Sheikh Abdullah

Sir Charles Cunningham Watson the Political Secretary of the Viceroy made the following interesting observation in his own handwriting on the file regarding appointment of Lt.Col.Colvin as Prime Minister of Kashmir: "I am definitely of the opinion that if Col.Colvin is to be of full value both to the Govt of India and the Durbar he must not draw less than Rs.4000/pm. Otherwise it will be said in the bazars that he is a cheap figurehead imported by the Maharajah on the advice of the Kashmiri Pandits. This last is true; he must not start with any other handicap." This makes clear the reason for the appointment of Col.Colvin as the Prime Minister of the Maharaja and is referred to in Chapter 18 of this book. To put it in proper perspective for the modern reader the lowest paid government worker like the Government Silk Factory worker was paid about Rupees ten per month. Thus the salary recommended for the Prime Minister was 400 times the salary of the lowest paid worker. In modern India the lowest paid employee of the Central Government the peon is paid about Rupees 7000/p.m. while the Prime Minister gets a pay of about Rupees 160,000/p.m. i.e. just about 23 times the salary of the peon The Resident of Kashmir in his memorandum of September 1931 to the Government of India made the following observation about the July 1931 agitation: “.. At the present moment communal trouble, as such, has not come to notice. The tenseness of Muhammadan feeling is rather anti-Durbar than anti-Hindu.” This belies the attempt by some persons to dub the agitation by the people of Kashmir for their greater empowerment that began on 13th July 1931 as a communal riot. Amin Kamil (1924-2014) is a famous Kashmiri poet and writer.Appendix 3 of this edition has the english translation of his short story “Pyind Puran” which describes the sea change that came about in Kashmir after the abolition of feudalism by Sheikh Abdullah in1952. This is the first time that this story has been translated from Kashmiri into English. The story of Sheikh Abdullah’s life is a love story. It is the story of a man who loved Kashmir and “whose entire life was an expression of this love”. It is a story of his trials and tribulations, his successes and failures, of storms that he weathered and his halcyon days. It is a story that deserves to be read and reread for its sheer human interest by all those who have a place in their heart for that blighted paradise that is Kashmir.