The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir

For those who associate Kashmir with the violence that has claimed tens of thousands of lives, Koul's lovely elegiac memoir The Tiger Ladies shows that the isolated vale in the Himalayas was a heaven before it became a hell...Koul succeeds through sensuous detail in summoning the vanished Kashmir, the one of rainbow days and clear mountains and Hindus living peacefully with Muslims. —Bryan Walsh, Time Magazine (Asian edition)The first memoir about a woman's experience in Kashmir, one of the most volatile and alluring places on the globeThe Tiger Ladies presents Kashmir through the lives of four generations of women. Skillfully interweaving the story of her family with the story of the gods and goddesses, myths and history of this rich and unique society, Sudha Koul reveals how the women of her region have attained their extraordinary power and place in their culture—and what a fascinating culture it is.Like Indira Gandhi and her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, Koul is a Kashmiri Brahmin, traditionally the highest caste of Hindus. The Hindus, though a tiny minority of Kashmir's population, lived in great harmony with Muslims, leading intertwined lives in the same cultural fabric. Kashmiris were isolated in their valley and enjoyed a culture so dissimilar to any other in India that they were largely unaffected by what was happening in the world around them. The 1947 partition of India and the rise of fundamentalism has turned Kashmir, once called "Paradise on Earth" by Moghul emperor Jehangir, into a religious and political inferno.Koul grew up immersed in the colorful legends and rituals of Kashmiri life, now imperiled for Hindus and Muslims. Her story is that of a lost Eden, full of the textures, tastes, and magical tales of a distant, at times contradictory world. She looks forward to an arranged marriage while completing her graduate education, even as she becomes a magistrate; and, in the end, Koul's marriage proves both loving and enduring.As she makes clear in this memoir, it was not her Muslim neighbors who tore her valley apart but "outside" political forces and religious ideologies, reflecting the tragic developments that have marked so much of the world's unrest in recent decades.