The Other Side of Silence: The Lives of Women in the Karakoram Mountains

The Other Side of Silence: The Lives of Women in the Karakoram Mountains

by Farida Azhar-Hewitt
The Other Side of Silence: The Lives of Women in the Karakoram Mountains

The Other Side of Silence: The Lives of Women in the Karakoram Mountains

by Farida Azhar-Hewitt

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Overview

In the quiet Balti villages, high in the Karakoram Mountains of North Pakistan, life goes on. The women live peacefully as they prepare for the seasonal harvest and take in views of the breathtaking high mountains and pastures. Deeply rooted female relationships bloom and mature, as do their sustainable, ecologically friendly lifestyles. The Balti women have been living in the mountains for centuries, so why does there seem to be change in the air? There's the war on terror, going on just outside their village. There are the growing influences and stresses of modernization. How will this society cope with such changes, and is there any hope for its survival? Social geographer Farida Azhar-Hewitt has spent months living in the Karakoram Mountains with the Balti women; now she presents her detailed study and firsthand experience in The Other Side of Silence: The Lives of Women in the Karakoram Mountains. Azhar-Hewitt takes a careful look at this mountain society-gaining recent media attention for its close proximity to the war on terror. Through the violence and fear, the Balti people have remained peaceful; the women have remained fruitful. Living as an insider, Azhar-Hewitt takes us behind the veil of these rural Muslim women, revealing a world of seclusion, community, and joy, despite all odds.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781450287678
Publisher: iUniverse, Incorporated
Publication date: 02/22/2011
Pages: 236
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

Read an Excerpt

THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE

THE LIVES OF WOMEN IN THE KARAKORAM MOUNTAINS
By FARIDA AZHAR-HEWITT

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Farida Azhar-Hewitt
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4502-8767-8


Chapter One

BEGINNINGS

Rabia's Story: A Farmer's Life

Every evening, Rabia unlocks the gate of woven saplings and goes into her garden. She has been working hard since she got up, like any busy farmer's wife with a large family, but when she enters her garden, she relaxes. Her satisfaction in being there is evident. She stoops down, skillfully transplanting tiny onion and tomato seedlings, pruning the tomato plants, deftly picking greens and coriander leaves for their evening meal. She plucks a red poppy for the baby and tucks it behind her ear. She may spend as much as two hours in her garden. All the while she answers her children's questions as they come and go, delegates reponsibilities, and nurses the new baby when she cries.

"If I could, I would spend the whole day here," she says, as her eyes travel over the garden with pride: neat beds of onions, tomato bushes trailing over the fence, tiny green spinach leaves poking out of the dark earth, ridges for potatoes and mounds for squash plants, hot peppers in flower. This work—while producing their daily sustenance—is not performed solely out of duty. It is a pleasurable, even therapeutic activity. In the serenity of the garden, she looks back on her long day.

Her days typically begin at 5:00 am—anticipating the dawn, bathing in the hot spring where she also washes last night's dishes. Then she heads home again to cook, feed her family, sweep the floor, clear the debris. She has spent most of the daylight hours weeding, watering, and tending their fields, accompanied everywhere by her baby and other small children. After leaving the garden she still has to milk the goat, gather in young chicks from the garden for the night, and prepare and serve the evening meal.

At one point, Rabia leaves the garden and climbs down the ladder into her katza, her underground cellar, with a small metal tray and shovel in hand. She goes to a dark corner where their winter woodpile has been stored and digs out the soft, dark, mouldering earth. "This is very good for the drumba, kitchen garden," she explains. She also takes the ashes out of the now-cold winter fireplace. "I put this tsillsirr around the tomato plants." Apart from vegetables in the small garden, flowers grow here and there to add colour and beauty—allo, gulchin, lamgan, hollyhocks, marigolds, poppies. In a corner, there are baby chuli and starga, apricot and walnut trees. Rabia has planted and is nurturing them, until they are big enough for her husband to plant outside the drumba. The care of this garden is woman's work—sowing, transplanting, weeding, watering, harvesting—when all her other work is done.

Surrounding her garden are fields of wheat and barley, crisscrossed by paths and water channels. Dotted here and there among them are mud and stone houses along with fruit and nut trees. They are set in a valley amidst towering snow-capped peaks, some of them over 7,000 metres high. From her garden, she can see the Kosar Range in the Braldu valley in the southwest. Far up a mountainside across the river from her, a waterfall is visible, silenced by the distance. Below it, hidden from view, is the wide, brown Basha River, which can be heard winding its way south to join the Shigar and then on to the Indus—another 2,400 kilometres to the Indian Ocean.

