For Kashmiris, Jhelum is many things. In their day-to-day existence, it is a source of livelihood, a means of transportation. In the bardic traditions, it becomes a leitmotif, a recurring melody, in the staccato symphony of the valley. It was along the banks of the river that the legendary poetess Habba Khatoon mourned her missing lover Yusuf Shah Chak. For poet Zareef Ahmed Zareef, Jhelum was the “heart of Srinagar.” For Farooq Nazki, Jhelum was indistinguishable from blood:
Mothers wash the bloodstained apparels of grooms,
On stream banks,
Bridal wear turns to ash,
And the Jhelum flows
In the wistful, un-remembering eyes of Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali, the river was “ultramarine”, a piece of a jigsaw puzzle he never could finish.
When Kashmiri poet singer-songwriter Mohammad Muneem peered into the depths of Jhelum, he saw strife and resilience. That became the song Jhelumas, an electrifying tribute to the strength of Kashmiri women, the destruction wreaked by the 2014 floods, all interlaced with the very sufi metaphor of becoming one with your emotions. Muneem is a co-founder of the act Alif, which skyrocketed to mainstream popularity after their release of the 2017 album Sufayed; Jhelumas, a particularly efficient crowd-pleaser, is part of the album. Alif, consisting of Hardik Vaghela, Aman Moroney, Karan Chitra Deshmukh, and Amit Gadgil, uses both contemporary and Kashmiri instruments in their pieces. Since Sufayed, the band has released several singles. The latest, Ride Home, received a rousing reception, clocking almost a million views in the 15-20 days since its release.
Muneem, who teaches Urdu poetry at Symbiosis University in Pune, dislikes the ‘Kashmiri Sufi Rock’ sobriquet that is universally attributed to Alif. “They are all marketing jargons,” he says. “If you ask me what Alif is, I will say it is plain Urdu and Kashmiri poetry with contemporary music. It is not correct to pigeonhole. I would say we have no genre, as it is in the world music zone. No two songs of ours are the same. That could be a strength and a weakness, but, most importantly, we are honest.”
He locates his Kashmir strong in the public imagination of a militarised valley. But, he defines its soul in the sacrifice and strength of its women. Jhelumas, he says, happened when he saw the calmness and strength of his ammi (mother) when the floods happened. “Just like every others woman in Kashmir,” says Muneem, in the official video describing the making of the song. Peer te Peeri, another meditative offering in Sufayed, is narrated from the point of view of a woman. “For me, Kashmir is female, embodying the resilience to live in conflict, through conflict, and out of conflict,” he says. Death is referred to in monotone, a matter-of-fact figure of speech. “Like it or not, it is something that awaits all of us, something that fascinates me,” says Muneem.
He delves into the personal, and extrapolates it to the universal. In Shoshe Ka Chashma (Sufayed), he bemoans the unfortunate necessity to sell yourself. “I was always very shy about my work, so recognition came late. I have been in this business for more than 10 years now,” he says. In the heartbreaking single Lalnawath (cradle), which won the eighth Dada Saheb Phalke Film Festival Award, he bemoans the lives lost, dreams lost, the blood spilt, invoking the ghosts of the nameless and the faceless. “It was, very honestly, one of the most emotionally draining songs. I literally cried at the end. Nothing held me back from going into that zone,” says Muneem. For a Kashmiri, the song denotes an intensely private, lived experience. While performing the song—usually with a shehnai accompaniment—in the valley and outside it, how different are the reactions? Does he feel any inhibition? “It is amazing to see how, even if the language is not understood, the emotions are [transposed]. It is a very beautiful thing,” he says.
“A giant negative, black and white, still undeveloped,” [Agha Shahid] Ali famously described his homeland in ‘Postcard from Kashmir’. What does Muneem wish the processed image becomes? “When you live in Kashmir, when you grow up in Kashmir, things could be complicated,” he says. “There are times when you need to know that things go exactly right, just perfectly. There are moments when you feel you are born in a very tricky place. When you get up in the morning, you wonder, will this be a normal day?”
“Life isn’t black and white here. When you deal with grey, that is when the realism comes in. When you live in the darkness, you celebrate it. If you have noticed it, we have a lot of songs that point blank celebrate darkness. Anything peppy you notice in our works is satire. What is dark gets really dark.”
There are a million think pieces lamenting the death of sufi culture in the valley, but it is illustrative that it is the life of one of its most famous Sufi poets Mehjoor that is reflective of Kashmir’s current predicament. The same person, who in his early days, wrote that ‘Hindus were sugar and Muslims were milk’—the same lines, illustratively, were quoted by Vajpayee, calling for peace between the communities in 2001 in the state—wrote, anguished and disillusioned, at the time of Kashmir’s accession, that 'alas, my heart lies with Pakistan'.“Empathy and understanding are very important. The political crisis of the place has done a lot of damage to the psyche of the people,” says Muneem, who candidly addressed the topic of clinical depression, a rising issue in Kashmir that has not been discussed much in the mainstream, in his ‘Malal Kya Hua’.
The band, says Muneem, is now working on their second album.
