14 Books About Kashmir, Each Labelled Fiction, Memoir or Reportage

Bashir builds the book around the night her grandmother died and the days that followed, which is when a family finds out what a curfew does to grief. Around that spine she rebuilds a teenage life: hair falling out from stress, a Walkman, exam preparation between crackdowns, the walk to school past a bunker, the daily arithmetic about what to wear and where to let your eyes rest. It is domestic and exact, and the violence mostly stays at the edge of the frame, which is how it works when you live inside it rather than visit.

Peer was a schoolboy when the militancy began, was sent away to study, and became a journalist in Delhi. He goes home and reports his own place: the Papa 2 interrogation centre, a village where the women wait for husbands who never came back, a friend who joined the militants, families who lost sons to one side or to the other. He writes plainly in the first person and lets the interviews carry the weight. Almost every Kashmiri book in English published since is in conversation with this one.

In the winter of 1990 Pandita's family joined the Kashmiri Pandits who left the valley after threats, killings and nights of loudspeaker announcements. The book is mostly about what came afterwards: rented rooms in Jammu, unbearable heat, small humiliations at school, a mother who keeps saying that their house had twenty-two rooms, and a grief with nowhere to file itself. It is angry, and the author makes no claim to be even-handed. Read it as one family's memory rather than as a settled history of what happened and why.

Koul grew up in a household where the grandmother ruled, the year ran on saffron, snow and weddings, and Hindus and Muslims lived side by side in a way that has since become impossible to describe without somebody starting a fight. She writes about food, gossip, school, marriage and the slow arrival of politics at the edge of all of it. The last part covers the exodus from a distance, because she had already left for America by then. The warmth is the argument: this is what was there before.

Sajad draws his own childhood in Srinagar: a family of woodworkers, an older brother, school, and a city where soldiers, searches and funerals are ordinary weather. The device that carries the book is simple and strange, since every Kashmiri in it appears as a hangul, the endangered deer of the valley, which turns a political point into something you feel before you can argue with it. The art is dense black and white, closer to woodcut than to comics, and the boy grows up drawing cartoons for a newspaper that keeps getting into trouble.

Haleema loses her father in a raid and her son to a night pick-up, and the book follows her through the machinery that assembles itself around a disappearance: army camps, lawyers, police stations, and the associations of parents who meet holding photographs. Bashir writes it small and slow, with none of the flourishes the subject invites. The title comes from the half-widows of Kashmir, women whose husbands vanished and were never declared dead, so they can neither mourn properly nor start again, and the novel extends that idea to mothers.

The narrator's friends have crossed the mountains to train and have not come back. He stays behind and ends up with the worst job in the valley, walking through a field of the dead, going through pockets, reporting to a captain who drinks and talks and occasionally seems almost human. Waheed keeps the perspective locked to that boy, so the war arrives as smells, rumours and errands instead of strategy and dates. The book returns to the same meadow again and again, which is hypnotic or heavy going depending entirely on your patience.

Faiz paints pencil boxes for a living and dreams of finishing one large work in the old style. Roohi has decided she will marry him whatever her family thinks about it. Around them Waheed builds the Srinagar of the early 1990s: a shrine, a school, a bunker at the end of the lane, and the steady closing of every route the two of them might have used to live an ordinary life. It is a romance written against a city that has stopped permitting romances, and it knows what it is doing.

Shalini has money, grief and no plan, so she follows a thin lead to a village in the mountains and stays with a family who take her in without asking for much. Vijay is interested in the thing outsider narratives usually avoid, which is what a well-meaning visitor costs the people who host her. Shalini is often insufferable, and that is deliberate. The novel alternates between her Bangalore childhood with a mother who was brilliant and unwell and the village where her ignorance slowly acquires consequences.

Agha Shahid Ali wrote these poems from America in the years when the mail from Kashmir stopped moving, and he built them out of that fact: letters nobody will ever read, addresses that no longer work, a burned post office, a minaret. He writes in strict forms, ghazals and canzones and villanelles, and he addresses friends by name inside the poems. If you have read only prose about Kashmir, these will change the pitch of everything else you read, because grief inside a form behaves differently from grief in a paragraph.

This is a collection rather than one narrative: memoirs, essays and short pieces by Kashmiri Pandits of several generations, edited by Siddhartha Gigoo and Varad Sharma. Some contributors are practised writers and some are not, and the unevenness is part of the value, because you get a community talking instead of one voice speaking for everybody. The camp years in Jammu come up again and again, the tin roofs and the heat and the schooling, and so does the argument about what should happen next and who owes whom.

Kak edited this after the protest summers of 2008 to 2010, when the street rather than the gun became the main form of resistance in the valley. The contributors are journalists, academics, poets and young Kashmiris who were writing online at the time, and the pieces run from cool analysis to raw first-person accounts written days after the events. The collection is openly sympathetic to the protesters and hostile to the state's response, and it says so rather than pretending to a neutrality it does not have.

Dulat ran the Intelligence Bureau's Kashmir desk, later headed the Research and Analysis Wing, and then advised the Prime Minister's Office on Kashmir. Written with the journalist Aditya Sinha, this is his account of the 1990s and early 2000s: which separatist leaders Delhi kept a line open to, how elections were handled, the hijacking of IC 814, and the outreach that Vajpayee attempted. It is chatty, indiscreet in some places and carefully evasive in others, and it was argued about loudly when it appeared.

Bose starts in 1947 and works forward through the accession, the wars, the 1987 election, the militancy and the counter-insurgency, and he does the thing most books skip, which is to give real attention to Azad Kashmir and the Northern Areas as well as the Indian side. Comparative politics is his field, so Northern Ireland and Bosnia turn up as working examples rather than decoration, and he uses them to argue that settlements come from arrangements between people rather than from anybody's total victory. Academic prose, but not walled off from ordinary readers.