JK PANORAMA OCTOBER ISSUE E-MAGAZINE

‘NA MEEDANAM'
Shantiveer Kaul
hen my friend used the old Kashmiri
bromide 'na meedanam, rahate jaanam'
Wthe other day, I was struck by the perfect
equanimity with which we regard our insular nature.
It seems to us not only to be the default state of
being, but being itself. Indeed, for us Kashmiris, to
be is to be insular. If the other accessorizing details
of being extravagantly vain and xenophobic are
added to this basic outfit, we have a pretty good
archetypal Kashmiri portrait. That is not to say there
are not exceptions, a fair number as well, but the 'I,
me, myself' brand of Kashmiri is the dominant
majority. But the world is not ordered into neatly
demarcated areas, land parcels, spheres of activity
and allocation of resources. It never really was, only
that the world itself took a couple of millennia to
understand this. Interdependence is something that
began to be studied in a serious academic manner
fairly recently. Historically, the obvious first
perception of its being must have been in the tacit
acknowledgment of trade as an economic necessity.
That the tidal waves of one coastal area had a direct
relation with the farm produce of another is what old
world sailors may have realized after many a
voyage. The connection between the South Asian
monsoon and the El Nino/ La Nina phenomena was
made only a century or two ago. The Silk Route, that
has been in existence as a trade route for over five
thousand years did not owe its existence to the need
of trading in silk but the interdependence of
economies of civilizations and populations
arranged along its contours. Fifty years ago social
scientists, particle physicists, neurobiologists,
thinkers of econometrics, mathematicians and
researchers in other disciplines began collating their
independent findings. And then, the penny dropped.
The whole world, indeed entire creation or the
whole universe as we know it, is intimately
interconnected. The naive view is that Nature exists
and is out there, and society exists and is out here,
and the latter is subservient to the former. Actually
each creates and justifies the other. Nature and
society need each other and are at the very least
interdependent. Today when it seems that each
discrete and sovereign activity, whether that of an
individual, a group, a bloc or a nation is dependent
in some way or other, seemingly unrelated activity
of another like or unlike entity, it is as if all this came
about suddenly, a few moments after the world
became a 'global village'. This is akin to progressive
justification of retrospective, if not eternal, truths.
Food chains have always existed. It is only now that
we have provided a formal basis to the fact by using
universal designators to define a biological reality
in conceptual terms. Tomorrow if these designators
fall in disuse, the reality still remains. Similarly,
howsoever adamant I may be to have it otherwise;
my dependence on Mr. A or phenomenon X will not
disappear.
Lately, the dominant strain of thought in
Kashmir has been about independence. The idea of
independence is intimately connected with the
concept of freedom. Ironically, the idea of
interdependence is even more intimately connected
with the concept of freedom. It is vitally important
for anyone seeking either to understand both. The
visible and audible manifestation of independence
in Kashmir, that of political independence, has not
been adequately articulated in conceptual terms.
Principal proponents of the idea of 'azadi' routinely
deflect all attempts at a discourse in that direction,
but attempts to provide a theoretical underpinning
to the idea itself have come from various quarters in
the form of assertions about economic viability and
resource sufficiency of the state. What is clearly
absent in these assertions is an understanding of
how uniquely we are placed in the world today. The
vale of Cashmere is no longer what it was two
centuries ago, though ringed by the same mountains
13
October 2017
JK