Curfewed Night

Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir

Author	Basharat Peer
Country	India
Language	English
Genre	Memoir
Set in	Kashmir
Published	2010
Publisher	Random House
Pages	256
Awards	Crossword Prize for Non-Fiction
ISBN	978-1439109113

Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir is a memoir on the conflict in Kashmir by the Indian journalist Basharat Peer. It won the Crossword Prize for Non-Fiction and was chosen among the Books of the Year by The Economist and The New Yorker. ^[1]

Plot

The book is a depiction of the author's rather personal tale of his life in the militant 1990's of Kashmir. Despite his family’s pleas, the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front attack an Indian convoy close by their village. The army’s reprisals will be swift and the family quickly grab their possessions. In the end they return home to find only a few bullets stuck in the walls, which Peer’s grandfather pulls out with pliers.

A few years later Peer’s father survives a militant attack on him, justified because he works as a civil servant in a government run by Delhi. He was, according to rumour, betrayed by a jealous rival at work.

After becoming a journalist for an Indian newspaper, Peer reports on other wars far away from home but is inevitably drawn back to Kashmir.

The second half of his book records his interviews with victims of the army occupation. Another sinister development is the increasing prominence in the conflict of Pakistani-funded radical groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which carry out suicide attacks in Kashmir, India and even in Pakistan itself against Sufi and Shia mosques. These groups also often have links with the Taliban.

The book ends in April 2005, with the hopeful resumption of a bus route between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. But five years on, despite occasional gestures from both governments, freedom is still a distant prospect for the people of Kashmir.

Reviews

The book was well received. The New York Times described it as "an instructive primer on the conflict mixed with literary reportage on its human toll".^[2] and praised in the Guardian by Kamila Shamsie for the way it brought the conflict "into the lives of Kashmiris".^[3] The noted historian William Dalrymple, writing in The Guardian said an extraordinary book, a minor masterpiece of autobiography and reportage and called it a "classic account" of the conflict.^[4]

References