Official description and blurbs:
Curfewed Night is a brave and unforgettable piece of literary reporting that reveals the personal stories behind one of the most brutal conflicts in modern times. Since 1989, when the separatist movement exploded, more than seventy thousand people have been killed in the battle between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Born and raised in the war-torn region, Basharat Peer brings this little-known part of the world to life in haunting, vivid detail.
Peer tells stories from his youth and gives gut-wrenching accounts of the many Kashmiris he met years later as a reporter. He chronicles a young man's initiation into a Pakistani training camp, a mother forced to watch her son hold an exploding bomb by Indian troops, a poet finding religion when his entire family is killed. He writes about politicians living in refurbished torture chambers, idyllic villages rigged with land mines, and ancient Sufi shrines decimated in bomb blasts.
Curfewed Night is a tale of a man's love for his land, the pain of leaving home, and the joy of return -- as well as a fierce and moving piece of reportage from an intrepid young journalist.
"A passionate and important book -- a brave and brilliant report from a conflict the world has chosen to ignore." -- Salman Rushdie
"The story of Kashmir has never been told before so evocatively and profoundly. Peer writes with the skill of a novelist, the insight of a journalist and the evocative power of a poet."
— Ahmad Rashid, author of The Taliban and Descent"Curfewed Night is the finest book I have read on the contemporary Kashmir conflict -- literary, humane, clear-eyed, and reliable. Basharat Peer has given voice, unforgettably, to a generation of Kashmiris who have never been heard in the United States, but who should be."-- Steve Coll, author of The Bin Ladens, Ghost Wars, and On the Grand Trunk Road
"Describing the ruin of Kashmir, Curfewed Night doesn't only shock, it challenges our most cherished beliefs––in democracy, rule of law, and the power of individual conscience. Everyone should read it."
— Pankaj Mishra, author of Temptations of the West
The book, on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/
JOURNALISTS: If you'd like to interview Basharat, please write to BasharatPeer [at] gmail (tell him SAJA sent you; because of the volume of e-mail, he may not be able to get back to everyone)
READINGS (we'll update this as we get more info):WASHINGTON DC:
NEW YORK CITY:
POLITICS AND PROSE, FEB 9, 7 pm
http://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/basharat-peer- curfewed-night
BARNES AND NOBLE, 82ND STREET AND BROADWAY
FEB 10. 7.00 pmNEW YORK CITY:
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL (116th St & BROADWAY), FRI, FEB. 11, 4:30-5:30 pm
A photo from the Vodafone Crossword Book Award ceremony - where he won the prize for the best English nonfiction book in India. His tennis-tournament check reads, "Three lakhs only," which means 300,000 rupees (or about $6,500) in prize money.
- - -
And now, to a guest post: A review of "Curfewed Night" by Donald Hubbard. He is a freelance
writer based in Richmond, Virginia. A well-read student of U.S. foreign
policy in South Asia, his natural curiosity and research led him to a
specific interest in the troubled country of Kashmir. He is currently at
work on a novel set in Kashmir. Comments below, please.
Breaking the Curfew: A review of Basharat Peer's "Curfewed Night" by Donald Hubbard
I felt I must be missing something. I knew that Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night was somehow different from the many other books on Kashmir, yet I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was that set it apart. Upon its publication in India in 2008, with a brilliant marketing campaign from Random House India, the book garnered a bagful of glowing reviews and praise from Indian readers. It won the prestigious Vodafone Crossword Award for English Nonfiction. It even seemed to be held in high regard in the author’s homeland of Kashmir, and that’s no small feat. But what was it that gave this account credibility and why was the simply told story so profoundly moving and affecting? I was overlooking something elemental; foundational.
Then I stumbled upon the key to the story that I felt was closet to the author’s heart. I suddenly realized that I had been approaching it from the wrong angle. I had been reading the book either as the biography of a place, or as a coming-of-age story and autobiography, or the tale of an exile’s departures and return. And all these are true descriptions, but this difficult to classify work finally yielded its secret, not in the text itself, but in the author’s dedication.
