
return to Indian-controlled Kashmir to wage the ‘battle for freedom’. There is
a massive army camp very near to the hamlet, and heavy presence of Indian
soldiers. The hamlet itself is empty save for one family: that of the narrator.
The narrator’s father, who is the Sarpunch—the
head—of the Gujjar clan, has refused
to leave the hamlet; the rest have left, having come to a (not unreasonable)
conclusion that the area is becoming too dangerous, not least because of the
excesses of the Indian army, with its pre-dawn crackdowns to weed out what it describes
to Indian media as terrorists. All of the narrator’s close childhood friends
have disappeared one by one: they all have crossed the LOC and gone to Pakistan
to receive training. The narrator has not seen any of them since. He wants to
cross the border too, like his friends, and return to the Indian-controlled
Kashmir wielding a Kalashnikov. But he has not taken that step, torn as he is between
the opposing urges of joining the ‘freedom fight’ and caring for his elderly
parents. And to make his inner humiliation complete, the narrator is employed
by the Indian army to do a job which he finds utterly degrading. His job is to
go down in the valley—the no man’s land on the Indian side of the LOC—where lie
the bodies of hundreds of men killed by the Indian army, and recover their
identity badges, which, in due course, would be presented by the Indian army to
the media as identities of the jihadists
trying to infiltrate into India from Pakistan. Here we meet Kadian, the
demonic, foul mouthed captain of the Indian army, who is in charge of the army
operations in the area. Kadian, the narrator believes, is responsible for the
deaths—murders—of hundreds, if not thousands, of Kashmiri youths. The narrator
loathes Kadian with a passion and fantasizes ways in which he would kill the
‘bastard’, as Kadian, his throat moistened with generous portions of whisky,
repeatedly subjects him to harangues, full of invectives and contempt for the
Kashmiris and the Pakistanis, reminding—as if to counterbalance—from time to
time that he (Kadian) is there just to do a job. The novel ends on a depressing
note: the evil Indian army captain has not met his comeuppance; after murdering
thousands of ‘poor Kashmiri boys’ he is going back to India on leave—he has
finished his ‘Kashmir stint’. The narrator, unable to see the dead bodies of
his ‘brothers’ rotting in the valley, is setting them on fire, even though he
is aware that, really, the bodies should be buried—as they are Muslims—having
reasoned in his mind that burning, still, is preferable to the bodies being
mutilated by crows and wild animals of the jungle.
Kashmir,
ever since India achieved independence and partition (although I wouldn’t have
thought she sought to ‘achieve’ the latter)—when Muslim majority Pakistan was
carved out of India— has been a bone of contention between the two nations. A
Muslim majority state ruled by a Hindu maharaja
at the time of partition, who decided to annexe it to India, Kashmir—referred
to variously as ‘paradise on earth’ and ‘India’s Switzerland’—has been the
cause of one full-scale and two proxy-wars between the two countries, in the
six decades of India’s independence. The end of the 1980s saw the beginning of
a fierce war between Indian army and—depending on your political sympathies—the
freedom-fighters or jihadi-terrorists.
The secessionist movement (I prefer this, as it is a neutral term, which
suggests that a proportion of Kashmiri population wished to secede from India)
was at its peak in the 1990s. During this period Kashmir achieved the dubious
distinction of being the most militarized zone in the world. India poured in
three quarters of a million soldiers in Kashmir (in addition to other
paramilitary forces), which meant, the novel informs the reader at one stage, that
there was one soldier per six civilians in Kashmir during this period. Over the
past two decades India has shown to those, who wished to break away its only
Muslim majority state (hence presumably the interest of Pakistan in it) by
violence, that it is a hard state when it comes to these matters and, no matter
what, Kashmir will not be allowed to secede. The back of the militant movement
apparently is broken, but simmering resentment among the locals towards India
and civil unrest remain. In the process the Indian army, which continues to
have considerable presence in Kashmir, has been accused of human rights abuse,
fake encounters to liquidate terrorists, and obtaining information by torture.
