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Our Moon has Blood Clots

BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS

Our Moon has Blood Clots
The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits
Rahul Pandita

Author: Rahul Pandita
Publisher: Vintage Books
Random House India; 1st edition
Number of Pages: 272
ASIN: B00AWLAYWQ
Binding: Paperback
Language: English

About the Book

They found the old man dead in his torn tent with a pack of chilled milk pressed against his right cheek. It was our first June in exile, and the heat felt like a blow in the back of the head. His neighbour, who discovered his lifeless body in the refugee camp, recalled later that he had found his Stewart Warner radio on, playing an old Hindi film song:

Aadmi musafir hai, Aata hai, jaata hai
(Man is a traveller, He comes, he goes)

From “Our Moon Has Blood Clots”

This powerful and moving book throws a sharp new light onto one of the most tragic conflicts in the modern world. As a young boy, Rahul Pandita was exiled from his native Kashmir. Now, twenty years later, he returns to the prelude and aftermath of his exile, narrating his family’s tortuous journeys with great sensitivity and skill. Every paragraph of this compelling memoir rings deeply true – Ramachandra Guha

Rahul Pandita was fourteen years old in 1990 when he was forced to leave his home in Srinagar along with his family, who were Kashmiri Pandits: the Hindu minority within a Muslim-majority Kashmir that was becoming increasingly agitated with the cries of ‘Azadi’ from India.

The heartbreaking story of Kashmir has so far been told through the prism of the brutality of the Indian state, and the pro-independence demands of separatists. But there is another part of the story that has remained unrecorded and buried.

Our Moon Has Blood Clots is the unspoken chapter in the story of Kashmir, in which it was purged of the Kashmiri Pandit community in a violent ethnic cleansing backed by Islamist militants. Hundreds of people were tortured and killed, and about 350,000 Kashmiri Pandits were forced to leave their homes and spend the rest of their lives in exile in their own country.

Rahul Pandita has written a deeply personal, powerful and unforgettable story of history, home and loss.

About the Author

Rahul Pandita is the author of the best-selling “Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement” (Westland/Tranquebar Press, 2011), and the co-author of the critically-acclaimed “The Absent State” (Hachette India, 2010). He has extensively reported from war zones that include Iraq and Sri Lanka. In the last few years, most of his work has been focussed on India’s Maoist rebellion, in Central and East India. In 2010, he received the International Red Cross award for conflict reporting.

Rahul was born in Kashmir valley in a hospital named after a 14th century saint poetess. At the age of 14, in 1990, his family was forced into exile, like thousands of others, by Islamic extremists. He lives in a Delhi suburb now, and his memoir on living and leaving Kashmir titled “Our Moon Has Blood Clots” will be out in January 2013 (Random House).

A journalist by profession, Rahul works as Associate Editor with the Indian news weekly, Open Magazine.

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