This book, set within the larger canvas of the story of modern Kashmir is – at least as I had come to believe – a biography: It’s the story of the author’s father, Ghulam Ahmad Peer. It’s the story of a son’s relationship with a man who, like thousands of other ordinary Kashmiris, rose to the status of hero by the quiet desperate act of acquiescence and acceptance of the extraordinary events that swirled around him and threatened to destroy his homeland, his faith and his family. By extension, it then becomes the larger story of a whole generation of Kashmiris who, by choice or by circumstance, stayed to witness and endure the horror of their country as it became consumed by violence and armed rebellion; a country compromised and forever changed. It’s this quality of forbearance that gives the story such power and immediacy.
From the opening pages, Peer sets the tone with one of the finest passages in the book; a poignant reminiscence of his father arriving home on Saturday evening: “A not-so-tall man in his early thirties, almost always wearing a suit, a matching tie, and brown Bata shoes...” describes a modern, educated and respected man. A self-taught man who faces the deepening crisis with a calm courage and dignity, who teaches his son tolerance and respect for other religions, and who values rationality and honesty. A man who remains determined in his quiet defiance of the unstoppable ruination of his beloved homeland. Determined to resist the forces of fanaticism and extremism and embrace modernity and secularism, he is also a father who ultimately intervenes against violence with painful foresight: when confronted with the inevitability of Kashmir’s long night, he sees the solution being education. He sends his son away from the village to attend school, and later to schools in India.
Through the son’s relationship with his father (and grandfather), we as readers come to feel, by extension, a broader connection and concern not only for this single family, but for the Kashmiri people as a whole. Within the framework of this personal narrative, we begin to see the larger human subject of Kashmir treated with equal warmth, devotion, and sympathy. Curfewed Night has made us care and compels us to compassion and understanding; the author has made us all a part of his family. And as we encounter the father throughout the book, we begin to get a deepening emotional sense of what has been threatened, lost, encountered and disappeared.
The tales of loss from other conflict zones are eerily similar, but when Kashmiris talk about what has been stolen, it’s more than a loss of security, but a helplessness against a sense of impending and sudden peril. It’s the blaze in the countryside, the empty village, newly dug graves and gardens of ghosts. It’s an ever-present fear that the next phone call may be the one that delivers the bad news about a next door neighbor, a friend, a schoolmate – or even a family member.
The most harrowing story is that of the author’s parents near-miss with a land mine planted by militants along a stretch of highway. We share in his frustration, fear and concern: “I obsessed about the attack on my parents in the months following it. What would have happened if my parents had died in that mine blast?... Most families accepted the killings with frustrated resignation and continued and struggled to continue with their lives.” Here we finally begin to understand the trauma of a people, of a son, through a lens focused on alternate endings, of what might have been.
We realize that these must have been painful words to write, and painful events to relive. As his father moves through the mine field, literal and metaphorical, of Kashmir and across the pages of Curfewed Night, we come to share the fear and uncertainty experienced by the son. You are never sure if the father (or anyone) will return home “to sit in his usual corner in our drawing room, facing the road, a few books and a boiling samovar of tea by his side.” We can then extend and multiply this sentiment by the population of Kashmir; a people unwillingly caught between paranoid imperialism and a brutal militancy, existing in a surreal realm of those dead and disappeared, between the buried past and the bleak future.
One day, the father speaks to his son directly about death: “ ‘I had somehow come to believe that my family would always be safe. I too had this faith that we will be fine and survive it all. Maybe people don’t really believe that they can be killed or come close to death,’ father said. I knew he was scared and living with a great degree of fear. He hardly travelled anywhere.” The survivors carry with them a heavy burden of inevitability, that no one is safe, that people can be killed and can come close to death: This is Kashmir: it is the end of everything; it is still night.
Peer’s intentionally fractured narrative reflects glimmers of a people afflicted with survivor’s guilt. The author tells us early on that if not for his family, he may well have been the young awestruck student who crossed the LoC into Pakistan, only to be returned bullet-torn, buried and forgotten as a martyr to the cause. Yet, he remained untouched by the blood flowing from the wounded valley. This feeling of guilt takes nothing away from the story; it’s these psychological scars that emphasize the struggle the ordinary citizenry has repeatedly been forced to face. It’s in the unending stories of those affected by the turmoil, in the sheer effort of living day to day with a shared feeling of helplessness, within the borders of real and perceived subjugation. This is Kashmir: a siege mentality.