At the end of the novel, are given statistics: since the beginning of the
conflict in 1989, more than 70,000 people have been killed in Kashmir; more
than 4000 people are thought to be incarcerated in various Indian jails without
trials; and more than 8000 have simply ‘disappeared’. One does not know how
reliable these figures are (the novel also mentions that the Indian government
disputes these figures). In one section of the novel—one that focuses on the
meetings between the narrator and the dreaded Kadian—is mentioned Papa 1, the
rumoured Guantanamo Bay style prison Indian army had erected in Kashmir, and
where the captured jihadis / freedom
fighters (again, take your pick) were subjected to severe torture in order to
obtain information.
Fiction
is a powerful way to give expression to the collective memories of peoples
traumatized by violence. With it come responsibilities, as there would be those
who would treat the ‘fiction’ as a quasi-documentary evidence of what ‘really
happened’.
Let’s
have a look at what is obviously ‘fiction’ in The Collaborator. In an
interview of Waheed I came across on the Net, he says that the hamlet—Nowgam—near
the border—is fictional. No village has ever existed so near to the LOC.
Similarly, the mountains of bodies lying in the no-man’s land, which the
narrator is tasked with searching, are ‘fiction’. The large portion of the
novel, thus, is fiction in more than one way. It is entirely a construct of the
writer’s imagination: it is not a ‘fictional account’ of real events—important
to bear it in mind, as the novel purports to express, fictionally, the ‘real’
tragedy of Kashmir. It is a device—and a very powerful device—that represents
the inhumanity of the Indian army, which the novel portrays as the enemy of
Kashmiri people.
The
reader is faced with the ideological force driving the novel from its first
page. The novel makes no attempt at neutrality. It has identified the enemy:
Indian state and Indian army. The narrator is an unabashed admirer of the
insurgents (as the Indians call them) and of Pakistan. He has no confusion in
his mind as to which side of the border he stands, metaphorically speaking. What
he lacks is courage to take that final step: sever his ties with his family and
fight for a higher cause. The Pakistanis are ‘brothers’, the militants trying
to infiltrate into Kashmir armed with explosives, Kalashnikovs and AK-47 are
‘poor boys’; while the Indians are ‘bastards’, ‘rapists’, and ‘murderers’. The
demonic face of the Indian state is Captain Kadian, who, during his monologues
in front of the-inwardly-boiling-but-outwardly-complaisant narrator, repeatedly
sneers at the Pakistanis (stupid sister****ers) and Kashmiris (disloyal
mother***kers); expresses his contempt for the namby-pamby, ‘bleeding-hearts’
lefties in Delhi and Calcutta; derives great pleasure in the ghastly spectacle
of dead bodies rotting in the no-man’s land in the Indian side of the LOC, so
that the ‘sisterf***king Pakis’ and ‘ISI bastards’ can see for themselves what
has happened to the ‘boys’ they trained in their camps; and justifies and
underestimates the impact of the violent methods used by the army and
para-military forces in Kashmir. Kadian is not a man, it would be fair to say,
whose heart is overflowing with love for humanity—when that humanity comprises
Kashmiri Muslims and Pakistanis. Herein lies difficulty. While there is no law
against jettisoning neutrality (artistic license and all that); indeed, as many
Philip Roth novels ably show (for example, Plot Against America), it can drive
forth a point very powerfully—here, you can’t help feeling that Waheed has
overegged the pudding. The reader is treated to repeated descriptions of
atrocities linked—directly or indirectly—to Indian armed-forces in Kashmir. Several
examples based on hearsay (the narrator has ‘heard stories’) are given of the
barbarism of Indian army, which is depicted as a relentless, ruthless, inhuman
machine. It has no love for Kashmir and its people, and it overwhelms the young
Kashmiri ‘boys’, who have a genuine grievance (as the narrator sees it). It
tends to get a tad hysterical at times, not unlike the Bollywood films, the
songs from which are shown to be big hits amongst the narrator’s friends (an
example of an unwitting paradox: the narrator and his friends don’t consider
themselves Indian; they hate India; yet enjoy singing songs from Bollywood
films)—the jihadists / freedom-fighters
in the making. All of this not only compromises the credibility of the
narration, it also detracts from the drama of the human tragedy in Kashmir. The
narrator struggles to consider that the Indian army can have any function in
Kashmir beyond terrorizing and marauding its people. Particular scorn is
reserved for the governor of Kashmir, ‘who has no surname’—“the former leader of the
demolition gangs and their bulldozers (who ran over the one-room tenements and
lavatories of the poorest of poor squatters in India’s capital because their
haphazard slum-clusters had no storm-water drains), the clinical undertaker of
forced, compulsory vasectomies.....”—sent
by the ‘Centre’ [Delhi, India’s capital] to oppress local population. (A bit of
Internet search revealed that the hated governor in the novel, ‘the king of
curfews’, was one Jagmohan, and he had a surname—Malhotra. Interestingly,
Jagmohan was governor of Kashmir between 1984 and 1989, and for 6 months in
1990; that is only in the initial months of the insurgency. This does not quite
tally with the time period of the novel and when he makes his appearance in it;
but then this is a novel and the author is permitted to take artistic license).
