A Practical Nomad and Kashmir

Writing in The Practical Nomad blog, Edward Hasbrouck writes:

It angers me when Kashmir is depicted in the news as the cause or site of a conflict “between India and Pakistan”, as though it weren’t a place and a people with their own culture(s), their own traditions, their own past and present, and their own desires for the future. If there is one precondition for peace in Kashmir, it is that Kashmiris themselves must not be pawns in a geostrategic game, but must have a central role in making the decisions about their homeland.

Then going on to write about Jashn-e-Azadi, he says:

Kak’s film is an important contribution towards a wider understanding of that imperative.

But that’s not the only reason why I quote Edward’s post. It’s to draw attention to another part of his Practical Nomad blog where he writes on “Why do I care about Kashmir?”. Because his interests and activism on issues of peace and human rights, and his work as a travel consultant and travel writer, first intersected for him, he says, on a 1989 trip to Kashmir. As a valuable account of a critical moment in Kashmir’s recent history, I would warmly recommend it.

blog update – Jashn-e-Azadi has a trailer!

a short trailer for the film, made for the forthcoming
International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam (Nov 22-Dec 2, 2007)

blogreview: “Azadi – Theirs and Ours”

by Ananya Vajpeyi

[This review/reflection has been available for several weeks on the online Outlook.
We're posting it here for ease of access: ]

Sanjay Kak’s new documentary “Jashn-e-Azadi” (“How we celebrate freedom”) is aimed primarily at an Indian audience. This two-part film, 138 min long, explores what Kak calls the “sentiment”, namely “azadi” (literally “freedom”) driving the conflict in the India-controlled part of Kashmir for the past 18 years. This sentiment is inchoate: it does not have a unified movement, a symbol, a flag, a map, a slogan, a leader or any one party associated with it. Sometimes it means full territorial independence, and sometimes it means other things. Yet it is real, with a reality that neither outright repression nor fitful persuasion from India has managed to dissipate for almost two decades. Howsoever unclear its political shape, Kashmiris know the emotional charge of azadi, its ability to keep alive in every Kashmiri heart a sense of struggle, of dissent, of hope. It is for Indians who do not know about this sentiment, or do not know how to react to it, that Kak has made his difficult, powerful film. And it is with Indian audiences that Kak has already had, and is likely to continue having, the most heated debate.

Between 1989 and 2007, nearly 100,000 people – soldiers and civilians, armed militants and unarmed citizens, Kashmiris and non-Kashmiris – lost their lives to the violence in Kashmir. 700,000 Indian military and paramilitary troops are stationed there, the largest such armed presence in what is supposedly peace time, anywhere in the world. Both residents of and visitors to Kashmir in recent years already know what Kak’s film brings home to the viewer: how thoroughly militarized the Valley is, criss-crossed by barbed wire, littered with bunkers and sand-bags, dotted with men in uniform carrying guns, its roads bearing an unending stream of armoured vehicles up and down a landscape that used to be called, echoing the words of the Mughal Emperor Jehangir, Paradise on earth. Other places so mangled by a security apparatus as to make it impossible for life to proceed normally immediately come to mind: occupied Palestine, occupied Iraq.

Locals, especially young men, must produce identification at all the check-posts that punctuate the land, or during sudden and frequent operations described by the dreaded words “crackdown” and “cordon and search”. Kak’s camera shows us that even the most ordinary attempt to cross the city of Srinagar, or travel from one village to another is fraught with these security checks, as though the entire Valley were a gigantic airport terminal and every man were a threat to every other. As soldiers insultingly frisk folks for walking about in their own places, the expressions in their eyes – anger, fear, resignation, frustration, irritation, or just plain embarrassment – say it all. In one scene men are lined up, and some of them get their clothes pulled and their faces slapped while they are being searched. Somewhere beneath all these daily humiliations burns the unnamed sentiment: azadi.

One reason that there is no Indian tolerance for this word in the context of Kashmir is that the desire for “freedom” immediately implies that its opposite is the case: Kashmir is not free. By the logic of the Indian state, India is free and Kashmir is a part of India, ergo, Kashmir too, must be free. But Kak’s images provide visual attestation for something diametrically opposed to this logic: the reality of occupation. Kashmir is occupied by Indian troops, somewhat like Palestine is by Israeli troops, and Iraq is by American and coalition troops. But wait, objects the Indian viewer. Palestinians are Muslims and Israelis are Jews; Iraqis are Iraqis and Americans are Americans – how are their dynamics comparable to the situation in Kashmir? Indians and Kashmiris are all Indian; Muslims and non-Muslims in Kashmir (or anywhere in India) are all Indian. Neither the criterion of nationality nor the criterion of religion is applicable to explain what it is that puts Indian troops and Kashmiri citizens on either side of a line of hostility. How can we speak of an “occupation” when there are no enemies, no foreigners and no outsiders in the picture at all? And if occupation makes no sense, then how can azadi make any sense?