I was living in Rabia's home on one of my periodic visits to the mountains. She allowed me to join her in her daily routines as a farmer's wife, so that I could understand something of the complex and intricate rituals of traditional living. She knew that I was writing a book about her homeland. My friendship with Rabia developed gradually. She was one of the many friendly women who greeted me on the pathways and came to visit me on my roof when we first arrived. Her daughters were among Tara's friends. But Rabia stood out above the others with her natural good manners, grace, and intelligence and, when I visited her home, by the pleasant and quiet atmosphere there. After my first visit to Chutrun, I always stayed there.

Rabia's life is at once unique and typical of women in this and other valleys who pursue a life of herding and cultivation that has been largely unchanged for several centuries, although inroads of modernity are becoming increasingly evident. It is a life bound above all by the round of seasonal activities and changes.

Outsider on the Inside: My Story

Skardu at last! We were going north to Baltistan, a region with some of the largest glaciers and highest mountains in the world. Intersected by five major rivers, its sharp peaks, deep gorges, and fast-flowing, flood-prone rivers have kept casual holiday-makers away, except from the main town and airport. But it is a much-desired destination for serious mountaineers, trekkers, and research scientists from all over the world. "Outsider" women and children rarely visit, much less stay, in the nallahs, as the interior valleys and settlements are known.

Tara and I were up at 4:00 am to go to the Islamabad airport for our flight to Skardu. It was still dark outside, made darker by heavy rain, thunder, and lightning. While it was a hot, humid dawn in Islamabad, when we arrived in the mountains we would need warm clothing. With this in mind, I had packed sweaters and light jackets in our carry-on bags. My mother came in with mugs of tea, worried about our adventure, giving advice and warnings for our safety.

I, on the other hand had other worries. The Boeing does not fly by radar alone, since it must negotiate its way among and sometimes below the height of some of the world's highest peaks, many over 7,000 metres high. Fog, low clouds, heavy rain, or strong winds are reasons to cancel the flight. The inclemency of the weather might mean that we would not fly today.

When we arrived at the airport, a crowd of mostly men was milling about, anxiously scanning the sky. Much of the conversation was about the weather. I have grown used to such uncertainty now, having made the trip many times since. I have gone to the airport only to be turned back and once even flown up to and over the Skardu basin before returning to Islamabad without landing. The clouds had been too dense above the landing strip that day. As it turned out, this time we were delayed at the airport for only an hour while the pilot made up his mind about the flight.

As we sat in the waiting room after being cleared for boarding, I looked around at the other passengers. They were mostly men, dressed in traditional salwar kamiz, baggy pants and shirt, in shades of grey and beige. Most of them wore round woollen caps with rolled edges, typical of the northern regions. There were only three women, accompanied by their men, who sat to one side in an area reserved for ladies. Their heads were covered with chaddars. Two small children, dressed in miniature like their mothers in salwar kamiz, played around the women. I was glad that Tara and I were appropriately dressed, although our heads were not covered. I still had not decided what to do about that issue, although I had been warned that local women in the conservative north covered their heads.

Much to our relief, the pilot's final decision to fly was announced and we filed on board the small Boeing. After leaving the city behind, we flew north over the flat Indus plains, which merged gradually into the foothills of the Himalayas. The view changed when we reached the high mountains. The blue-grey ribbon of the river was enclosed in a deep gorge, edged by green. Occasionally, in narrow valleys, we glimpsed villages like fly specks on green patches. Bare brown slopes stretched up to snow and clouds on high mountains.

"On the right we are passing Nanga Parbat," the pilot intoned over the sound system. Through ragged grey clouds we saw the famous mountain outlined against the sky. At over 8,000 metres, it is the third-highest mountain in the region. I recognized its sharp cone-shaped peak with the twist at the end from postcards. It seemed as though the wing of our plane might almost brush against it.

An hour later we landed in Skardu on an airfield ringed by bare, brown mountains. The airport was a small bungalow, the garden full of zinnias, roses, geraniums, and hollyhocks. It was a beautiful sunny morning. After collecting our baggage from a trolley wheeled in by porters, we stepped outside while I scanned the waiting crowd for a familiar face. Sure enough, there she was, standing beside a jeep—the cousin of a "friend of a friend" whom I had met in Islamabad as a contact. Saleema was Balti, an educated woman involved in local politics. She was plump and fair, smartly dressed in a pastel-coloured suit of salwar kamiz. She took us to the Yurt and Yak Hotel where we were installed in a spacious and carpeted yurt-like tent. The foam mattresses folded up as couches for daytime. There were two tables, two chairs, a table lamp, and a water cooler. A bare light bulb hung down from the centre pole of the tent.

