Editor: Murtaza Shibli

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Mental Health of Societies
Jeremy Seabrook


The worst fate that can befall a society is not only physical conquest by a more powerful entity, but the loss of meaning of its world. The story of indigenous peoples everywhere has been one of lost coherence, as the remnants of ancient civilizations leave their degraded environments to go and grieve in city slums, or to die a slow death from alcohol or drugs - those very modern consolations for the extinction of meaning. Sometimes, traditional societies are prey to millennial cults, the dream of a return to a mythic past, the hope of a supernatural deliverer. At other times, there may be an intensification, or warping of traditional beliefs; this is often referred to as 'fundamentalism' and it is a reactive response to a violent assault upon beliefs or values.

The intrusion of powerful external forces into any culture upsets its balance, deforms society, and sets up pathologies of one kind or another, unpredictable in their scope and impact. Societies, like individuals, require certain conditions in which their mental health, as well as their physical well-being, can be sustained.

This is why much of the discussion over Kashmir has been missing an important dimension. Kashmir, invaded, occupied, fought over for centuries by Persians, Mughals, Afghans, Sikhs, British, adjusted themselves to these continuous violations. The celebrated adaptability of Kashmiris, their capacity to co-exist with victors and dominators, has been regarded - perhaps falsely - as an integral part of their psyche. After all, is it not out of the many diverse cultures that have influenced Kashmiri experience that its own particular eclectic, tolerant and fluid sensibility has developed? Is it not the sheer ability to survive of a people who know how to keep their heads down and let the storms - meteorological as well as social - that rage in their highland fortress pass over them?

Because Kashmiris have traditionally retreated under stress into the security of their own psychological refuge, presenting to the world a face of apparent compliance with conquerors, this does not mean that such adaptability will last forever.

The importance of faith in our understanding of the world (which to outsiders may appear as superstitition, unreason or idolatry) cannot be overstated. To make sense of our lives is as much a basic human need as to eat and drink. This is why, when the modern world imposes its prescriptions - economic, social, political - upon traditional societies, these clash, or mix combustibly with ancient systems of belief. The outcome is far from predictable.

The recent two decades of violent conflict in Kashmir are different from any earlier assault upon identity; for this has been a product of the most intractable and violent encounter with the consequences of a globalization, which has burst upon the world, as destructive, totalizing and inescapable as the incursion of the conquistadores into the closed societies of central and south America in the fifteenth century.

Kashsmir is not simply the 'unfinished business' of Partition, although that remains the original disturbance, which subsequent struggles have aggravated and made more bitter. Kashmir has become the site where incompatible world-views and religions meet; not only a resurgent Islam, but equally, a more assertive India, itself torn between the inflexible doctrines of secular nationalism and Hindutva, and even more telling, the values of a globalization characterised by industrialised consumption and the fateful seductions of materialism. There are no inner sanctuaries in which to shelter from these, for they set up their idols and images in the spaces within: this is what the cliché of 'hearts and minds' actually means.

These new sensibilities in play in Kashmir are not just instruments of dominance. They reach into the heart and soul of the people; they seek to re-arrange the internal landscapes, so that these are no longer fashioned by mists, lakes and mountains but by the distant and artificial topography of the garden of earthly delights manufactured in the malls and shopping enclosures of the West. This is the in-between, the no-man's land, the place where capitalism meets the cultures of Islam, Hinduism and nationalism, where war has been declared upon vestigial local cultures, and 'choices' are imposed upon people who until now had never been compelled to face such stark alternatives.

There is nowhere to hide from these savage encounters. To which haven will the refugees of globalism flee? Who will offer asylum to those who have always called themselves Muslims, but who have never thought to interpret their faith literally, according to words of revelation which admit of no ambiguity? Where is the safe exile to be found from the militaristic celebrations of a nationalism almost mystical in its self-belief? Nowhere on earth has been so highly militarised. Nowhere on earth have people been subjected to such an incomprehensible cultism of sectarianism and factionalism. Nowhere on earth has an ancient sensibility been so systematically crushed; and offered as compensation for this trauma only the magic healing of that most modern of all superstitions, the power of money.

Is the trampled sensibility of Kashmir like grass that will spring up again once the boot of the enemy is removed? Or have its tears effaced even the memory of its capacity for song, poetry and dance, its ability to fashion things of beauty, not for distant tourist markets, but for daily use and in celebration of the joyfulness of being alive? What can be salvaged from the ruins, not only of bombed towns and abandoned fields, but from the inner desolation of a culture which, despite all the brutal historic assaults upon it, had remained more or less intact?

These are not simply rhetorical questions. Societies are like individuals, in that their mental health depends upon a sense of identity, as securely anchored in geography as in time, in language as in ritual. The maintenance of confidence in self is as vital to the human person as it is to the societies that shelter them. When 'modernisation' itself is inflected by the pathologies of extreme religious or nationalistic ideology, it does irreparable damage to local customs and beliefs that have given significance to the life of peoples for centuries. Kashmiris are victims of those who would tear the veils from the eyes of others, not knowing that these are not veils at all, but living membranes.

The bringers of liberation to the world the bearers of universal values, the triumphalist emancipators of humankind, expect to be greeted as deliverers. Instead, the exuberant export of their culture, their wealth, their power, creates strange new pathologies, both individual and social. And to deal with the bastard offspring of their rape of the cultures of the world, they bring nothing but the supreme confidence of their own measureless ignorance.


London, July 2007