GHULAM MOHAMMAD KHAN

Roland Barthes was a French literary theorist and semiotician who felt deeply ‘impatient at the sight of (this) naturalness’ of meanings. Below, I make a crude attempt to expound how Roland Barthes would have meditated over different symbols, cultural constructs, and metonymic conceptualizations that deeply influence collective Kashmiri behavior or ‘territorial consciousness’. In other words, it is my endeavor to explain how Barthes would have disemboweled these symbolic fixities in Kashmiri culture and shown us the concealed softwares of ideology installed there. These softwares of ideology form the significant constituents of our ‘social action’.
Hartal
This term, recently incorporated in the latest edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, actually represents a collective territorial submission to an insuperable ennui, despondency, and a sense of overbearing nothingness. It means a complete erasure of the normal. Translating the deeply sensitive cultural associations of the term into a foreign language for a different readership would amount to a lexical deculturation. On a ‘hartal’ day, people in Kashmir don’t intentionally suspend all activities, but spontaneously adjust themselves to a powerful societal mechanism whereby they are tractably convinced to abandon the whole social activity. The prolonged perpetuation of this cultural construct highlights the very temporal gaps of nothingness in our collective existence. It symbolically reflects on our life which, like Schopenhauer’s pendulum of life, only swings backward and forward between ‘pain and boredom.’
Nokri (Employment)
This new cultural archetype deconstructs the so-called sacred discourses spun around the institution of marriage and implicitly propagates economic disparity and class consciousness. It proves the great Karl Marx ever relevant that it is socio-economic factors that shape human consciousness and not the reverse. Apparently denounced in the popular commonsense discourse, the ‘nokri’ archetype actually influences our serious opinion making when it comes to marriage or establishing new social relationships. It exposes the deeply internalized social behavior of the denial of the human essence in favour of the material superiority of a small class. Its conditioning of our thought process has been phenomenal in the recent past.
VPN
This newly adopted acronym in Kashmiri culture symbolizes the same old culture of protestation and the mixture of satisfaction and excitement at the helplessness of the oppressor. However, the full form of these letters could mitigate their cultural relevance or significance. Ask a common Kashmiri to define VPN and he/she will certainly define it, without any prior knowledge of this virtual private network, as a working tool against the abounding political arrogance of the State. Only inside the political derelict of Kashmir, one can trace both the methodological and semantic similarities between stone-pelting and VPN. As witnessed in the recent shocking political developments, VPN users have not only been physically trounced but also threatened with sedition charges.
Sonam Lotus
This highly dependable weatherman, recently described as ‘Saint Lotus’ by a regional daily for his accurate weather forecasting, has become an institution in himself. The bittersweet public reaction to his forecasts is motivated or governed more by an embedded conventional thought process than an unprejudiced rational approach. In normal public discourse, his forecasts are mostly treated as the Tiresian clairvoyance and no clairvoyance is welcome to the rigid existing generic mental set. Any slightest error in the forecast earns him the ire of the majority. This indirectly explores our (collective) latent unyielding faith in some supreme celestial power as the epitome of all perfection, while sentimentally negating everything else, even the scientific enquiry, which attempts to get closer to this archetypal perfection. Sonam’s failed forecasts bring some strange satisfaction to the majority. Overall, Sonam Lotus symbolizes a broader thought process affecting our collective behavior for a very long time now.
Beauty Plus
Given its powerful symbolic representation of a collective crazy fetish for the fantastic ideals of beauty, it would be rather parochial to limit the semantics of this phrase ‘beauty plus’ merely to an image editing application. Since our thought and behavior work within a historically complex structured field of meanings, the need of any factual immediacy to challenge any culturally pervasive or internalized unit of meaning appears irrelevant. Maybe it is possible that the sublime ideal of the beauty archetype undergoes change over the passage of time, but the one bestriding our territorial consciousness for many years has been never achieved. However, people continue to aspire for the fictitious ideals of beauty. Beauty Plus, by erasing blemishes and whitening their images, doesn’t actually make anyone beautiful; rather it exposes a dark repressed world of desire where one wants to be something else which one can never become. It also points to the social processing or categorizing of colors and their cultural associations. It may sound a universal tendency, but its regional implications can’t be ignored. In Kashmir it has gone to another level, creating a parallel hyper-real space of social relationships where we continuously disown our real identities.
This list may go on. However, it should suffice to help us understand the complex pattern of meanings underlying the normal lexical usage and different cultural codes. It is the perennial interplay of these codes and usages that produce meanings. These meanings, in turn, shape human, and particularly the Kashmiri human’s, consciousness.
The author is an Assistant Professor in Higher Education
Email id: [email protected]

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