A Love Letter to My Grandparents in Kashmir

My earliest memories of Kashmir lie with my grandparents, in the fine grooves of their fragile palms and the soft hums of their leisured speech. In between verses of Urdu and Kashmiri that glide past my ears, they call me their jaan, their kurbaan: their life, their sacrifice. They call me their jigar, their liver — and though it perhaps makes for a quite unsavory translation, I learn years later that the body cannot survive in the liver’s absence; that my grandparents and I, separated by one generation and even more oceans, breathe and bleed together.

I often struggle to imagine a Kashmir undecorated by my grandparents’ handprints, by the scenes of their childhoods and adolescence that they would spin over their regular evening chai: of a Dal Lake so pristine that even a penny tossed into the water would glisten across its twenty-foot depth or of their electrifying treks onto snow-capped Himalayan mountains from which their eyes could meet the soil of Pakistan.

But when age — when my grandparents’ age — begins to sound less like the triumphant extinguishing of candles and more like the pounding drum of a clock, I wonder what will then tether me to this rich memoryscape that they have so tenderly tilled throughout their lives.

For me, it is this Kashmir — their Kashmir — that is home.

But as I drift across different spaces at Harvard, especially South Asian-centered institutions and initiatives, I am forever haunted by the chilling reminder that here, Kashmir is never a home to be held close, a culture to be celebrated, or a memory to make last. Rather, at Harvard, Kashmir is too comfortably scripted as a caricature of itself, rendered most legible when depicted as a site of violent occupation and extraordinary militarization but utterly unintelligible upon attempts to foreground enduring, everyday ways of life in the region.

Indeed, I am disturbed by the overwhelming sense of spectacle that has become too readily invested in my Kashmiri identity — a sensation that I have been made to feel most acutely in South Asian spaces at Harvard, where I feel I have become a carrier of an exceptional legacy of suffering alone.

I must note, I hardly intend to obscure the very real, embodied consequences of colonial violence and militarization that have shredded the fabric of everyday life in Kashmir. Instead, I hope to interrogate the conditions under which Kashmir is produced in the grammar of progressive and South Asian discourse at Harvard, bringing my homeland and my people into new and daring focus — even if it means lighting a match in my efforts to shed light.

As a Kashmiri student, I inhabit a uniquely liminal position across affinity spaces at Harvard, stretched and suspended aimlessly across diverse South Asian cultural groups, organizing networks, and artistic productions. And it is a kind of tenuous, precarious condition that belongs widely to diasporic Kashmiri students, who — in the absence of geopolitical legitimacy and institutional support for preserving Kashmiri culture and language — first interface with our identities through political encounters: through confrontation, through opposition, through anger. We are a deeply socialized ethnic minority: We learn to speak boldly about and bear witness to histories of injustice before we learn to speak our mother tongue. We learn what it means to resist and protest against occupation before we learn what it means to be Kashmiri itself — what it means to walk for Kashmir, for its liberation.

Thus, we inherit a conception of our Kashmiri identities that is emptied of its cultural, symbolic, and affective textures and become grotesquely politicized, as if there is nothing but barbed wire that binds our people. We learn to rehearse the trite tropes that keep us visible at South Asian cultural showcases — of Kashmir as the most militarized region on the planet, as an occupied and disputed territory — and condemn to our collective amnesia the faces who fundamentally keep our people alive and movement aflame. We learn to forget, and we learn to be forgotten.

It is in these fragmented moments that I remember my grandparents most vividly — how they indelibly continue to make life and break bread amid the impossibilities of everyday life. I recall the Kashmir they showed me to embrace, how they taught me to wear this identity with care, with spirit.

At Harvard, though, this Kashmir is not palatable, not legible. What emerges, instead, is a cruel, diminishing narrative of Kashmir as a merely geopolitical space — as a land with no culture, no people. As a land of graves.

However, in Kashmir, we say that our people live not in graves but in baghs, in gardens, inhabiting homes and everyday forms of life that flower between military encampments and fences. These gardens are pollinated by the histories and stories of their Kashmiri residents, who give new meaning and breathe new life into this profoundly militarized ecology.

This is what liberation means to me: a framework that neither begins nor ends in politics, but with people. It is a liberation imagined in each blossoming bagh of Kashmir, in the hearts and hands of those like my grandparents. And it is a liberation we must be bold enough to dream.

Sameer M. Khan ’24, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a History of Science and Social Anthropology concentrator in Adams House.