Kak explained to an audience at a recent screening of his film in Boston (23/09) that he could only begin to approach the subject of his film, azadi, after he had made it past three barriers to understanding that stand in the way of an Indian mind trying to grasp what is going on in Kashmir. The first of these is secularism. Since India is a secular country, most Indians do not even begin to see how unrest in any part of the country could be explained using religion – that too what is, in the larger picture, a minority religion – as a valid ground for the political self-definition and self-determination of a community. The Valley of Kashmir is 95% Muslim. Does this mean that Kashmiris get to have their own nation? For most Indians, the answer is simply: No. Kashmiri Muslims are no more entitled to a separate nation than were the Sikhs who supported the idea of Khalistan in the 1980s. Such claims replay, for Indians, the worst memories of Partition in 1947, and bring back the ghost of Jinnah’s two-nation theory to haunt India’s secular polity and to threaten it from within.

The second barrier to understanding, related to the struggle over secularism, is the flight of the Pandits, Kashmir’s erstwhile 4% Hindu minority community, following violent incidents in 1990. 160,000 Pandits fled the Valley in that year’s exodus, leaving behind homes, lands and jobs they have yet to recover. Today the Pandits live, if not in Indian and foreign cities, then in refugee settlements that have become semi-permanent, most notably in Jammu and Delhi. For Indians, even if they do little or nothing to rehabilitate Pandits into the Indian mainstream, the persecution of the Pandits at the hands of their fellow-Kashmiris, following the fault-lines of religious difference and the minority-majority divide, is a deeply alienating feature of Kashmir’s conflict. Kashmir’s Muslim leadership has consistently expressed regret for what happened to the Pandits in the first phase of the struggle for azadi, but it has not, on the other hand, made any serious effort to bring back the exiled Hindus either. In failing to ensure the safety of the Pandits, Kashmir has lost a vital connection with the Indian state – and, potentially, a source of legitimacy for its claim to an exceptional status as a sovereign entity.

The third major obstruction to India taking a sympathetic view of Kashmir is the problem of trans-national jihad. Throughout the 1990s, Kashmir’s indigenous movements for azadi have received varying degrees of support, in the form of funds, arms, fighting men, and ideological solidarity, not only from the government of Pakistan, but also from Islamist forces all across Central Asia and the Middle East. The reality of Pakistani support, and the presence of foreign fighters, from an Indian perspective, damages the claim for azadi beyond repair.

Kashmiri exceptionalism in fact has an old history. Yet even if we do not want to go as far back as pre-modern and colonial times, then at the very least right from 1947, Kashmir has never really broken away completely like the parts of British India that became Pakistan, nor has it assimilated properly, like the other elements that formed the Indian republic. The status of Kashmir has always been uncertain, in free India. But with the involvement of pan-Asian or global Islamist players, starting with Pakistan but by no means limited to it, the past gives way to the present. India no longer deals with Kashmir as though it were still the place that was ruled by a Hindu king until 1947 and never fully came on board the Indian nation in the subsequent 50 years. It now looks upon Kashmir as the Indian end of the burning swath of Islamist insurgency that engulfs most of the region. In quelling azadi the Indian state sees itself as engaged in putting out the much larger fires of jihad that have breached the walls of the nation and entered into its most inflammable – because Muslim-majority – section.

Secularism, the Pandits and jihad are all very real impediments to India actually being able to see what is equally real, namely, the Kashmiri longing for azadi. Kak explained to his viewers that to be able to portray azadi from the inside, he had to get through and past these barriers, to the place where Kashmiris inhabit their peculiar and tragic combination of resistance and vulnerability, their dream of a separate identity and their confrontation with an overwhelmingly powerful adversary. Their misery is palpable but they have yet to find a politics adequate to transform dissatisfaction into independence. Kashmiris do not agree on a singular meaning of the word “azadi”. Meanwhile, in the face of brute oppression, they do not fully fight back, but they do not submit either.

