Megan Gieske an American university student and writer had an opportunity to meet a Kashmir family settled in Kochi. She wanted to know why and how they traveled thousands of kilometers and started tapestry business in this part of the country. She tries to peep in the ongoing turmoil in Kashmir and examine their position on the issue as well as the foreign tourists’ that buy their products.
By Megan Gieske
A little boy watched carefully as tourists got off the buses before he set his sights on a group of American students. They wore T-shirts and cargo pants; or were in a baseball cap and green shorts. The backpacks they carried gave them a forward-leaning gait, but they walked swiftly through the gates to the Taj Mahal.
They avoided eye contact when he walked up to them, but he recited his line with a suave smile: “Obama tea! Obama tea!” A fleeting expression of surprise lit their faces, but they stepped aside.
Another vendor slipped between the little boy and the tourists; he was delicately handling snow globes of the Taj Mahal. This time, they stopped in their tracks to gaze at the beautiful scene, a snow-laden wonder that in India, is usually only blanketed by an intense heat. The little boy shot the guy a look that said, “I saw them first, get away from them.” The students walked on, so the little boy followed.
“Of the tourists who come to your shop, tourists from which country are the most rude to you?” This question I asked Altaf “Khan” Rather, a Kashmiri man (26) from the Craft Palace at the Jewish Market in Cochin, India, this March. He could not answer the question to why American tourists had been the most rude. Instead, students, families, professors and staff from a 700 passenger German cruise ship — that were mostly democratically-inclined Americans – had come to do just that.
Other students and I were traveling around the world with the Semester at Sea floating university program. I had taken myself (20), to study abroad from my school in my home university in Kentucky to expose myself to the inequities as well as the beauties of different cultures. India was our most politically fraught port of call with its history of religious human rights abuses, a “blind-eyed” political system, and an economy of inequality.
Enticing a tourist to pay any amount of dollars more for an already twenty-five-dollar tapestry is no mean feat. I managed to learn the business by attracting other students to the Craft Palace the way the family called the tourists from the street and then continued to bargain for more of the tourists’ dollar.
The family had originally fled from Hindu-Muslim conflicts in Kashmir at the contested border between India and Pakistan. Just the second week in July 21 Kashmiri Muslims were massacred by the state, according to Dibyesh Anand, an expert on minority relations in India and China. The common cry of Kashmir’s Muslim brothers is “We want freedom for Kashmir; it’s their right. India has to go back and leave their independent Kashmir!” heard by the surviving family members and scared Muslim minority.
Now the family’s two son happily endured the religious prejudice and racism towards Kashmiris on Jew Street for groups of foreign tourists. Kashmiri men here rely on tourists’ money to provide for their families in their home state of Kashmir but, apparently, do not rely on tourists’ kindness who insult them about the quality of their products. Though Khan is yet unmarried, his brother provides for a wife and new son back in Kashmir.
When I visited the shop in Kochi this April, Khan was sitting behind the counter, folding tapestries, when two students I knew to be American tourists came in. It had been a quiet afternoon, disturbed only by the Muslim calls to prayer. They walked from the jewelry case to the shelves laden with souvenirs and knickknacks. Spotting a tapestry on the wall, they squealed, “Look!”
Stuffing her hands in her jeans pocket, The female student whispered, “Don’t show too much interest, or they’ll charge you more.” She affected a look of utter disinterest for the benefit of Khan’s Papa, who sat in the corner watching them.
“How much?” she asked.
“Fifty dollars,” Khan said.
“Too much,” she said, leaning her elbows forward on the counter, eager to bargain, the way guidebooks probably told her she should. “Thirty.”
Khan raised an eyebrow. Then Khan turned his tea glass in his hand several time. “Forty.”
She blinked. “Thirty-five,” she said.”
“Thirty-seven,” Khan said, standing. “Final price.”
“Fine,” she said, opening her purse.
