Paradise Here: Kashmir Chronicles – Part VI

Imagine waking up one morning and being told that your home is no longer in India but in Pakistan. Imagine the tension, the worry, the confusion. Imagine if your goats were tied on the Indian side… and then imagine you were told that you would be shot dead if you went to retrieve them. Imagine making peace with this sudden twist of fate and then after 20 years, just as suddenly one morning, you are Indian again. You, your goats, your home are all Indian again.Whilst this feels like a wild story—this is the reality of India’s last border village in Kargil, Leh. Hunderman is a hamlet located on the Indo-Pak border. The Line of Control (LoC) runs across the high peaks of the Kashmir Valley in which the hamlet is situated and abruptly changes course. Hunderman has seen four wars, many skirmishes, and unique events in military history during the last 70 years. Hunderman has incredibly been a part of two countries. When I planned my retreat in Leh, I knew I had to take my students to see this place. Why? One, to understand how war is devastating but also to see the incredible ‘Museum of Memories’ that has been curated in the abandoned area of this village..I knew that if my students were to travel to this side of the world on their own, they would see the houseboats of Srinagar and maybe even the war memorial of Kargil but this incredible village? I doubt it. I knew that this would be life altering for most people who saw it. And I wasn’t wrong. As we drove up the dusty slopes of Leh, our driver pointed out to a cluster of houses by the Indus River, ‘Hunderman Mal’, he said, ‘in Pakistan’. Then he pointed up the slope to a cluster of houses still lit up by the sun. ‘Hunderman Brok, in India’, he named it. Mal and Brok were probably the Balti words for lower and upper.As I looked at the dusty villages built into the rock surface, I suddenly realised that if it wasn’t for the border between them, I would have thought it was a typical mountain village. Each family farmed and kept livestock. The farms would be by the river, the summer pastures up the slope. But now if they went up the slope it was ok… but if they went down, they would be entering Pakistani territory and might be shot dead..As I walked along the dusty village, I met a shepherd, and I couldn’t help but ask him what life was like during war time. He said that before 1948, the divided village carried on its living between the bunkers of the two nations. That its people would be residents of both nations and the soldiers would allow this.But Pakistan got impatient to claim Kashmir before the end of the legal process mandated by the British Empire and started a war to capture Hunderman and other border villages. Those were difficult times he recalled with there being difficulty for food and water.Then in 1971, when the War of Liberation was initiated by India, the Line of Control advanced a few hundred meters, and divided the village between two countries. That’s how the situation has remained in the lifetime of the 216 (more or less) people living here today.The shepherd then told me that the Hunderman Brok was originally known as Hundermo. During the war of 1971, Major Mansingh of Gorkha Regiment of the Indian Army was the first soldier to arrive at Hunderman. His kind words pacified the villagers. The army also distributed free rations to the villagers and many of them tasted rice after a long time. As a tribute to the Major, his name was added to the village as a suffix and Hundermo came to be known as Hunderman.

Paradise Here: Kashmir Chronicles – Part VI

Related Stories

Truckseat MBA - I

Where the Road Ended, Grace Began

OG Tirupati - The Real Travel Experience

In Search of My Utopia