Kak subtly captures their strangeness as a people: they recount how they lost sons and husbands to a random, ubiquitous and unforgiving violence, and, in the midst of gruesome narrations, offer the questioner tea. They walk among the dead, through lots covered with marked and unmarked graves, speaking of the departed in a weird idiom that mixes the language of martyrdom with the everydayness of life that must continue. Their poets, whether Muslim or Pandit, compose verses that in Kashmiri, Urdu or English carry the same unmistakable note of pain, even as they mirror a landscape of mountain lakes, blooming flowers and delicately-hued skies. (A few years ago Amar Kanwar’s documentary “Night of Prophecy” also brought to Indian audiences the same poignancy of poetry written by Kashmiris that confronts torture, disappearance and death in a place of unearthly natural beauty). Their traditional entertainers, village bards and clowns, called “Pather Bhand”, remember their patron, the medieval pir (Sufi saint) Zain ul Abidin, or Zain Shah, and tell tales of war and destitution with a mischievous light-heartedness that makes you cry instead of making you laugh. Women cover their heads but look at the camera with unnerving directness, insouciant, beleaguered but never submissive. These are a wry people, part defeated, part unconquerable.

Their breathtakingly beautiful land stands at the crossroads of East Asian, Central Asian and South Asian cultures. For centuries, different races, religions and ethnicities have trampled through Kashmir, subduing its people on their way. But the Kashmiri language bears little relationship to any other languages of Persia, India, Afghanistan, Tibet or China, its nearest neighbours. Kashmir has always kept its head down as the winds of history have blown over and across the mountains, turned inward in an isolation that feeds the desire for azadi but does not provide the political wherewithal, the canniness, to carve out a separate nation in a world where might makes right.

Here the Indian Army arrives, 1 Indian soldier to every 10 Kashmiris. Here the Indian tourists arrive, as Kak shows us, sledding in snowy Gulmarg, dressing up in “native” costume to have photographs taken in the Mughal Gardens of Srinagar, calling blood-spattered Kashmir a veritable Paradise. Here the sadhus in saffron robes arrive, on their way to the holy shrine at Amarnath, on their annual pilgrimage, invoking, in the same breath, the Hindu god Shiva and the Indian flag, the “tiranga” (“tri-colour”). You cannot take away what is ours, say these people. Ah, but you cannot keep what was never yours, either. India for Indians; Kashmir for Kashmiris: this is the fugitive logic that the filmmaker is seeking to make explicit.

Kak has set himself a nearly impossible task. He must take Indians with him, on his difficult journey, past their prejudices, past their suspicions, past their very real fears, into the nightmarish world of Kashmiri citizens, torn apart between the militants and the military, stuck with the after-effects of bombings, mine-blasts, crackdowns, arrests, encounter killings and disappearances that have gone on for nearly two decades without pause. I became interested in Kashmir at the same time, for the same reason, that Kak began his investigations: the trial of S.A.R. Geelani, accused and later acquitted in the December 13, 2001 Parliament Attack case. In 2005 I wrote a couple of articles about Geelani, a Kashmiri professor of Arabic and Persian Literature at Delhi University, for this and other Indian publications. These earned me denouncements as anti-national, self-hating, anti-Hindu, pro-Pakistani, crypto-Muslim, etc. One letter to the editor even called me a terrorist!

Kak has already had a taste of this reaction since the release of “Jashn-e-Azadi” in March, and must expect more of it to be coming his way in the next few months, as his film is shown widely in India and abroad. In fact, he is sure to get more flak that I ever got, given he is a Kashmiri Pandit. Aggressively Hindu nationalist, right-wing Pandit groups find Kak’s empathy for Kashmiri Muslim positions infuriating, a “betrayal” that enrages them much more than that of a merely (apparently) Hindu – non-Pandit – sympathizer like myself.

But like Israeli refuseniks, there is reason to believe that now India too has its own nay-sayers, who cannot condone the presence of the Indian armed forces in Kashmir or the continued refusal of the Indian state to engage with Kashmiris on the question of azadi. Kak himself makes the comparison to Palestine by calling the azadi movement of the early 90s “Kashmir’s Intifada”. What allows someone like me – born, raised and educated in India, secular, committed to the longevity and flourishing of the Indian nation in every sense – to get, as it were, the meaning, the reality, and the validity, of Kashmir’s agonized search for azadi? Why do I not want my army to take or keep Kashmir by force, or my fellow-citizens to enjoy their annual vacations as unthinking, insensitive tourists, winter or summer? Why do abandoned Pandit homesteads affect me as much as charred Muslim houses, and why do I think that neither will be rebuilt and re-inhabited, nor will they be full of life as they once were, unless first and foremost, the military bunkers are taken down?

