Kashmir: Rumours and Commotion
Khalid Bashir Ahmad
[This piece was inspired by widespread shock and panic created in January 2016 across Kashmir by a rumour that polio drops administered to children had caused death of many babies.]
Last Sunday brought with it horror, chaos and worst confusion to Kashmir. Thousands of panic-stricken parents poured on the streets of Srinagar and other towns to make it to the nearest hospital for a medical checkup of their children after someone spread a rumour on social media that few infants had died soon after being administered polio drops. The rumour was false but it did the trick its originator had intended. Kashmir was gripped by commotion.
I recall a similar scene during my childhood in early 1960s when word spread like wildfire that a mysterious gang was drawing blood out of the veins of children in schools. The rumour engulfed the city in no time as anguished parents ran towards educational institutions. My mother who had never stepped out of home without a veil, turned a sprinter, barefooted and unveiled as she ran, to look for her two children and bring them home.
Rumour-mongers are found in every society. I am told that the word ‘monger’ has its origin in the Latin word ‘mango’ which means ‘dealer in tricked-out wares’. A rumour-monger thus is a dealer in gossip or hearsay who is least bothered about the fallout of the word he circulates. In other words, he is a trickster who derives pleasure in spreading a false story and celebrating its impact which could be as chaotic as we witnessed on Sunday.
As a people, Kashmiris are as good or bad as there are good and bad people in other parts of the world. However, generally speaking, we love rumours and exaggeration. There is no doubt about that. We tend to derive amusement out of exaggerating things. If we like a person we make him divine and if we dislike someone we make him look like a sibling of the Devil. If a small adversity befalls us, it is no less than a qayamat. Even newspaper reports often describe an incident of a couple of deaths or property loss as qayamat-i-sugra (Little Doomsday). We describe a small misfortune as toofaan (tempest). Likewise, we proudly describe people with small or inconsequential achievement as ‘world famous’, ‘globally acclaimed” and the like when the fact is that the ‘accomplishments’ of these gentlemen or ladies are not known even to their spouses, not to speak of their next door neighbour.
Rumour mongering is our favourite pastime and has remained so since very old times. We are known to make a mulberry tree out of a gourd plant (Alle kulis tulle kul banavun). Phrases like Khabr-i-Zaina Kadal or the adage Gayi ho gayi ho Zaina Kadle speak about our fascination for rumours. To Aurel Stein, Kashmir capital has always been a hot bed of political gossip and ‘fertile nursery of false and often amusingly absurd rumours’. Strolling down to the city bridges and the ghats on the river bank, he notes, one would always watch small crowds eagerly gathering around the news-fabricators who were always found in these localities. Walter Lawrence believes that half the stories to the discredit of Kashmir and its inhabitants are due to the fertile imagination of a particular community in Kashmir, who after the Irish car-driver told quaint scandals of the Valley and its rulers.
Towards the end of the 19th century a frightful creature, who, some said, was like a great cat, was rumoured to have struck the city. While nobody had actually seen the creature it was believed to be coming out of the Jhelum to visit homes at night and tear people apart. The rumour spread dread across Kashmir and nobody ventured out after the day fall. During the time educationist Tyndale Biscoe was in Kashmir, a terrible beast was rumoured to inhabit the Jhelum one summer. Frightening stories about it were making rounds in Srinagar and no one dared to bathe in the river for a month. When, after the summer vacations, students returned to school dirty and unclean, Biscoe persuaded 130 boys of his school to leap into the Jhelum from Amira Kadal, and swim right through the city to Safa-Kadal “so that this beast might burst itself with swallowing so many boys and thus would save the city”. The bridges and banks and the roofs of the houses were crowded with people to see what would happen. “Nothing did happen and next day city was washing itself once more, for the bogey was slain”, recalled Biscoe in his book Kashmir Under Sunlight & Shade.
