BABADEMB : A MARKET THAT SOLD GOODS LOOTED FROM PANDIT HOUSES

                                                                  

                

BABADEMB: THE MARKET OF LOOTED BELONGINGS

 

Everyone saw it. The keepers of conscience saw it. The civil society saw it. The spiritualists saw it. The religious preachers saw it. The intellectuals saw it. Yet nobody raised a voice. Nobody stood up to say, "No. This is wrong. This is theft. These are not abandoned goods. They belong to people who were forced to leave their homes."

                                                                                 

 Babademb, near Khanyar in Srinagar, became a marketplace of an altogether different kind after the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits in 1990. From 1992 onwards, it gradually acquired the character of a market dealing in household goods and material salvaged from deserted Pandit homes. What had once been a locality became known for the sale of possessions that had belonged to families who were no longer there to protect them. The story of Babademb was not merely about a market. It was about the fate of a community's belongings after that community had disappeared from its ancestral homes.

 The Pandits had left behind more than houses. They had left behind lives. Behind locked doors were brass thalis used for generations, samovars that had witnessed countless family gatherings, bronze khasus, brass degchas (with owner's name engraved at  the rim)  ,  utensils, religious books, manuscripts, family photographs, idols, crockery, clothes, mattresses, toys and other objects of everyday domestic existence. There were gas cylinders, bicycles, scooter parts, books and countless things that had once formed the ordinary furniture of ordinary lives.

                                                                       

 There were doors and window frames. There was flooring. There were building materials that could be removed and reused elsewhere. Some articles found their way into shops and other establishments. The market offered a bewildering assortment of possessions whose owners were scattered across Jammu, Delhi and other parts of India. A bronze thali was not merely a bronze thali. It might have been part of a wedding gift. A samovar was not simply a vessel for preparing tea. It might have stood in the same corner of a family kitchen for decades, witnessing births, marriages, festivals, mourning and conversations that had long since become memories. An old photograph album was not waste paper. It held faces, relationships and moments that could never be recreated. A manuscript could have contained the accumulated learning of generations. A small household idol might have been worshipped by a grandmother, a mother and then a daughter-in-law. Its value could never have been measured in the money it fetched in a marketplace. Yet these things appeared there for sale.

 Everything was sold at throwaway prices. But the most disturbing question was not how cheaply these goods were sold. It was how they had reached the market in the first place. The original owners had neither sold them nor gifted them. They had not walked into Babademb to negotiate a price. They were thousands of miles away, struggling to rebuild their lives in unfamiliar surroundings. The owners had left Kashmir in circumstances of fear and uncertainty, carrying little more than the belongings they could manage to take with them. Their absence had created an opportunity for others. And there were buyers, too.

 One wonders what went through the minds of those who purchased these belongings. Did anyone recognise a familiar family name on an old book? Did anyone wonder why an entire collection of household possessions had suddenly appeared for sale? Did anyone think of the families whose homes had once contained these things? Or had the absence of the owners made everything morally acceptable? A society's conscience is tested not merely by those who commit a wrong but also by those who knowingly benefit from it. The seller and the buyer were both part of the same transaction. The market had a supply, but it also had a demand. Without buyers, such a trade could not have flourished.

 There was another dimension to this tragedy. Kashmir had long taken pride in its composite cultural inheritance. The word Kashmiriyat was invoked repeatedly to describe a shared civilisation, mutual respect and a common social ethos. But what meaning could such a claim retain when the possessions of an uprooted community were traded in public, and the neighbourhood watched in silence?  Kashmiriyat was not tested in speeches, seminars, religious gatherings or literary conferences. It was tested in the streets, shops and homes of ordinary people. It was tested when one community was driven away, and its possessions became available for commercial exploitation.

The most painful part was not simply that the belongings were taken and sold. It was that the act appeared to attract so little moral outrage. Where were the voices that could have said, "This is not yours"? Where were the religious leaders who could have reminded their followers that another person's property remained another person's property, even if its owner was absent? Where were the intellectuals and civil society representatives who could have condemned the spectacle? Nobody needed to organise a political movement to oppose this trade. A simple sentence would have been enough.

 “No. This is wrong. This is theft.”

 That sentence was missing.

 Many films were subsequently made on the tragedy of the Kashmiri Pandits. They depicted their displacement, their suffering, their separation from their homeland and the destruction of a way of life. Some explored the violence and fear that accompanied the events of 1990. Others spoke of exile, nostalgia and the longing to return. Yet, in all these cinematic representations, one crucial reality remained largely absent: Babademb and the market that had emerged from the material remains of deserted Pandit homes.

 The market was not a peripheral detail of the tragedy. It was one of its most disturbing chapters. It showed what happened to the material world of a community after its people had been forced out. It revealed how displacement could be followed by the appropriation and commercial circulation of the possessions left behind. It took filmmaker Maharaj Shah to bring this uncomfortable reality to the screen in his film Azadi, made in October 2026. He dared to show Babademb. He did what many filmmakers dealing with the Pandit tragedy had not done. He placed before the audience a marketplace that had become a symbol of a moral failure. His camera did not merely record a market. It brought back a chapter that had remained outside the familiar narrative of exile. It reminded viewers that the tragedy of 1990 did not end when the Pandits crossed the Banihal tunnel. Their homes, their belongings, their family memories and their inherited possessions continued to have a history of their own. Babademb was a marketplace of the past. Its story, however, belonged to the conscience of the present.

 I find it difficult to think of that market without imagining the people who had once owned the articles displayed there. A family might have spent generations preserving a samovar, only to have it appear in a shop window. A child might have left behind a favourite toy, never knowing where it would eventually end up. A family photograph might have passed through unknown hands, separated from the people whose faces it preserved. An idol that had received daily prayers might have become just another item for bargaining. There was a peculiar cruelty in this transformation. The owners had lost their homes, but their homes had not necessarily lost their contents. Those contents had acquired new destinations, new purchasers and new prices. The people who had once given meaning to these objects were absent, but the objects themselves continued their journey through the marketplace. No invocation of Kashmiriyat could make the transactions innocent. No religious identity could excuse the violation of another person's right to property. The real test of a civilisation is not how beautifully it describes its values, but how firmly it defends them when doing so becomes inconvenient. Babademb had failed that test.

Babademb remains a dark and indelible stain on the much-hyped Kashmiriyat. It was not merely a place where plundered goods were sold; it was a marketplace where the dispossession of an entire community was turned into an opportunity for commercial gain. The tragedy was compounded by the silence of those who should have protested. Maharaj Shah deserves appreciation for having the courage to bring this uncomfortable and shameful reality to the screen, when so many others chose to look away.

 

 (Avtar Mota )

CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.
Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.