A Critique of the Kashmiri Pandit

By Siddharth Gigoo

Homeless, we wander from one home to another.

We,
the Kashmiri Pandits have always been excruciatingly
pompous and superficial.

We have invariably flaunted an illusiory sense of
pride in our rich
cultural and intellectual heritage we could neither
inherit nor understand.

Though we can only boast of a fertile Sanskritic and
Vedic tradition of
our ancestors, we have made no efforts whatsoever to
be a part of that learning tradition.

We have become hollow and intellectually barren.
We brandish a false sense of cultural superiority
without even realising
that our ideas of culture and civilisation are
mediocre and petty.

We have no vision.

We have no thirst for knowledge.

We cling to the shreds of glory that our ancestors
left us and to the
half-lit memories of our history
alive in somebody else’s mind.

We dread to fight. We love partitions.

We can’t abide togetherness and uniity amongst
ourselves.

We loathe our own fellow Kashmiri Pandit.

We chant the same old tale of suffering and agony.

We break easily and pride ourselves in having the
power to defeat another Kashmiri Pandit.

When we talk, we say the same thing which we said
yesterday and the day before yesterday.

We revel in cultural bigotry.

We are searching for something we haven’t lost yet.

We have become happy renegades.

We have exaggerated notions about our past which we
even haven’t studied.

We cultivate hypocrisy and affectation.

We stand precariously on the edges of today.

We fall and hide it from everbody’s eyes.

We let our past speak for us.

Afterword:

We have not been exiled; we have been freed.

We have turned our exile into a child’s shriek.

We have poured our memory into a broken sieve.

We now live in a rat-hole.

We do not see the light of the world.

We do not even see the shadows.

We have pawned our imagination.

We only sleep a deep sleep.

And we do not wake up in a fit.

Homeless, we wander from one home to another.
“Give me an exile and I shall shake the whole world”

Image Courtesy: Paul La Porte (wikimedia)

This poem was first published in Meghdutam.com (between 1999 to 2002).

About the Author

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