How Love Endures Conflict: Mehak Jamal's Loal Kashmir Tells Intimate Stories from a Besieged Valley

The Hindu

24-06-2025

Published : Jun 24, 2025 16:30 IST - 8 MINS READ
In her latest book, Lōal Kashmir, the filmmaker and author Mehak Jamal gathers 16 stories of intimacy and separation, tracing how Kashmiri couples sustained relationships under extraordinary constraints. Through letters, medical networks, and disrupted digital channels, these narratives trace the emotional landscape of a region where affection often had to navigate the machinery of surveillance.
In conversation with Gowhar Geelani for the latest episode of The Kashmir Notebook, Jamal reflects on memory as an important archive, the poignancy of unrecorded sentiment, and the role of storytelling in reclaiming the personal amid conflict.
Edited excerpts:
Your book Lōal Kashmir consists of 16 love stories from Kashmir. These stories are set mostly in Kashmir against the backdrop of the communication blockade of 2019. How did you gather these 16 stories?
I started this project as a memory project in 2020, one year after the abrogation and the communication blockade. I kept hearing stories of love from people during that blockade when people were finding ingenious ways to reach out to each other, to communicate because the regular means of doing so weren't available. I got interested in examining love and longing in Kashmir through different periods of unrest. The main way of collecting these stories was an online project called, where I put out exactly what I was looking for with a simple Google form. I would interview them over a phone call or Zoom, or in person. The other way was through word of mouth. Over the course of four years, from 2020 to January 2025, when the book came out, I had to drop a few stories because sometimes they were repetitive.
You divide the book into three sections—Ōtru, Rāth, and Az—day before yesterday, yesterday, and today. One story that struck me was about Bushra from the other side of Kashmir, like the divided families of East and West Berlin. Tell us about these stories where conflict and communication blockade impact love stories differently.
What's intriguing is that the first chapter of the book is called 'Love Letter', set in the early 1990s, where this boy and his girlfriend use letter writing as a way of communicating. Many years later, 30 years later, when the abrogation happened and there was no form of communication, people were forced to resort back to letter writing and become experimental and inventive.
And find joy in this old communication tool.
It is poetic and ironic, but it's also heartbreaking to think that a group of people are reduced to that when the whole world has the highest speed of internet, and you can reach out to anybody in a second. In Kashmir, just five, six years ago, it was impossible to even talk to somebody who maybe lives one kilometre away from you. I felt something poignant about these stories, and they should be documented because when you generally talk about Kashmir and the conflict, the lived experiences of the conflict are as important to document. In the times that we live in, when history can be altered, sometimes memory is a more powerful tool. Collective public memory means that 10 different people, if they say this happened to me, you start making that thing undeniable.
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It is irrefutable in a way. The first story about Javed, who wants to show off a love letter written in Urdu during a crackdown in the early 1990s—soldiers find his letter and get interested. Tell us about this story.
That story is the perfect entry into the world of Lōal Kashmir because it perfectly encapsulates the dichotomies that Kashmir exists in. Here is this love letter, and these soldiers first don't understand it because it's written in Urdu. He is afraid that they think it's a militant code and they're going to take him away. Nobody attributes crackdowns to pleasant memories. So he doesn't really know what to do, except they say recite your love letter. That's the only short way that he sees to get out of the situation. He decides I'm going to just stretch this out as long as I want, whereas maybe he's not conscious of the fact that this can be seen as humiliation, but he focuses on wanting to get out of the situation. Those soldiers are lapping it up, and by the end of it, they're almost like buddies. And he doesn't like that. He doesn't want to be seen as their buddies or be seen as complicit with them.
The use of Kashmiri words throughout your stories—was this deliberate to introduce other audiences to Kashmiri words, or linguistic decoration?
Certainly not the latter. I wanted to bring about more layers to the text. The words are not italicised in any way. I was trying to inculcate them into the prose itself. For a Kashmiri reading it, it's a happy surprise. For somebody who is not from Kashmir, they learn something new. A lot of times, the dialogues are in Kashmiri, and most of the time, those are how they were told to me by the contributor. Sometimes I just felt like something like Chilai Kalan, how do I say that in another way? Having all of those words and objects which are a part of Kashmir—what is a kandur or what is a kanger? I felt they were very much needed and came organically to the text. For anybody who doesn't understand it, there's a huge glossary explaining everything in detail.
Tell us about your multicultural background—your father is Kashmiri, your mother from Maharashtra, you were brought up here, studied in Bangalore, work in Mumbai. How did this influence your approach to these stories?
I was born and brought up here. I did all my schooling here, and went through all those summers of unrest from 2008, 2009, 2010. When I was growing up, I kept thinking, does the world really know what's happening to all of us in Kashmir? Everybody reads the news and sees what's happening on the news, and that's all they know of Kashmir. But there's a different side to our lives. There's always that struggle as Kashmiris to want to live a normal life, but also want to let the world know what's happening here. Even while I was growing up, it was always a struggle for me—I wondered whether I completely belonged to this space or not? It was very cathartic collecting these stories, talking to these people and writing this book because it really did bring me close to the place and the people.
Stories like 'Visa' show how the Kashmir story gets transported to non-Kashmiris through relationships. How does this dynamic work?
There is a certain unlearning which comes with being in a relationship with somebody from Kashmir. In the visa story, she gets married and has to go back to the US, but her visa application gets flagged for a year. So for a year after her marriage, she didn't see her husband. This is from 2008 to 2009, when even broadband internet wasn't the best. They didn't have video calling. How did they sustain this relationship over the internet for a year? And it was an arranged marriage. For a person who has not experienced any of it, how do you explain that to them? You just married them, and they don't understand anything about Kashmir. What does that really do to your relationship?
The story 'Ambulance' about Dr Khawar and Dr Iqra using ambulance drivers to pass letters—tell us about this.
This story is one of the few in which I spoke to both sides. This is the first story from the last section of the book, which is Az—today—dealing with the abrogation of Article 370. Both are doctors. Khawar is in general medicine at SMHS, and Iqra is a psychiatrist, which is not seen as an emergency branch, so she doesn't have a duty as much. Even though the hospitals are governed by the same medical college, they have permutations and combinations happening in terms of whether they will be able to see each other or not. At that time, even civilian vehicles were not allowed, so doctors were taken in ambulances.
Would you read a favourite paragraph from your book?
This is from someone whose name is also Mehak. She told me these exact words: 'We cannot control death. That is inevitable. But what is within our reach is love, loving the people we can and showing our love to them. When we aren't given the freedom to profess our love, it is the worst kind of cruelty, a crime against a people. Love is humanity, it is everything, existing beyond borders, beyond language. We have seen curfews and lockdowns, and each of them leads to a curfew on love. Love gets caged, and a lock is put on it. And yet, here's the miracle. Despite the obstacles that do exist, people continue to love. They don't forget each other.'
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There's resilience in these stories, but also heartbreak. Have you probed this resilience—where does it come from in Kashmir?
When you talk about resilience in Kashmir, I don't think it's something that you have a choice to have or not to have. It comes organically because you are put into circumstances where you have to find ways to survive, to hope, to deal with things. There's an urgency in a lot of these people to reach out to the ones they love. It comes from living in a place like Kashmir, where things can get volatile very quickly, so you look for a person in your life who is a constant or who understands you or understands what's happening around you.
Can we hope for more books from you in this vein?
In some other form, maybe. I haven't thought about a sequel. I want to tell more stories from Kashmir. That's what I have always wanted to do.
Gowhar Geelani is a senior journalist and author of Kashmir: Rage and Reason.