BY DR.ABDUL AHAD
As a matter of fact, the hours of work were determined by the workers needs and wages. As the wages were paid in piece-meal their needs compelled them to work for more and more hours. The idea of demanding a cut in working hours never struck their mind. In summer they would usually start at 8 O’clock in the morning and stop 8:00 in the evening with a break of one hour for lunch. In winter, the work would start late. Friday was, as stll continues, an off-day for the workers of all trades. Besides, they got some more holidays during festivals and occasionally moved out in summer on excursions.
The Karkhanas of Kashmir did not live in peace always. They witnessed tensions also and occasionally confronted various labour problems; alarming being those relating to low wage system which had made the plight of workmen immensely miserable and intolerable. But these tensions did not assume the shape of organised protests.
It can be safely stated that the Muslim rulers, in collaboration with the Sufis and Saints, made conscious and genuine efforts to use the Central Asian Karkhana System for the betterment of Kashmir. The system gave a big boost to medieval Kashmir’s economy; pressed forward the interests of Islamic culture; consolidated the power of the Sultanate and above all made achievable, slowly but surely, a new, exceptional and unprecedented configuration ot disparate social groups-who were essentially caste-ridden and close-minded to form a collective Kashmiri identity with actions, feelings and ideas shared commonly by the people. It was, undoubtedly, a formative period of a novel experience that had an important and lasting influence on the character and attitudes of people. It threw open the doors and windows of the outside world to bring Kashmiris under the roof of Muslim Brotherhood and embellish their identity with those features and patterns which made it look more effervescent, Iively and heavily tilted towards industrial goodness and commercial righteousness.
But the mode of production and the type of working it introduced was so multifarious, complex and intricate that it inflicted a harsh blow to the socio economic synchronization obtaining in Kashmir during the phase of its village community system. The collective .consciousness, friendship and cooperation; the characteristic features of community life, came to be sacrificed at the new altar of shifting industrial and commercial morality. A new milieu of a complicated social division of labour, commodity economy, eye-catching consumption, elaborate -marketing, merchanť’s capital, the middleman and of recompensing of advances totally delinked artisans from agriculturists and completely subordinated them to the intrinsic pervasiveness of the State apparatus of Karkhanas. The new-fangled and new-found situation, thus, incorporated the Kashmiri masses into an exploitative system of unbearable dimensions; depriving them, ultimately, of the means of survival.
Apart from this the brutal tax system and scarcity of essential commodities created by black-marketeers deeply steeped them in poverty; making them, in the beginning, complacent even to the extent of being called zulmparast. But, subsequently, the unwanted and unnecessary interference by a disorderly group of Sayids provoked them a great deal. Having swooped Kashmir like acquatic birds quite famished’, they made lite tor common masses really miserable by patronizing an environment in which bribery came to be considered a virtue, oppressing the subjects a wisdom and addiction to women a happiness.
The Mawali machination, manipulations and their prejudice against the common Kashmiris also resulted in embittering Sunni- Shia relations which ultimately put in motion a bizarre example of invitations sent to aliens to rule Kashmir. Exasperated as they were, the natives, thus, made recrudescence of horse trading and invited The Mughals to annex Kashmir.
The Mughal occupation of Kashmir didn’t bring the much desired change in the circumstances. They treated the workmen as sheer-slaves whose services were forced through coercion and captivity and terms of payment fixed arbitrarily.
The Afghans further added to the miseries of Kashmiris. In addition to raising the prices of essential commodities they imposed a tax regime from whose cruelties the people were unable to escape. Besides, they were wholesale murderers who “are now only remembered for their brutality and cruelty, and it is said off them that they thought no more of cutting of heads than of plucking a flower’. They were deceptive; glutton, nasty and avaricious, and their conventions of amity were savour of wolf”. Their was, thus, nothing but an era of plundering properties; an era when despicable crime, viciousness and tyranny ruled the roost; when the Kashmiris endured jeers and sneers without a murmur”.
During the Afghan regime the sectarian violence once again raised its ugly head to destroy the productive forces of the country. Alongside this the sudden incursion of Bombas completely destroyed the observable signs of life; they carried loot and murder to extremes through the bands of renegades and left behind the shrieks of orphaned children and the wailing of infirm to rent the sky.
The conditions further worsened after 1819 when the Sikh regime undertook to sell daily necessities on cent percent profit and encouraged crime by imposing a fine of a few rupees on the alien killer; out of this fine 4 rupees were paid to the family of the deceased if a Hindu and 2 if he was a Muslim. “I have been in many lands”, writes Schonberg, “but nowhere did the human being present a more saddening spectacle than in Kashmir. It vividly recalled the history of the Israelites under the Egyptian (Pharaoh ‘3) rule when they were flagged at their daily labour” and
deprived of their daily bread, “by their pitiless taskmasters.”
With the inauguration of the Dogra regime the situation went out of control when the State officials began imposing private fines upon workmen Even their social functions like marriages were not spared from taxes and fines They were not paid for public services and were, ultimately, reduced to such penury that they were left with no option but to take to stealing and other immoral practices. Their economic deprivation pushed their women towards white-slave trade and prostitution which were encouraged and recognized by the Government in order to swell its revenue Moreover the economic dispossession; a consequence of ruthless exploitation; entrenched the historical and emotional baggage of fatalism which prevented the workmen from making any effort to change their plight. They continued regarding everything including oppression and exploitation as ‘God-sent. Their belief that God was not favourably disposed towards them cemented their helplessness and despondency even more strongly than before.
As a result, they did not develop class consciousness till 1847 and 1865.
Dr. Abdul Ahad is a well-known historian of Kashmir. He presents a perspective on the Kashmir issue and talks about Kashmir’s history and individuality and personality.