There was a rustle of the curtain as a young Balti boy brought in a tray of tea and biscuits. Our new friend left after arranging for us to have a jeep and, after our tea, we also left on our errands. First, we went to see an Aga Khan Rural Support Program officer about choosing a village for my research. The white jeeps of this organization are a familiar sight in the streets. Again, this was a contact we had established in Islamabad through the social network.

I had originally intended going to Arindu, at the snout of the Chogholungma Glacier. The name had appealed to me in the travel books I had read. It means big stream in Balti. I had also heard that, in Arindu, women instead of men go up to the high mountain pastures with the herds. The village is at an altitude of approximately 3,000 metres. A smaller glacier nearby had surged and engulfed fields and houses the year before and I wanted to learn how they had coped with the flood.

But instead Mr. Darjat (the manager) said that I should reconsider my plan since I had a young child with me. "The village is isolated," he said. "It is at the end of the Basha valley and difficult to reach because you will have to walk the last ten to twelve kilometres on a rough dirt track that is often under water. What will you do if the child is sick?" He suggested Chutrun on the Basha River, about eighteen kilometres south of Arindu. The name Chutrun means hot spring, from chhu, water and trunmo, hot.

"How big is it?" I asked.

"I think the village has thirty-five chulas, so it is not very big." It is their custom to count houses by the number of fireplaces, since each home has one. "The advantage is that it is on a jeep road," he replied. "AKRSP had a flood reclamation scheme there, but the people showed no interest, so we abandoned it." I was delighted with this piece of news, because I wanted to go to a village as unaffected by "modernization" as possible to be able to see traditional Balti culture. "Another advantage is that it has a natural hot spring. Your daughter will like that," he continued.

"Can we bathe in it?" I asked. This was news indeed! The hot spring would be a boon in the winter months we planned to be there.

"Oh, yes," he answered with a smile. "The locals seem to do nothing else. It's always busy." He added, "I don't know how they get any work done." His tone was patronizing. So it was decided. Mr. Darjat kindly agreed to send us the next day in an AKRSP jeep that was going that way.

After visiting the AKRSP office, I asked the jeep driver to take me to the bazaar so that we could equip ourselves for the trip. The rough road was shared with pedestrians (men and boys), small donkeys pulling loaded carts, bicycles, and other jeeps. I went to small shops, some no bigger than large, wooden upturned crates, piled high with trinkets, plastic toys, kitchen utensils, medicines, and cosmetics. There were also vegetables and spices along with canned, dried, and baked goods, cloth, shawls, shoes, postcards, and stationery. Altogether, I bought 1,500 rupees worth of groceries, essential items for our use, and gifts for new friends.

I had left Tara with Saleema's cousin's wife. When I went to pick her up, she was playing happily in the garden with Mrs. K, who has no children. Her house of brick and stone was set on top of a hill. The garden was full of flowers, fruit trees, and neat vegetable beds in a corner. We were served tea in the garden on a tray with china cups and we feasted on biscuits, strawberries, dark red cherries, and mulberries, all from the garden, of course. Then Mr. K drove us back to the Yurt and Yak Hotel with a basket of mulberries and cherries. Increasingly, I realized that the reason everyone was so kind is that I had a child with me.

Arrival in the Village

Nothing could have prepared us for the journey to Chutrun the next day. We arrived at night after a tiring five-hour drive, going north-northwest along the Shigar River. The paved road out of Skardu soon petered out into an expanse of sand and rock. The driver seemed to discern a track in what seemed to me a desert as we slithered and slid in the jeep towards a point where the mountains narrowed and then the track followed the river northward, keeping the river to the left of us. The sand changed to a rocky untarred track along and above the Shigar River, at times wide enough for only one vehicle to pass at a time.