Indeed, there are times when you wonder whether the diatribes of the whisky-sodden
captain Kadian, deeply unpleasant as they are, are entirely without merit. I am
not sure whether that was the intention of the author. The task Kadian gives to
the narrator—that of searching the dead bodies in the valley for ID badges—is
so ridiculous, it is scarcely believable. While one understands it as a device
by the author to emphasize the point (as if not already emphasized) that the
Indian army is evil and lacking in common human decency (and also allows the
author to stage some fascinating meetings between Kadian and the narrator),
surely he could have thought of a different device that wouldn’t have stretched
the limits of readers’ credulity.
The Collaborator does not satisfy at
another level in that it fails—it does not even attempt—to examine the reasons
underlying the disenchantment of the Kashmiris with India (assuming they are
disenchanted). The explanation, such as is offered, is meagre. The narrator’s
childhood friends, as also—the author would have you believe—thousands of young
Kashmiri men, turned militants as a reaction to the excesses of the Indian
army. Now I am no expert on the Kashmir problem, but it does strike as tad simplistic.
You are left wondering why the Indian army and the paramilitary forces
descended on Kashmir in the first place, forty years after it was annexed to
India. That, one could suppose, is because the novel is told from the point of
view of a village boy who has never been even to Srinagar (the capital of
Indian controlled Kashmir), let alone rest of India. It is therefore
understandable that the boy will not have a considerate, well-rounded view on
the geo-political problems afflicting the region. However, the absence of a
sound—even plausible—reasoning, coupled with relentless animadversion of the
Indian state and Indian army, makes the narrative imbalanced. Occasionally,
there are examples of militants torturing Kashmiri people who they (the
militant) think are informers of the Indian army; but the author’s heart is not
in it. What he is interested in is giving a chapter and verse ‘account’ of the
crimes of Indian army. The plight of Kashmiri Hindus—who lived there for
generations and were made destitute by the Islamic militants—is described in
one sentence. As you read it you feel that the truth—whatever that is—has got
to be different from the simplistic viewpoint of the protagonist..
Where
the novel succeeds is in creating an atmosphere of menace. The descriptions of
the crackdowns by the Indian army, the visit of the loathed governor to the
hamlet, identity parades carried out by the army to ferret out terrorists / freedom
fighters hiding in villages are utterly gripping. At places the novel reads
like a thriller. Waheed has a great feel for dialogues: the foul-mouthed
‘wisdom’ of Captain Kadian, appals and fascinates you in equal measures. The
novel is also a lament on the passing on of an innocent world. There are
lyrical, elegiac—almost haunting—descriptions of the natural beauty of the region
where the narrator spent his childhood.
The
Collaborator
is the debut novel of Mirza Waheed. It is said that the first novels are often autobiographical.
The author-information tells you that Waheed was born in Srinagar (capital of
Indian controlled Kashmir). At the age of 18 he went to Delhi where he enrolled
in a university and completed a degree course in Literature. He then worked in
Delhi for a few years (and, for the past ten years, has been living in London
for the BBC Urdu service.) The trajectory of the author’s career gives its own
message about the Indian state, which the protagonist of his novel sees as an
oppressing, unjust, immoral and hateful force.
The
Collaborator
is gripping in parts in its depiction of the calamity that has befallen
Kashmir. It seems like a novel written out of intense anger, and the writer
seems as overwrought as the protagonist of his novel by the tragic subject
matter.
