Memory, History and Displacement in Chandrakanta’s The Saga of Satisar

Abstract

The mass exodus and displacement of Kashmiri Pandits in the 1990s is widely recognized, yet the militancy was not an abrupt eruption but the culmination of nearly nine decades of socio-political pressures. This article argues that Chandrakanta’s The Saga of Satisar (trans. Ranjana Kaul) functions as a layered “memory-text” that archives the longue durée of Kashmiri sociality—its composite culture, ritual calendars and traditions of neighbourliness—while tracing the slow transformations that led to rupture and displacement. Through close reading and cultural-historical contextualization, the paper examines how the novel narrativizes myth (Satisar), domestic rituals and foodways (Herath, Muharram spectatorship), occupational hierarchies, land reforms, regional politics, insurgency, and eventual exodus. The study foregrounds gendered vulnerability through the medical gaze of Katya’s clinic and evaluates the novel’s ethics of representation as a situated Pandit chronicle that nonetheless recalls intercommunal bonds. It contends that the text is less a tribunal of history than a literary archive of plural loss, where dispossession—“our lands, our heritage, were taken in the name of equality”—coexists with memories of solidarity and shared grief. In this way, The Saga of Satisar demonstrates how literature sustains mythic belonging amid modern fracture and how, even in exile, communities carry “their gods and their songs, weaving a tapestry of memory that refuses to fade.” By interweaving myth, history, and lived experience, the study highlights the role of literature as witness—not only to violence and displacement but also to resilience, cultural endurance, and the preservation of identity.