A Girlhood Lost Under Occupation: Farah Bashir’s RUMOURS OF SPRING
Written of a time under armed occupation in the Kashmir valley, Farah Bashir’s memoir Rumours of Spring (2021) entwines the geographical and corporeal, the social and psychological, where the violence of the world remains painfully connected to the violence within.
In her recent book of essays Girlhood, Melissa Febos describes this period in life as a “darker time for many than we are willing to acknowledge”. She attributes this ‘darkness’ to the peculiar transitional yet deeply impressionable character of female adolescence and teenage as a time of profound vulnerability.
Girlhood is when young women indoctrinated in constraining societal norms about body image and gendered behaviour experience internal conflict between personal autonomy and the horizon of cultural expectations. It is when they develop fractured selfhoods, understood in Febos’ powerful analysis as an “exile of many parts of the self... hatred and abuse of our own bodies, the policing of other girls, and a lifetime of allegiance to values that do not prioritise our safety, happiness, freedom, or pleasure.” Febos’ autobiographically-mediated intervention continues along the lines set up a couple of decades ago in Iris Marion Young’s stunning scholarly exposition (Throwing Like a Girl) of how ordinary activities like walking and throwing a ball serve as concentrated sites of gendering in which gender congeals into the realm of habitual, unconscious practices from gait to comportment and posture, and materialises in actual practice as an internalised, naturalised, and embodied template of essential and indubitable femininity.
If this underexplored and often misunderstood fraught landscape of female coming of age forms the not so “exceptional” common bedrock of girlhood, how do the social, political, and material specificities of lived realities, inherited histories, and inhabited spaces intersect with and inflect this common course? How do everyday topographies of endemic violence and normalised exigency complicate this already precarious trajectory women’s coming of age experiences, while reinscribing these in other terrains of threat, danger, exile, and policing? What is it like to grow up female in landscapes of risk and under conditions of historically and ideologically-manufactured trauma, conditions under which bodily anxieties and normative pressures are thickened by political restrictions, censorship, and disenfranchisement? What does it mean to ‘throw like a girl’ to recall Young’s telling figure, in instances where entire lives are made dispensable? And how are forms of misogyny, objectification and sexualisation that Febos critiques in her work, reproduced under necropolitical regimes in which certain bodies and communities are always already marked and dehumanised?
Here, architectures of daily habitation become fragile thresholds blurring boundaries between the outside and the inside, the living and the dead, the individual and the collective… the quintessential emblems of privacy are transformed into sites of political infiltration, intervention, and determination.
Last year Marie Lucas Rijneveld’s Booker winning The Discomfort of Evening tackled some of these questions through the lens of the travails of its prepubescent female protagonist. This year, Kashmiri author Farah Bashir has delivered a similarly powerful, disturbing, and timely salvo—though in a style and aesthetic markedly-different and significantly sparse—into the existing vacuum of girlhood narratives now being steadily and welcomingly reclaimed and occupied.
Bashir’s memoir Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir (HarperCollins 2021) is a simultaneously focused and capacious account of a period of five years from 1989-94 that saw the beginnings of a long and tumultuous history of local resistance and armed occupation in the Kashmir valley. As a detailed, deeply personal record of the valley in the 90s, it foregrounds a period and cultural milieu. The memoir is also a meditation of how a rich archive of loss and suffering tends to be overlooked or forgotten in the light of contemporary political developments and shifting historical discourse. However, what makes Rumours of Spring truly remarkable is the manner in which the public and the intensely private, the geographical and corporeal, the social and psychological are entwined, made to segue and overlap as inextricable skeins of a unique politico-historical tapestry.
This is not simply a narrative sleight of hand, rather, as Bashir’s compelling storytelling goes on to show, a stylistic choice that remains committed to transcribing in prose the particular existential terrain of Kashmir in the 90s. Here, architectures of daily habitation—domestic spaces, commercial arenas, beauty parlours, post offices, schools and streets—become fragile thresholds blurring boundaries between the outside and the inside, the living and the dead, the individual and the collective, and both homes and bodies, the quintessential emblems of privacy are transformed into sites of political infiltration, intervention, and determination. Bashir’s narrative reproduces with heart wrenching tenderness the total permeation and destabilisation of lived experience in its most intimate, microscopic dimensions by external forces of policing and control.
We get a sense of this early in the memoir as the customary funerary rituals following the death of Bashir’s grandmother have to be modified according to curfew rules. Later in the narrative Bashir’s account portrays the ways in which certain parts of her five storey house in downtown Srinagar are turned into prohibited zones. There is ironic symbolism: the attic which is also the repository of memory becomes forbidden territory, since a height makes a person susceptible to arbitrary gunfire, doors and windows are points of caution, the creaking of hinges at night risks exposure to an attack or a raid, the use of windows is regulated by the frequency of patrols, rooms remain closed and unfrequented for the phobias and anxieties they provoke. The proverbial leisure of vacations in relatives’ houses is disturbed by the haunting proximity of sites of mass killing and the idyllic scenery of lakes invaded by armies of motorboats and halogen strobes. Through a frame comprising concertina wires and impromptu bunkers sprouting out of forcefully-occupied civilian houses, broken footwear littering roads and shuttered markets, missing persons’ reports and body counts that transform local newspapers into “mortuaries laid out on broadsheets”, Bashir’s memoir creates a dynamic narrative photomontage of the surreal reality of occupied Kashmir, even as it mobilises a deliberate echoing of this geography of losses across the canvas of physical and psychological debilitation suffered by its inhabitants.
