The Personal and the Collective: A Study of the Exile of Kashmiri Pandits Through Multiple Genres

This paper will probe the meaning of “home” as a subjective category for healing through a comparative examination of selected poems by Lalita Pandit Hogan (1950- ) and two documentaries Tell them: ‘The Tree they had planted has now Grown’ and The Lost Paradise : A documentary on plight of Kashmiri Pandits by Ajay Raina and Akshay Labroo respectively. Both the poems and the documentaries summon the notion of Home as a potential “end”, with the latter deliberately invested in the double meaning of loss and purpose. In identifying the “end” of return to home, the two genres fuse the personal with the trans-personal, blend the concrete with the political, mix the haunting memory of past with a confusing present and an uncertain future. The welding of diverse poles in each evokes the tragedy of the unending conflict in modern Kashmir. While the erasure of hope in the “end” of home is strongly present in Lalita Pandit’s poems, the documentaries appeal to the political establishment to rend the wall between the despair of present and the free home of the future. For Raina and Labroo, as with Pandit, the present is rife with desolation and fear. However, while documentaries hint at the transience of the Now, Pandit, rooted in the fear of the radical other in the altered political scenario, evokes the permanent migration of the Self from the healing home. Both cautiously present the past as far more adjusting and accommodative than the insularly exclusivist perceptions of the present saturated with the growing cries of liberation from a country with which her Hindu community has deep cultural connections. In all, personal expression transcends the individual limits to acquire a putative representative voice for their respective cultural configurations. Neither is dedicated to a narrow essentialist rendering of those configurations.