It’s the conscious worry of which fated keyword will finally be attached to the story of you or your family: beaten, intimidated, tortured, disappeared, raped, gang raped, recruited, or merely wearied and exhausted. You can move away, but the words travel with you as baggage. Because you can’t outrun it, it follows, it silently stalks; you can’t ignore it, you can’t avoid it. You can depart and return like the ubiquitous bus that crisscrosses the scarred landscape, but the trip is destined to end at some existential checkpoint. Kashmir’s sad history will find you and these stories that Peer has gathered remind us that this is the psychological cost of living in a conflict zone. That death may come as suddenly as a knock on the door in the middle of the night. This is Kashmir: “Till the soldiers return the keys.”
It’s this cycle of uncertainty and fear, of nervous calm followed by sudden loss that desperately needed to be told. It’s simply too important that Kashmir has a voice, and even with its faults, Curfewed Night deserves to be the voice that finds a larger Western audience. Yes, it does approach the questions of identity and exile through a lens narrowed only on the largely Islamic Kashmir Valley. Yes, it leaves out Kargil and Siachen and POK (about which little is known to the outside world), and other equally important stories and regions (such as Ladakh), as well as failing to account for the deeply plural nature of Jammu and Kashmir society. But the overall concept does not suffer from these omissions.
Yes, the ambiguous ending with the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus line and its suggestion that the symbolic gestures of soft borders along the LoC, or empty political rhetoric about conflict management vs. conflict resolution, offer the best hope for the future, is surely a misstep. Kashmir’s best chance will come from those beneficiaries of the father’s cultural legacy, the intellectual heirs of his embrace of modernity that allows them to make sense of the world in ways others cannot or have not had the opportunity to. We discover that the father’s answer of education, tolerance and rejection of extremism will be the best hope at a new beginning for Kashmir.
And yes, the story does lose some narrative drive in the last section, as the father’s story begins to recede and the other survivor’s tales are recounted. But as we come to realize, a new beginning is necessary. Both the author and his people are ready – and need – to move forward. And even though the father may be fading from view, we discover he has left an object lesson in how to survive a conflict with your sanity and your family intact. That the best personal strategy for ordinary Kashmiris living within the borders of a conflict zone that suffers under the heaviest military presence of any place in the world – that to break the cycle of abuse and human rights violations – would be to follow in the footsteps of the author and heed the father’s words: “If you want to do something for Kashmir, I would say you should read.”
Perhaps with education and foresight this younger generation will craft a future where it becomes possible for Peer’s father to once again journey safely across the glorious Kashmir countryside in a car or bus, or even a blue Willys jeep. That they will write a better future, one where we are not left with an image of the father barricaded behind his books against the fear and burnt-down and bombed out hollowness, peering out the window at a Srinagar bunkered, powerless, and forever lost. That this new generation will find the tools and patience and intellectual backbone to finally break the curfew of Kashmir’s long night.
The lessons learned in Curfewed Night suggest it’s possible. The book itself has provided us a long view of how all these events – all the history of India, Pakistan and Kashmir – have filtered down from grandfather to father to son to produce this touching and heartbreaking work that encompasses all the tragic aggregations deftly woven into the author’s own personal narrative. We have become aware of all the people that violence has touched, we share their pain and perplexity and hope. That’s the genius of Curfewed Night, what sets it apart and why this humanistic and honest narrative deserves the praise and awards it’s won. Within its pages, you will find Kashmir.
In the end, Basharat Peer relates the two words that had always made their presence felt: militants and soldiers. But we have become emotionally invested and now see this story on another level: home and family. It’s also, at its most personal level, the entwined tale of a father and son as they move through the story of modern Kashmir: “In my part of the world, you are always your father’s son, your grandfather’s grandson.” It may comfort the author to think that, perhaps, somewhere in Srinagar on the bookshelves of Ghulam Ahmad Peer, proudly sits a well-read copy of Curfewed Night.
Please post your comments below.
