Book of the Month: The Collaborator (Mirza Waheed)

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.