BOOK REVIEW
Portraits of strong women enhance apolitical look at Kashmir
By Clea Simon, Globe Correspondent, 7/8/2002
When faraway places surface in the news, it’s easy to view them simply through recent events. Vietnam, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and now Kashmir all end up defined in our minds by their troubles, and understanding the people and culture that existed before the bombs and the headlines becomes secondary. While we may be only slowly catching up on the first three countries, Sudha Koul’s ‘‘The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir’’ serves as a corrective for the most recent of these newsmakers.
The Kashmiri expatriate writes lovingly of a girlhood in this mountainous region in Northern India, on the border with Pakistan, and through her reminiscences begins to explain how it feels when neighbors turn on neighbors.
‘‘The Tiger Ladies’’ is not a political work. Instead, in a series of flashbacks told in simple terms, Koul re-creates a girlhood in a privileged Hindu family in this religiously mixed area. Her family owns land, as most of her friends’ families do, but also has a history in academia: Her grandfather was a professor of English. But although Koul follows in these paternal footsteps, pursuing higher education and landing a job in the Byzantine Indian bureaucracy, it is her grandmother and her mother who provide the focus for her life and this book.
Dividing her memoir into ‘‘Grandmother,’’ ‘‘Mother,’’ and ‘‘Daughter’’ sections, which jump back and forth in time, she credits Kashmir’s toughness and joy, and her own sense of survival, to these hard-working women. Whether retelling how her grandmother followed a fortuneteller’s prescription to bathe once a month in a freezing outdoor spring - even during winter - to conceive or describing her mother’s dismissal of a shady shawl salesman, she sees in the women the descendants of Durga, the Hindu goddess who rides a tiger. ‘‘She Who Fears Nothing dismounts only to destroy evil wherever it hides its ugly self,’’ she writes.
It is from these women that Koul gets her sense of family and the importance of tradition. Although she pursues a career, Koul knows her mother has been laying up fine weaving, jewelry, and housewares as a dowry since she hit adolescence, and she accepts that she will marry and fulfill the same roles as her mother and grandmother. Writing of these women, Koul is at her best. Her memories are drawn sweetly, with an almost childlike simplicity, but the women - crying at night for a lost lover, laughing over tea - are real. Their travails and triumphs with children, men, and the fierce climate are often depicted with more life and detail than Koul’s own young adulthood.
Despite her Western education, partly in a British-style convent school, Koul still treasures the local folklore, in which seers and omens decide important events and ghost stories convey moral lessons: ‘‘A fine chaos of reason prevails; it is all a part of our nature and in the very water we drink.’’ Her Hindu religion coexists alongside these older beliefs, to be called on for festivals and dietary rules but not for anything extreme. ‘‘It is absurd that any mother would send her daughter to die with a dead man,’’ she writes dismissively of the practice of suttee, which was once practiced by her coreligionists in other parts of her country.
This shared culture - part British-Indian, part animist - is what binds her community as tightly as the encircling mountains, or so the young Koul believed. Although Pakistan split from India in the year of her birth, 1947, she gave no thought during her idyllic girlhood to the religious conflicts that helped cause this rupture. Neighbors shared one another’s holidays, she recalls, even if they wouldn’t eat off one another’s plates. At times, her innocence seems horribly naive. ‘‘The postman, the vendors, all are Muslims, but we hardly notice that as it makes no difference to us,’’ she writes. In her own words, she might have noted the class differences that separate her Brahman household from many of the poorer Muslims - the vendors - who live and work by her.
Such innocence doesn’t last. The first reports of religious unrest are disbelieved. But by the time Koul is in college, the quiet lane that runs alongside her house has been the scene of a murder, and an old acquaintance is the likely suspect. Eden is shattered, and Koul’s homely images reflect what has been lost. ‘‘No one could remember anything so bloody in the heart of the old city, where everyone lived so close together that no one could even have gardens of any consequence,’’ she writes. ‘‘An us and a them was evolving.’’
Such scenes mark the slow spiral into civil unrest that has surfaced in our news, and Koul’s conclusion of emigration and the disruption of tradition. These more contemporary retellings lack the beauty of the opening sections of this book, in part because the actions depicted are ugly and unnatural. In part, however, the writing as Koul closes in on catastrophe seems rushed, her lovely figurative language misfiring. ‘‘The self-determination that had been promised to Kashmiris by Nehru can no longer be swept under the carpet,’’ she writes. Such clinkers may surface in any highly emotional work. But earlier in this memoir, Koul had more than a timeless sense of wonder. Describing the paradise that she and thousands of her compatriots lost, she employed a floating prose that earlier made even death a part of life.
The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir
By Sudha Koul
Beacon Press, 224 pp., $24
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/189/living/Portraits_of_strong_women_enhance_apolitical_look_at_Kashmir+.shtml