Until August 5, 2019, Bariya Hamid, a bibliophile, would write poems about nature and beauty of Kashmir. For the 24-year-old post-graduate ...
Until August 5, 2019, Bariya Hamid, a bibliophile, would write poems about nature and beauty of Kashmir. For the 24-year-old post-graduate student of literature, poetry was a meaningful way of engaging with her feelings and emotional outbreak.
But all of that began to feel meaningless to her on August 5, 2019.
“It was a turning poet in my poetry,” Hamid, who started writing about the Kashmir conflict after the union government scrapped Jammu and Kashmir’s special status under Article 370 of the Indian constitution and downgraded the state into two union territories. “I was like: what am I doing [writing] and what should I be doing actually?”
The decision had coincided with a complete communication blackout, restrictions, thousands of arrests and curbs on public movement in order to prevent any protests. For a student of literature at New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University, the turn of events cast a lasting impression on creativity.
It was this impression that triggered Hamid’s first attempt to express the situation in Kashmir valley through poetry. In her maiden political poem, Hamid started by capturing the scenes of a night preceding the August 5, 2019. During the night of August 4 and 5, communication services across Jammu and Kashmir died one by one....
