16
NEARLY a month later, the human tragedy that is Kashmir is still dominating India and Pakistan, and elsewhere, despite the multitudes of crises enveloping the world. In the midst of global attention focusing on the Hong Kong protests, Brexit and the US-China trade war, there has been considerable reporting as well as statements by leaders on what is happening in the Valley.
In Pakistan, of course, it seems that Kashmir has crowded out most other news. Perhaps this is why I have been thinking in detail of what I still see as my primary job — subbing — and the importance of words. For the latter struck home a few years ago while reading a book on the Partition; beginning with the events elsewhere, it ended in the Valley, and the conflict it led to between the newly emerged states.
The author’s efforts have been widely acclaimed as a well-written and well-researched account on what happened in the days that led to the subcontinent being torn into two separate countries. But if one pays attention to the words, the larger narrative pales into the background. And it made me wonder if we, as writers, are sometimes even aware of the biases that creep in, as we construct sentences to describe events and people.
It is assumed that if a bias is visible, it might be deliberate, but not necessarily so. For our current tendency to write ‘colourfully’ (which has become a prerequisite for good journalistic writing) does, at times, come at the expense of neutrality.
It is assumed that if a bias is visible, it might be deliberate, but that is not necessarily so.
Words are important, and who knows this better than subeditors.
So, take this book (which shall remain unnamed because we are all guilty of these biases and no one person needs to be pointed out).
In a detailed account of what happened in Kashmir (which comprises a good part of the tail end of the narrative), he writes of the days when Pakhtun tribesmen entered Kashmir. One of the towns thus ‘invaded’ was Baramulla, “a once cheerful town” which now showed “scenes of devastation” that the “tribesmen” from Pakistan had caused. “They lingered for two days, burning and killing. They looted everything they could find, even prying loose the bracelets on women’s wrists and the earrings from their ears.”
He then speaks of a “famous incident” in which the “fierce, unkempt fighters” who were “armed with rifles, huge daggers and axes” kill a British couple as well as “hack apart the chapel’s altar and statues of saints” in an attack on a Catholic mission.
Indeed, throughout the account, the tribesmen are described vividly. Consider this: “They were fearsome in appearance, though, with matted beards and rough turbans tied loosely around their heads — and they were remorseless in their advance.”
(One might even find similar language used in books on recent events in Afghanistan or Muslim militancy from other parts of the world. For it has now become a norm to associate beards [long, unkempt or unruly] and turbans [rough, traditional or black] with the violence of a militant. In fact, they have become interchangeable. But I digress.)
Perhaps the tribesmen were as violent and destructive as implied. Fair enough. But then one has to turn a page or two to get to where the ‘violence’ in Jammu is narrated.
We are told that “RSS cadres were infiltrating the Kashmiri province with the help of elements in the Indian army”. Later it is said that “Hindu extremists were hitching rides on army trucks headed north”.
But there is no description of what these men look like. Beards or no beards, fierce or not, educated or not, the language is so sparse that the reader is not aided in imagining what the “Hindu extremist” looks like. No image comes to mind, especially not of violent and ferocious men. Is this because, in the post-9/11 world, we all have an image of what a Muslim or Pakhtun tribesman should look like, but not of a “Hindu extremist”?
The massacre in Jammu is described relatively sparsely.
“…Dogra troops in Jammu city had piled five thousand men, women and children onto buses… the soldiers had driven deeper into Kashmir, then forced the civilians out of the vehicles. As the disorientated Muslims huddled in a clearing, Hindu and Sikhs — most likely Akali and RSS extremists — rose out of the underbrush and laid into them with rifles and kirpans. A couple hundred Muslims escaped into the fields. The rest were either raped or killed…”
Once again, the description of the event is sparse compared to the tribesmen and their ‘crimes’, even though it has been called “grim”, “egregious” and even “outrageous”. But there were no “screams and cries” as there were when the Catholic mission was attacked. And while “the rest were raped or killed”, there is no description of how individual women who were raped were treated; remember that the tribesmen had forcibly removed the jewellery of the women they had encountered.
One incident paints a picture of human suffering and human bestiality, while in the other, there is little of either (at least in the words). One is an event described with the addition of what journalists call ‘colour’, while the second is simply narrated with plain facts. And the plain facts do not have the same impact that the descriptive passages do.
It is hard to say why this was done. It could be bias — deliberate or otherwise. It could also be simply a result of having done more research on the tribesmen than the events in Jammu.
But it underlines the importance of words, as we write or read them. And in either case, we should be aware of how they impact the writing.
As I made my way through these pages, I recalled the first golden rule of editing taught to subeditors — remove adjectives (which I break in this sentence by using ‘golden’). It always seemed to be a tool to trim fat/excess words, but it can also be a means to ensure neutrality.
Postscript: If I had to remove one word from this book, it would be the word ‘shrewish’ used to describe Fatima Jinnah. It seems so politically incorrect in this day and age.
The writer is a journalist.
Published in Dawn, September 3rd, 2019
