If Heaven Had a Color

Abstract

If Heaven Had a Color is a multigenerational novel following a family across eight decades, from the 1920s to the 1990s. Set in a time where Kashmir moves through various forms of oppression — the begar system, partition, and insurgency — the novel traces the impact of prolonged conflict on the people of the valley through the experience of one family. It is a novel about the women who remained behind, who had to navigate the war from within the walls of their homes, who had to do fundamental things like go to college even as the conflict rewrote the world around them. If Heaven Had a Color also explores how ecological trauma mirrors human trauma. For a place like Kashmir where identity is inseparable from its springs, mountains, and trees, conflict does not only wound people. It wounds the land. To lose your basic rights is also to lose access to the places that have always held you: springs barricaded, mountains occupied, forests closed off by army camps. The land you grew up on, the nag your grandmother prayed beside, the hill you walked to as a child are seized, fenced, forbidden. In Kashmir, the occupation of land and the occupation of a people are the same violence. The folklores passed down through generations reflects the rich and layered culture of Kashmir. In times of war, these stories also become acts of preservation of an identity and history that the occupation seeks to erase.