In the Valley of Mist: Kashmir: One Family in a Changing World

I was in Kashmir in the fall of 1989 for my daughters wedding. Serious fighting began just after the wedding ceremony ended and we were escorted to the airport at Srinigar under armed guard. This book rings true from what I saw and remember. It is an even handed and sympathetic appraisal of the problems of Kashmir and I enjoyed every word. Derrell Sweem

I chose to read this book because I have heard a great deal about the long-term conflict in Kashmir but never really understood what was happening there. Author Justine Hardy's story of that beautiful and sad region both educated and inspired me. She tells the story of the Kashmir Valley through the lens of the Dars, a Muslim family with whom she became acquainted when she was seeking out markets for the sale of shawls made by a group of Kashmiri women she wanted to help. The patriarch of that family, Mohammad Dar, was a carpet merchant and became Hardy's friend while trying to help her get the shawls to market. Over the years, Hardy spent a good deal of time in and around Lake Nagin, near the city of Srinagar. This area was once a major tourist destination, where people came to live on houseboats moored on the lake. Prior to the late 1980s, Muslims and Hindus lived together peacefully in the Kashmir Valley. Throughout the entire state of Jammu and Kashmir (of which the valley is only a part) many religions were represented, including Buddhism and Christianity. That changed around 1989 when, according to Hardy, Muslim insurgents sponsored by Pakistan proclaimed jihad and initiated open warfare in the region. Part of the nation of India, Jammu and Kashmir is a majority Muslim state that had a sizable Hindu minority prior to the conflict. Now many Hindus (Pandits) have fled their homes out of fear and the Indian army has, de facto, become an occupying force in India's attempt to maintain order. The whole situation is very sad for all concerned, Muslim and Hindu alike, and by the end of the book it is pretty clear that this conflict will go on into the future. No end seems in sight. However, Hardy does witness some bright spots. For instance, she relates stories of an Indian general who was able to gain the trust of many of the local Muslim village leaders, to the point where men -- and I do mean men only -- were able to help each other after the big 2005 earthquake without much regard for their religious and ethnic differences. The women of the Valley take a decided back seat in life, wearing burqas and centering their lives around the home and their children. Hardy notes that prior to the conflict, the custom was for women to wear a head scarf rather than a full burqa, or even to go with no head covering at all. So, as with many Muslim communities, women have rigid roles and their aspirations are limited, yet Hardy tells their stories in such as way as to make them real rather than mere ciphers behind a veil. It gave me an appreciation for the courage and humility that these women demonstrate in the way they live their everyday lives. This is a wonderful book and well worth reading.

Poetically written and I liked that the author has actually lived the life she writes about, and not as a brief traveler. Reminded me some of the books I read about WW2 and after the war and how two worlds clashed and changed. Anyone who loves the middle east, Persia and India should like this book. Loved the photographs that made what I had read, come to life. Its so nice to read a book that visually brings words to life where you feel you can smell the flower sellers items, or feel a breeze off the Nagin lake.

I loved reading In the Valley of Mist most of the time. It must have been a difficult book to write because the scope of life in the Vale of Kashmir is so broad. And the events of war and its ongoing aftermath are distressing to read about. I've wanted to read of the changes that have taken place in Kashmir since the world turned upside down for Kashmiris and changed the wonderful Vale that I visited several times over a 15 year period. As a westerner I could never safely return because war and rebellion broke out. Justine Hardy picked up the story where my life in Kashmir left off. For this I am both grateful and deeply troubled by her book. When I knew Kashmir, as an intimate member of a Muslim family as was Ms. Hardy, it truly was a ripe kind of paradise on earth offering visitors tastes of her delights. Where else could you find lotus-filled lakes surrounded by snow draped mountains at an altitude of Denver? Lovely people, fruits and flowers and perfumed soft air. men spontaneously sang while working, stopped where ever they were to answer the chanted calls to prayer... and then came guerrilla warfare and further oppression from the occupying Indian army.. And this charming life changed. It may seem an insignificant sign of this change, a pheran--the outer covering worn by both men and women year round. Yet taken away because invaders feared the Kashmiris might be hiding of weapons.Changing a people's style of clothing changes everything in their culture. How cleverly Ms. Hardy paints this picture by devoting a chapter to the pheran. She introduces the reader to aspects of Kashmiri life that would otherwise be overlooked. I often wondered while I was in Kashmir how long the medieval aspects of life could continue with the encroaching, modern world attempting to get inside. Ms. Hardy begins answering this question by closely following one Kashmiri family and the changes they make to survive. I recommend In the Valley of Mist for all those who like to read of current changes in romantic and remote regions of the world. It's a satisfying, but troubling, read.

"Every gun that is picked up, every bullet that is fired, is killing our paradise." So says one member of the Dar family, an extended clan of four brothers, their aging father -- Hajji Papa -- and their children and cousins, trying to survive in conflict-torn Kashmir. As vividly portrayed by Justine Hardie, this is a land of unparalleled beauty, where the hard edges of the nearby mountain ranges soften into gentle meadows and finally reach the lakes of Srinagar. But for the last two decades, it has been the focus of a guerrilla war between Kashmiri separatists and Indian military forces, a conflict that has driven the Hindu 'Pandit' portion of Kashmirs population away from the homes they inhabited for centuries and into refugee camps outside Delhi, as well as driving rifts among the remaining Muslim inhabitants. Hardy, who has been familiar with Kashmir since her earliest visits as an adolescent, uses the changes within one of those families, the Dars, as a way to write about the changes within the Kashmir Valley itself. She has known them for as long as the conflict has persisted, has stayed on the houseboats the Dars own on Dal Lake in good times and in bad, and has helped Mohammed Dar set up and run a relief and rebuilding operation in the wake of the 2005 earthquake. Probably few 'outsiders' have both her journalistic talent for telling this kind of story, or the kind of access that transforms what could have been a foreigner's view of another conflict "in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing" (to borrow Neville Chamberlain's infamous view of Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia) into something much more compelling. Hardy isn't suggesting that we intervene, just that we become more aware of the impact that conflict has one families like the Dars. The family have become more devout Muslims -- Imran, who now sports a thick beard and traditional garb, once favored RayBans and was photographed with his arm around attractive young Western tourists, while the girls of the family, who once ran around the family compound bareheaded, now don heavy black burkas and cover their hair at home as early as the age of six. The Dars are better off than many Kashmiris; as tourists stopped coming to Kashmir, Mohammed began taking traditional Kashmiri crafts abroad, to India, Dubai and Europe, and has become economically successful. But their world at home has become more difficult. The brothers try to send their sons to England to be educated, because Kashmiri children never know how many days a year their school will be open, or whether they will reach it safely; Hardy tells of children abducted and forced to become members of the rebel militias who train in remote regions of Pakistan, as well as those who are seduced into throwing bombs at Indian army encampments. Nine years after the conflict starts, she writes, what is now the sole Kashmiri psychiatric hospital sees 80,000 patients a year (despite having only 150 beds), up from 775 i