One of the most poignant expressions of this debilitation is the author taking recourse to picking her scalp as a coping mechanism during periods of heavy shelling. The pain from self-mutilation becomes a perverse means of recreating through the medium of the body the autonomy and sense of control that is otherwise lost. Hair takes on a completely different significance in this renewed context of siege metamorphosing from being a source of bonding with her grandmother and a site of feminine aspirations, to becoming an object in a field of trauma invested with functions that have less to do with pleasure and more with survival. Under the dehumanising effects of armed repression self-estrangement is translated as dissociation from one’s own body.
But as her memoir delineates, Bashir’s trauma is not an isolated instance; rather one among a mental health epidemic that has affected Kashmiri youth for over two decades. The ubiquity of trauma in the lives of ordinary residents of the valley is jokingly referred to by Bashir’s cousin as “Perennial Traumatic Stress Disorder”.
Bashir’s memoir weaves itself around the central motif of the death of her grandmother. What appears to be an ordinary bereavement is in fact at the heart of a larger set of losses, of freedoms, rights, traditions, ways of living, histories and voices, that come to cohere in short, staggered, fragmented vignettes of personal and political experience, around Bobeh's death. Within the narrative of this particular loss, is contained a layered chronicle of the gradual infiltration and transformation of the landscape of daily existence in Kashmir in the 90s under the shadow of military occupation.
Occupation isn’t just an abstract political event involving territory as an inert component on a map. The spectre of armed siege permeates the most intimate, ordinary, habitual aspects of civilian lives whether it is Bobeh’s failing health made worse by tear gas induced asthma and the psychological pressures of regular curfews and their attendant violence, the ways in which fear and anxiety constrain her father’s posture, how spaces of living are redrawn and certain parts of the house made unlivable through the proximity of military presence, or dietary practices, conversational patterns, and modes of address are altered by the omnipresence of imminent, arbitrary conflict or death. With utmost precision and convincing realism Bashir conveys the affective tenor of the microcosmic dimensions of state power as it becomes the sole arbiter of individual lives and liberties.
Thus, the narrative of girlhood in Bashir’s memoir is also a narrative of dispossession. The measure of loss in the wake of insurgency and occupation is not only lives and livelihoods but spaces and structures that anchor and sustain them. The years of active military intervention not only entail the loss of liberties and rights, but are marked by the atrophy of bodily capacities, health and wellbeing, and in Bashir’s case, a crucial moment in physical and mental development stymied by the contraction of her immediate horizons.
Thus, the narrative of girlhood in Bashir’s memoir is also a narrative of dispossession. The measure of loss in the wake of insurgency and occupation is not only lives and livelihoods but spaces and structures that anchor and sustain them.
Rumours’ retrospective arc both recounts episodes from memory, as well as inscribes this process of recollection with the loss of those familiar, habitual markers and practices that secure a girl’s passage into teenage. Its autobiographical trajectory charts a map of personal experience even as it allows us to glimpse a girlhood that is prematurely truncated and held hostage to forces beyond the personal. Bashir’s narrative mourns as it speaks, elegising both the landscape of larger public losses, but also the fractured typicality of coming of age.
Girlhood under siege as Bashir shows us is uneven and chaotic, its usual field of desires, discoveries, pleasures, and possibilities, its developmental richness, complexity and expansiveness compromised by the stark predictability of mundane violence. In a world where normalcy is redefined through a climate of contingency and the exception is ruled as norm, the conventional, regular, seemingly trivial ground of girlhood has to be negotiated and recreated into a space of resistance.
At times this resistive reappropriation of girlhood is done through creative, ludic, and clandestine modes—in the leaps of fantasy and imagination enabled by dancing to popular Pakistani disco music in secret, or engaging in a teenage romance over letters. At other times, girlhood’s complex bodily and psychic vicissitudes reinforce and intensify the effects of social and political traumas: the chronic discomfort of painful menstruation made worse by curfew-induced inaccessibility to certain spaces and forms of alleviation, or the author’s alienated, self-mutilating relationship with her femininity in response to the anxieties produced by shelling on the one hand and the gendered politics of constant policing and surveillance on the other.
In an environment of acute stress, the ‘old’ is source of comfort: nostalgia-laden anchors that preserve in material form rapidly eroding signs of identity, community, and cultural expression, objects and rituals that haunt the eviscerated contours of the besieged, stagnating present as spectral remnants of the freedoms and possibilities of the past. These include a music player gone silent, an unfinished letter accidentally found in the pocket of unused clothes, the pristine whiteness of Bashir’s unworn school uniform that flashes like a Freudian object encoding her longing and frustration—a range of habits, attitudes, patterns of behaviour and styles of communication that exist only as fragmented memories once the contexts of their performance have been destroyed. Bashir’s sister’s elaborate beauty routines, her father’s particular manner of using a chair, and his assistant’s amicable good humour are also lost to a climate of normalised fear. Together these vignettes interspersed throughout the memoir offer a rich and textured material history of the occupation.
Together, these vignettes interspersed throughout the memoir offer a rich and textured material history of the occupation. Along with a searing snapshot of the penalties and restrictions imposed upon the civilian population of Kashmir, Bashir’s narrative also clears space to dignify and restore to public consciousness the things, ways of life, and practices that are concomitantly delegitimised and made to disappear.
But, more importantly Rumours enables the foregrounding of those wounded psychic and emotional cartographies engendered by post-traumatic atmospheres of prohibition, catastrophe and ruination. It shows how time, space and matter are experienced and understood differently under conditions of prolonged incarceration and normalised violence. And how this altered habitus affects the minds and bodies of those who suffer—effects that are in fact invisibilised by the very conditions which produce them.
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Paromita Patranobish is an independent researcher based in Delhi, moving between academic and creative interests. She has a PhD on Virginia Woolf, and has taught in SNU, Daulat Ram College and Ambedkar University Delhi. When not teaching or writing, she loves to spend time with her camera and telescope doing amateur photography and stargazing. You can find her on Twitter: @paromita33.