Khan went back to sit behind the counter, leaving Papa to run the credit card and wrap the tapestry for them.
When a student would enter the Craft Palace, Khan stood up, and tossed his phone aside. “Papa,” the other salesman and the father, was slouched on a chair in the corner, snoring softly, as he did most afternoons. The owner was elsewhere in Cochin on other business, and “Papa” had been given the keys to the shop.
With revenues of just twenty rupees per paper-mâché, the demand is high at the Jewish Market. It houses a collection of paper-mâché, which was brought here from Kashmir to provide economic relief and also relief from the religious warring in Kashmir. It involves detailed hand painting of every flower followed by complicated lacquering and polishing to make what tourists generally think of as a cheap, mass-produced, low-quality souvenir.
In a government-inspired effort of “religious” cleansing, many of these “Kashmiris“and their families have been allegedly sought after by the Indian army in Kashmir, forced to flee to Kerala, denied freedom of religion and without the “sympathy fatigue” of the Western world, set up as tourists attractions where visitors pay half the real, true cost per tapestry to preserve some of their intangible cultural heritage. We were assured that the similar paper-mâché and embroideries we saw in other shops on Jew Street actually had been made in Kashmir, supported their families in Kashmir, and were exempt from “staged authenticity.”
The “to bargain or not to bargain” ethical dilemma had divided both faculty and students on our floating university, the MV World Odyssey, as we sailed on our way to India. Staff and students had been starting in-classroom debates since we first sailed into countries like Myanmar and China with their known unfair labor and markets on bargaining in this country of “economic inequality,” to say the least.
No-one can be sure whether morally we should have left the ship to bargain, support Indian culture, and meet these oppressed people. Their precarious lives are subject to the whims of the tourism interests of groups from North America and Europe. However, it did not prevent us from guiltily agonizing over it, arguing for and against in both academic and social settings on board, spurred on by Professor Elizabeth Fowler, of the University of Virginia and a staunch activist for academic thought on supporting and preserving intangible cultural heritage.
So, into the malaria and HIV ridden, religiously unstable country we went with admonitions from the most vocal students not to and with admonitions from current readings not to buy souvenirs or trinkets from the local markets.
For most of the voyage, I had been on the “to bargain” side, and now began to admit my lack of confidence in this issue. That was when I met Khan and his family. Ethnic interest in the Kashmiri people contrasted with this advice, and I found myself walking on a sheet of shattering glass.
Khan blew up the embers of the wood fire and burned the kettle for tea. He brought the tea-tray, set it on the floor, and we sat together in a circle.
I explained to him the situation of foreign women in India – the way the Muslim men salaamed us in the mosques, but eyed us like so many greedy tigers in the streets. Most of the time, we felt like “steaks for starving people.”
“This is not Islam. For us, if our wife should have a mosquito bite, we should also have the pain,” unknowingly, Khan offered a metaphor for his own situation and for ours as struggling tourists in India, trying to use our money to “help the poor without hurting them and ourselves,” to use the language of author Brian Fikkert.
The way we can treat our “mosquito bites” is to have a mutual respect for each other and interest in participating in each other’s well-being. “Just because somebody’s trying to twist your arm, doesn’t mean you have to give in. You can do this in another way,” Professor Elizabeth Fowler informed me. “Give an alternative strategy, but understand that the reason they have this impulse is because they are supporting their families.”
If we want to make tourism into a global citizenship and participate in an investment into the lives of people like Khan, our guidebooks must also include information on how to provide fair treatment to the businessmen we are filling our shelves and our Passports with.
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The author is an American university student and writer. With years of experience in the field of freelance writing in 12 countries, her writing has recently appeared in publications Newstime Africa, Immesion Journals, One, and She Leads Africa to name a few.
For more writing like this, visit my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/MeganGieskeOfficial/?ref=aymt_homepage_panel and website https://megangieske.com/ where I cover stories of injustices and human rights issues around the world.
do you visit kashmir often?
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