Where tributaries from the east joined the Shigar, the fair-weather track dipped and widened as villages appeared—a collection of low mud-and-stone dwellings surrounded by neat fields. Then the road would rise again, often with a steep drop down to the river on the left. When we saw a jeep coming towards us, I would hold my breath as the driver expertly manoeuvred his vehicle to one side (we were on the outside) in the smallest of spaces to let the other pass. At one point, in the rearview mirror I saw our rear wheel perched on the edge. "Sit still," I whispered. Even a change in the distribution of our weight might end in a catastrophe—it was too far down to see the river, but not to hear it. A phrase from Dervla Murphy's book came to mind— she quotes a local man, who said "Always, jeeps are falling down into the Indus."

Our jeep shook and rattled along the road, hugging the mountain on one side. The slopes were covered sparsely with stunted, grey-green artemesia bushes through which red earth and rocks were visible. Clumps of white or cream flowers sprouted up among them, the flowers of the isman bush. Once a chakor ran across the road. "We hunt the partridges," the driver said. "A shikari is sure to come along with a rifle." I felt he would have liked to be that hunter.

Most of the time we held tightly on to a strap to avoid hitting our heads on the roof or to avoid whiplash injury on the bumpy track. Where the road levelled through villages, groups of children came out to cheer and wave and women looked up from the fields. At Shigar, the largest settlement, really a town, we stopped for chai where the driver took us to see the seventeenth-century mosque, with pagodas and intricate carvings made of wood. It is an unusual mosque, because the architecture is Buddhist rather than Islamic. Churrkha, Hashuppe, Alchori, Sildi, Kashumal, and Yuno slid by. At Hashuppe, the small tributary that flooded yearly had deposited its loads of sand through which the driver had to accelerate the jeep, skidding but managing to keep it upright, as if going through snow. We bypassed a small wooden bridge that sat unused and broken over the now-shrunken stream.

The River Shigar meets the River Braldu from the east and Basha to the north, where we were headed. At the confluence, we stopped in Hyderabad at a small hotul (local pronunciation for hotel) for lunch, before turning west towards Tissar and north to Chutrun. The cook, in a sleeveless vest and pyjamas, a towel over his shoulder, peered at us through the tiny serving window from the kitchen. "Bring three dal plates, roti, and a coke for the child. We will have tea," the driver said. Some talk between the cook and the driver followed. Since that visit, whenever we stop at that hotel, I am welcomed as the "api of Chutrun."

The last stretch of the journey, when we crossed the Basha over a solid-looking bridge ("No photos," the driver said, putting out a warning hand) and passed through Tissar, was one of the most difficult. Streams tumbling down from the west to reach the river had dislodged rocks and carved deep gullies in the soft surface of the road. The driver had to get out to move rocks, or drive fast, wheels churning through deep pools of water.

It was growing dark by the time we reached Chutrun. The resthouse keeper met us as we rolled to a stop in a clearing at the southern edge of the village. We discovered later that the jeep is visible as it approaches the village from the south, a black, moving dot that slowly gets bigger. Its arrival is a lively diversion from routine so there is always a welcome party of men and boys, and sometimes, bolder girls, when it arrives in daylight.

Since we had arrived in the evening, most of the villagers were in their homes, but someone had obviously notified the chowkidar. Rapid talk followed between the driver and the resthouse keeper about our unexpected arrival. I peered out of the jeep into the gathering dusk. There were some cement buildings nearby, later identified as the resthouse and bathhouses.

(Continues...)



Excerpted from THE OTHER SIDE OF SILENCE by FARIDA AZHAR-HEWITT Copyright © 2010 by Farida Azhar-Hewitt. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Contents

Preface....................xi
1. Beginnings....................1
Rabia's Story: A Farmer's Life....................1
Outsider on the Inside: My Story....................3
2. The Village Scene....................24
The Four Seasons....................24
Bread Is Sacred....................29
Little Brown Hen or Settling In....................35
Chhu—The Social Hub....................40
3. The People....................49
Mainly Women....................49
Tea in Loqpar....................57
Ei'la—Celebration....................60
Child Bride....................68
4. Work....................94
All in a Day's Work....................94
Only Half a Home....................99
A Season for Everything....................103
Seasonal Rhythms....................106
5. The Other World....................112
Exodus!....................112
Veils and Dzos....................121
6. Disasters and Tragedies....................131
Floods!....................131
Ghorrocho—Grim Secrets....................139
Rape!....................144
Death of a Baby....................147
7. Last Words....................151
Perils and Joys of Doing Research....................151
Rumours and Resistance....................167
If You Could Have a Wish....................176
Thresholds of Acceptance....................183
Appendix: The Balti World: Background to the Stories....................187
Glossary....................196
Acknowledgments....................207
Bibliography....................209
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