Beyond Silence: Women's Stories
In a corner of Srinagar's Partap Park, a mother has stood in protest every month since August 1990, still waiting for news of the teenage son who never came home. Her story opens Beyond Silence: Women's Stories - and it is only the first of many the world was never meant to hear.
Veteran journalist Nayeema Ahmad Mahjoor spent decades reporting from Kashmir before going on to edit the BBC World Service's Urdu output in London. In this collection of interlinked true stories, she turns that reporter's eye, and a survivor's memory, on the women history keeps in the margins: the "half-widows" of Dardpura who cannot remarry because no one can confirm their husbands are dead; schoolgirls blinded by pellet guns; a Kunan Poshpora survivor who still cannot sleep through the night; Kashmiri Pandit families weighing an impossible homecoming; a journalist mother filing her last story before the August 2019 communications blackout cuts her off entirely.
These are not statistics. They are women Mahjoor sat across from, in interrogation-centre waiting rooms, in refugee flats in London, in her own family. Some carry decades of grief with dry-eyed composure; others break their silence in one furious, unstoppable sentence. A few, like the Pandit activist fighting her own community's politicians, or the woman who arrives at a Women's Commission office asking only for hope, refuse to be anyone's symbol at all.
Beyond Silence moves between the Kashmir Valley and the Kashmiri diaspora in Britain, between the militancy of the 1990s and the lockdowns of 2019 and 2020, tracing what three decades of conflict do to the women left holding a household, a memory, or a grief no one will officially acknowledge. Mahjoor, who also served as Chairperson of the Jammu & Kashmir State Commission for Women, writes with the authority of someone who has both investigated these stories and lived inside them.
Unflinching, intimate, and often devastating, this is essential reading for anyone drawn to women's stories from conflict zones, South Asian history and politics, oral history, literary journalism, or the long, unresolved story of Kashmir itself.
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