#rememberingmohiuddin

By Faisul Yaseen

Stories travel fast in Kashmir.

They spread from wooden balconies and shop fronts to tea shops and Masjids, from public parks and bus stops to riverbanks and bridges, quickly crossing rivers and localities.

Akhtar Mohiuddin was born on April 17, 1928, in this world of stories, which was about to break apart. He would go on to dedicate himself to documenting its fracture with his writings in the language of sorrow.

To understand Mohiuddin, one must understand who he was during the time Kashmiris were gaining relevance. Before him, Kashmir literature was mainly poetry of mystical and lyrical forms. Influenced by the Progressive Literary Movement, Mohiuddin instead began to document the realities of people struggling to make ends meet through the prose form. Much like many Kashmiri writers of that time, he began writing in Urdu before shifting to Kashmiri. Mohiuddin felt that, in addition to beauty, Kashmiri could also encompass decay.

He gained much recognition for his writings in Sath Sanger (1955), where Mohiuddin created stories that could be considered oral rather than written.

In one of his pieces, a man has been subjected to bureaucratic torture all day. He returns home after a long and irksome day at work. The man is silent the entire time his family eats. In fact, he unwittingly chews slowly as if to say, “Yes, please give me permission to chew this one more time.”

While the description is brief, it quite literally expresses the essence and spirit of an entire class, those who are always hesitant, diminished, or invisible.

His story ‘Jala’s Broken Tooth’ expresses an emotional trauma with consolation towards the attacker, yet an understanding of how a child’s broken tooth inflicts them with sadness and desperation.

“My Jala’s broken teeth - they must have fallen around here somewhere,” is powerful beyond expression.

Mohiuddin’s fiction does not shout from the rooftops. It collects.

In his novel Doad Dag, considered by many the first modern Kashmiri novel, there is nothing extraordinary about suffering. It exists all around. Suffering due to illness, economic deprivation, and emotional fatigue is non-explosive. It flows into life.

In one quiet passage, one of his characters asserts, “The body does not go from being well to unwell in one moment. It develops into its unwell state just as a child develops his speech.”

Mohiuddin illustrates pain not as an abrupt loss but as a continuing process. The main theme throughout his short stories and narratives is of workers waiting for promotions that will never come, people negotiating their place in the hierarchy of work that exists but cannot be perceived, and families breaking apart due to the stresses that cannot be described.

This is also summed up in an anecdote when an employee spends the entire evening practising how to ask for a loan and stands mute at the moment when he needs to speak.

Rather than proceeding or finishing a story, Mohiuddin depicts examples of indecision, such as when a man stands in a doorway but cannot cross into the room.

Mohiuddin creates that indecision and keeps that inconclusive, as if providing a resolution would be dishonest.

Unlike other authors, Mohiuddin creates his stories from both the spoken word and the unspoken.

In one brief but powerful passage, a woman looks out the window and watches the snow fall after having an argument. The narration conveys no direct reference to the disagreement. Instead, it describes the scene outside: “The snow kept falling until it covered the footprints, the path, and the idea that someone had walked there.”

It would be hard to interpret this as emotional symbolism. The erasure of the disagreement occurs through silence, rather than reconciliation. The characters he creates seldom speak about the turmoil within them, but rather show it.

A man folds his letter multiple times before sending it out to the post office. A child notices adults around him appearing to be stressed, but doesn’t understand why they appear to be that way. A woman experiences infidelity but proceeds with her routine. These gestures tell the entire story.

Reading Mohiuddin’s work today, one experiences a great deal of contrast. Although his style is subdued and almost minimalistic, his writing comes from an environment that is filled with instability and chaos.

Kashmir, specifically after the subcontinent’s partition, is not a geographical location. It is a state of mind in which there is uncertainty, multiple identities, and constant violence occurring at the same time. What you see in Mohiuddin’s work is not the result of a political commentary on Kashmir but rather the atmosphere that he creates.

One example of this is when a neighbourhood hears a rumour and everyone in the neighbourhood is affected by it, yet no one knows who started the rumour or if the rumour is true. As a result, conversations become shorter in length, and doors begin to close earlier in the evening while eyes are avoided, yet stare for an extended period of time when they do meet.

Or as Mohiuddin puts it, “Nothing has happened; however, everything is different.”

This is how he writes history: not as a series of events, but as feelings.

In the early 1990s, the violence that had been a backdrop for Mohiuddin’s writing suddenly erupted into his personal life. First, “unidentified gunmen” killed his son, and then “security officials” killed his son-in-law. What had only been an abstract notion of loss became something much more immediate to him. But, long before these tragedies occurred, Mohiuddin’s stories contained the notion of such profound loss – not in specifics but in emotional truth.

In one of his early stories, a father waits for his son to come home late at night, each minute extending as he waits for him. When the son finally arrives home, nothing dramatic happens. The father simply says, “You are late,” and turns away from his son.

Mohiuddin’s account of the event shows him as, “He spoke in a manner that implied the universe had suffered an injury.”

Reading Mohiuddin, one gets the feeling that through his own fiction, he predicted what would eventually happen to him. He was also able to express a strong moral consciousness in the way he wrote. When Mohiuddin returned the Padma Shri in protest, he did so as an extension of the same ethical framework that had shaped his stories.

His fiction insists on complexity and the uncomfortable coexistence of contradiction as a way of challenging the readers’ desire for easy distinctions between good and evil, victim and perpetrator.

In one of his stories, an untrustworthy small time bureaucrat is depicted as an empathetic individual towards his sick mother. The narrative does not provide any judgement, but only a description: “The bureaucrat was counting money in one room and counting breaths in the next room.”

This type of scene creates tension in the reader when trying to find moral clarity. It implies that human behaviour is inconsistent. Literature must also reflect that inconsistency.

Later on in his life, Mohiuddin began to think more of the past, but not as a solid record of reality, rather as an unreliable reality.

Memory becomes a major theme in his works. The same character will remember the same event differently, and the story will change based on who is telling the story.

“What we recall about an event is not necessarily how the event occurred.”

This idea of recursion, whereby memory feeds into narrative and vice versa, lends to that haunting quality present in Mohiuddin’s later works. The act of narrating is unclear as well.

Mohiuddin’s death in 2001 left a body of literature that changed the way the Kashmiri language is written. Although the works were written in Kashmiri, he will continue to live on through the “parts” of his stories that remain, through copies written in many different languages, in many different styles, in many different editions and publishers.

There is something almost appropriate about this – the disappearance of lives, feelings, and history. These were always at the forefront of Mohiuddin’s writing.

To read Mohiuddin today is to not only rediscover his writings but also rediscover ways to view the world. Mohiuddin’s most striking aspect is his denial of a spectacle. He creates stories using very small and detailed parts of life – pauses in conversation, gestures that stop abruptly, and thoughts that never get expressed verbally.

In one of the most impactful examples of his writing, a character says, “The sounds of life that are the loudest are not usually heard. They are simply lived through.”

That is the core of Mohiuddin’s artistic vision as a writer. His works show that suffering is often quiet, that history occurs in very private locations, that the language is often fragile and imperfect, but can still bear the weight of a human experience.