There is a story representative of how as a people we not only fabricate news but also make a fabrication of the news. In the olden times, it is said, a woman in a Kashmir village delivered a baby boy with a dark complexion. A lady neighbour visited the mother and the infant and on return told her acquaintance that the woman had given birth to a black coloured boy. The second woman then took the news to her friends telling them that a jet black skinned baby was born to the lady. Everybody who heard and forwarded the news added extra black tinge to the boy’s skin. One lady described the baby as black as a crow. The news kept on circulating in the village until one woman announced that the lady had given birth to a crow. That drew people in scores to witness the unprecedented happening.
Not to speak of a moron or a heartless dealer-in-gossip taking people for a ride and deriving sadistic pleasure out of their torment, even journalists have not spared us of this horror game in the past. In 1935, for instance, the Kashmir Times published a news report quoting a non-existent ‘eminent geologist’, Robert Macfield that the Takht-e-Sulaiman or the Shankaracharya Hill will erupt between July 15 and August 15. The news report warned that the areas immediately surrounding the hill within a distance of two miles will be in very great danger and it is probable that the shock will change the physical configuration of the whole area and that Srinagar will be flooded by latent fountains existing underground. As expected, the news created widespread panic and migration of people to safer places until another newspaper, The Civil & Military Gazette, described the news as ‘cruel joke’ and the Kashmir Times’ ‘idea of April Fool’. The dread caused by this rumour keeps visiting us periodically even now, although geologists have ruled out possibility of the hill ever erupting.
It is difficult to conclusively identify reasons for Kashmiris being rumour lovers or fabricators of news but there are geographical, historical and cultural aspects that can be attributed to the birth and evolution of this trait in them. Geographically, as we know, the Valley was landlocked and even today inclement weather for a few days cuts it off from the rest of the world. Consider the situation hundreds of years ago when the land was isolated and winters were harsh and long. Added to it, Kashmir has been subjugated for centuries and its inhabitants subjected to the worst types of oppression that humankind has ever known under which there was no scope of free expression or entertainment. In such a gloomy and depressing atmosphere people devised their own ways to keep themselves in good humour and fight melancholic conditions. One such medium was tarr or fabrication of news, and rumours. They weaved fantastic stories to laugh out loud at their despair and misfortune.
Rumour mongering in Kashmir was successfully used in the past for political purposes. Political leadership often used it to mount pressure on the powers that be. During the concluding days of the Dogra rule, the popularity of Sheikh Muhammad Abdullah skyrocketed through a widespread rumour that his name was found naturally inscribed on tree leaves. People across the Valley took it as gospel. There was another rumour that Abdullah, incarcerated as he was in the Hari Parbat Fort, was thrown in boiling oil but came out of unharmed. These rumours grew a halo around the image of the leader who had taken up fight against an autocratic rule. Once in 1930s, the middle-rung leadership, in order to test how widespread their word of mouth can go, circulated that a female leopard had delivered three cubs at the entry of the Jama Masjid and within no time hundreds of people thronged the mosque to have a glimpse of the baby leopards. Many swore that they actually saw the cubs.
In a superstitious society, rumour mongers without much effort circulate frightening stories, like monsters and celestial bodies visiting villages and taking away children. During the 2014 deluge, rumours of hundreds of bodies floating on flood waters and many prominent doctors being washed away by the Jhelum across the Line of Control could be traced to our being rumour loving and exaggerating trait in the society.
A harmless funny rumour can be a source of entertainment but a bad rumour can cause limitless anguish and pain (and the worst traffic jam too) as we observed on last Sunday. Circulating such a rumour is not funny. It is criminal and must be dealt with accordingly.
TAILPIECE: As news about infuriated people swarming hospitals came, I phoned my medico niece posted in a major hospital to know what was happening. She replied, “No child has died of polio vaccine but, importantly, doctors too remained out of harm’s way.” She was referring to enraged parents looking for doctors and vandalizing hospital infrastructure.
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