As seeping corruption and censorship taint Kashmir’s landscape, the true foulness lies not just in spoiled meat or banned texts, but in the silence that allows decay to flourish beneath the surface
Behold, Kashmir! A land where the literal and the metaphysical engage in a macabre dance of decay. For those familiar with its viscera, its wounds, its spectral burdens, and most importantly, its layered history, the question isn’t whether something is rotten, but rather which particular flavour of decomposition demands our attention today. Enter the masterpiece of decay: several tonnes of exquisitely putrid meat, distributed to the valley’s unsuspecting eateries.
The Food Safety Department’s heroic unveiling of this olfactory affront naturally caused a stir, a tempest in a teacup, or perhaps a maggot in a meatball. Cue the predictable symphony of outrage on social media, a chorus demanding eternal damnation (via boycott, lawsuit, and closure) for purveyors of unlabelled haram sustenance. One can almost hear Feuerbach chuckling from the grave: “Man is what he eats.” And so, a populace now plays a grim game of gastric archaeology, wondering precisely which mouthful of their recent culinary history constituted this unsanctified offering. A rather indigestible truth, wouldn’t you say?
Is the meat the sole malodorous offender in Kashmir? The answer, whispered in resigned unanimity across the valley, hangs pungently in the air: a resounding ‘not’. Most Kashmiris would concur, though the alacrity with which that concurrence escapes their lips remains a performance worthy of Sartre’s stage. For between the silent acknowledgement of rot and its vocal espousal yawns an abyss so vast, it mocks the very notion of conviction. Believing a thing is one matter; championing it publicly is quite another – these are antipodes separated not by distance, but by an almost thermodynamic resistance. One needn’t excavate the ‘why’; the chasm itself is the indictment. Yet observe the curious paradox: on select stages, Kashmiris exhibit a breathtaking velocity of opinion, leaping not merely to conclusions, but into fervent, often spectacularly irrelevant, declamations – a climactic tango performed while the foundations smoulder unremarked. As Camus might note: “Silence itself has a meaning.” And in that silence, the deeper rot quietly proliferates.
So, yes—Kashmir exhales a bouquet of rots. Some undergo a miraculous sanctioned decomposition, emerging not merely sanitised, but curiously fragrant; an organoleptic alchemy where decay acquires the perfume of propriety. These, naturally, offend no nostril. Yet history—that patient compost heap—remains the foundational putrescence. Apply an attuned olfactory interrogation, and its true fetor emerges: acrid, inescapable. We shan’t catalogue every festering epochal sore. Instead, let us isolate two freshly sprouted specimens of decay, ripening simultaneously in Kashmir’s hothouse of late. Their relative stench? A matter for your own discerning schnoz to arbitrate. As Adorno might murmur: “The decay of a thing ignored becomes its truth.”
The theatre of decay opened on August 2nd: a pungent debut with 1,200 kilograms of rancid meat seized from Zakura’s Industrial Estate. Cue the Food Safety Department’s valiant pantomime – swinging into action, uncovering several thousand kilograms more of olfactory offence across Srinagar and Pulwama. The plot thickened: rotten rice joined the cast. A grim epiphany: dig deeper, and the rot metastasises; it cannot be fully seized, only temporarily inconvenienced. Then, on August 5th delivered Act II: an official decree banning 25 books concerning Kashmir, allegedly propagating a “false narrative and secessionism.” And here lies the true, gag-inducing miasma: the fetid absence of the state-sanctioned “correct narrative.” The order bans, yet offers only silence, a void begging for its own sequel: “Order No. …: Clarification of the Approved Narrative.” For the people of Kashmir, trapped in the narrative of no man’s land between the banned and the unarticulated? That liminal space reeks with the same visceral intensity as the Zakura meat, a suffocating stench of curated oblivion. As Foucault might observe, “Power is exercised through the control of discourse…” and here, the silence is the rot.
Behold the modern Kashmiri: a paragon of calculative wellness, dissecting sugar molecules in a cola can with Talmudic precision. Yet this very connoisseur of glycemic indices flocks, en famille, to the valley’s celebrated eateries—not merely for sustenance, but for the theatre of consumption. Is it appetite, or the fetish for being seen at that bistro, the one radiating Instagrammable legitimacy? Bourdieu nods: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.” Food here is pure distinction, a social alchemy transforming grease into status.
Now consider the cognitive menu. How many of these discerning diners could name a single title among the 25 banned books? Do they taste the “false narrative” the state condemns? Know the recipe for the “correct” one? If these texts are indeed poison, they fester more insidiously than Zakura meat.
The timing, of course, reeked of genius: this bibliographic purge unfolded alongside the buzzing Chinar Book Festival at SKICC—ten days of government-endorsed literary virtue-signalling. The banned books, however, hold memories that outmass all seized stinking meat. If their narratives are “false,” they’ve stolen our past. And if the state declares them toxic? Then it owes the people the antidote: the authorised truth, served not in silence, but on the platter of public record. Until then, the void between the forbidden and the unfathomable hangs thick—a stench no food safety raid can dispel.
The gastronomic rot, those tonnes of seized, stinking flesh, will, no doubt, be disposed of. Accountability! Rigorous inspections shall commence; culprits (already delightfully known, not unknown) shall be nabbed. The health-conscious Kashmiri, hitherto preoccupied with sugar grams in soda, will now ponder rista with the gravitas of a scholar. But consider the PhD thesis—that scholarly monument erected upon the 25 banned books. Their publishers? Paragons of exclusivity, gatekeepers permitting only “the best research” to pass. Yet this pinnacle of academic rigour, we’re told, “misrepresents Kashmir.” If the crème de la crème of scholarship distorts truth, where does that leave narrative?
So, which demands greater urgency? Nabbing meat-peddlers, whose faces, warehouses, and sins are blissfully familiar? Or excavating the correct narrative these “best” texts have allegedly buried? Foucault’s blade cuts deep: “Knowledge is not for understanding; it is for cutting.” If banned books sever Kashmir from its past, the state owes more than seizures—it owes truth, served not in silence, but, for God’s sake, on the platter of public record. Until then, the void festers.
We dwell not in Hamlet’s binary abyss, but in the limbo between being and oblivion, a Sartrean hell of others’ making, reeking of rancid mutton and burnt pages. This olfactory purgatory defies Descartes: “I stink, therefore I am… trapped.” So, pray, enlighten us: shall we dine on state-inspected haram, or feast on banned bibliographic heresies? Guide our forks and our fates, O arbiters of palates and paradigms! In this Kashmir, even the air is epistemology.
Dr Ghulam Mohammad Khan
gl******@***il.com