Book Review | Whither identity without politics?

“While reading a headline about Kashmir a few years ago,” writes Priyanka Mattoo in her new memoir, “I realised how often my people are discussed in terms of the many things that happened to us.” Mattoo is Kashmiri-American. Though she never lived in Kashmir after her family migrated to Britain, then Saudi and ultimately the United States since she was a toddler, the author retains a deep grief over the displacement her family suffered in the 1990s, when, like a thousand others like them, they were forced to flee the valley and leave behind a family home in Srinagar. Her memoir, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, cobbled together from a number of her journalistic accounts of life in Kashmir and the US, is an attempt towards a narrative of Kashmiri life that isn’t defined by tragedy alone. To write, in the author’s words, “about who we are.”

Ensconced within twin imperialisms, American and Indian, the memoir opens up numerous possibilities for an exploration of Kashmiri personhood in the 21st century – an intervention into a growing body of writing coming from Kashmiri Pandit writers who came of age around the 1990s. And yet, to do so in 2024 also requires the writer to thread with care and nuance the distortions which the tragedy of the Pandits has undergone in the hands of the Hindu right, who have used the incident to mobilise and justify a retributive and often gleefully inhumane politics towards Kashmiri Muslims in recent years.

That is not the book Mattoo writes. Incoherent, digressive and overwhelmingly inward in its gaze, her concerns toward the Kashmiri condition appear to extend only insofar as her family’s past. Any solidarity towards Kashmiris currently under military occupation is conveniently sidestepped: “So many Kashmiris’ grief and loss outweigh mine by a factor of thousands,” she writes. “Can we ever go back? Should we ever go back? I am neither historically nor politically fluent enough to unpack these answers”.

What remains is a litany of diasporic banalities, costumed in turgid Manish Malhotra magical realism. A passing nod to Hindu arranged marriage is made without any reference to caste. Likewise the invocation of religion and ritual, all inflected with helpful American analogies (Vaishno Devi is “Capri stripped of its fancy awnings”, the goddess Kali a maternal girlboss). In what seems like a particularly American affliction, the tendency of the memoir towards individuation robs the book of anything resembling a broader story of a community; nothing to bridge the great distance that extends between individual and societal insight. Blinded by the limitations of her research, Mattoo can only talk about family, never community.

To belong isn’t just to commemorate or preserve, but also to chastise, reproach, lament. It might be harsh to claim this renders Mattoo an outsider, yet the book does little to dispel this notion. If anything, it throws the chasm between identity and belonging into ever greater relief.

Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones

By Priyanka Mattoo

Penguin Viking

pp. 304; Rs 699