The answer comes from my own history, the history of India. If ever there was a people who ought to know what azadi is, and to value it, it is Indians. 60 years ago India attained its own azadi, long sought, hard fought, and bought at the price of a terrible, irreparable Partition. My parents were born in pre-Independence India, and to them and those of their generation, it is possible to recall a time before azadi. Kak’s film incorporates video footage from the early 1990s, taken from sources he either cannot or will not reveal. In those images of Kashmiris protesting en masse on the streets of Srinagar, funeral processions of popular leaders, women lamenting the dead as martyrs in the path of azadi, terrorist training camps, the statements of torture victims about to breathe their last and BSF operations ending in the surrender of militants, the seething passions of nationalism come right at you from the screen, leaping from their context in Kashmir and connecting back to the mass movements of India’s long struggle against British colonialism, from 1857 to 1947.

No Indian viewer, in those moments of collective and euphoric protest against oppression, could fail to be moved, or to be reminded of how it was that we came to have something close to every Indian heart: our political freedom, our status as an independent nation, in charge of our own destiny. The irony is that azadi is not something we do not and cannot ever understand, but that it is something we know all about, intimately, from our own history. What frightens us is not the alien nature of the sentiment in every Kashmiri breast: what frightens is its familiarity, its echo of our own desire for nationhood that found its voice, albeit after great bloodshed, six decades ago.

The British and French invented modern democracy at home, but colonized the rest of the world. The Jews suffered the Holocaust, but Israel brutalizes Palestine. India blazed the way for the decolonization of dozens of Asian and African countries, and established itself as the world’s largest democracy, yet it turns away from Kashmir and its quest for freedom, and worse, goes all out to crush the will of the Kashmiri people. Indians with a conscience – and perhaps Kak’s film will help sensitize and educate many more, especially the young – ought not stand for this desecration of the very ground upon which our nationality rests. After all, we learnt two words together – “azadi” and “swaraj”, freedom and self-rule – and on these foundations was our nation built.

We are a people who barely two generations ago not only fought for our own freedom – our leaders, Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, and so many others, taught the whole of the colonized world how to speak the language of self-respect and sovereignty. We of all people should strive for a time when it will become possible for a Kashmiri to offer a visitor a cup of tea without rancour or irony, as a simple uncomplicated expression of the hospitality that comes naturally to those who belong to this culture. We should join the Kashmiris in their search for a city animated by commerce and conversation, not haunted by the ghosts of the dead and the fled. We should support them, whether they be Muslims or Hindus, in turning their grief, so visible in Kak’s courageous work of witnessing, into a genuine “jashn”, a celebration, of a freedom that has been too long in the coming.

Anything less would make us lesser Indians.

_________________________________

Ananya Vajpeyi is a Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi (2005-2008)

[blog update - audio 1]

Now you can listen to some of the audio from the film.
slogans of azadi 

 If you want to read a translation of these slogans (and hear some more) click here.
You can also sample some of the poetry with Zarif Ahmed ’Zarif’ and Piarey ‘Hatash’ reading their poems

[ blog connection 5 - Kashmir Affairs ]

Those who’ve already read Jeremy Seabrook’s perceptive piece on the film in The Statesman may also enjoy reading his conversation with Sanjay Kak from the online journal Kashmir Affairs, linked here for quick reference on our Interviews page.
The Apr-Jun 2007 issue of the journal also carries a reflective piece by Roland Playle on the film: Why We Are All Martyrs.

[ blog engagement 2]

HUMANIZING THE OTHER
by Ather Zia

April 08, 2007 11:28 PM

http://www.arabisto.com/p_blogEntry.cfm?blogID=24&blogEntryID=454

Losing the rose colored lens

In 1991, I a young Muslim teenage girl waited for my Kashmiri Pandit (Hindu) friend. I stood outside the only greeting card and gift shop in Kashmir at that time. We were meeting at 11 o’ clock. As any normal teenager excited at this “out alone for the first time” expedition, I looked forward to a fun afternoon with my friend. Our time of meeting came and passed; I kept waiting looking for the familiar blonde head, the face with a golden dusting of freckles and light eyes.

She never turned up.
The phone in her home kept ringing and the only other contact I had for her, a person in the shop belonging to her family, informed she had gone out of the valley and would return after some time.
The answer to my query that I would in my imagination pose to my friend for keeping me waiting; as it finally dawned on me, was not the one for personal explanation but of a very public, tragic, and political nature.

Most of the Kashmiri Pandits by then had left the valley. Many of my friends spoke in whispers about trucks and buses, which had taken them out of the Kashmir, in wee hours of morning, in the dead of night… Some Muslims had helped find vehicles for them and many were trusted with the keys to their house and properties as they fled.
My father called up his Pandit friends only to let the phone ring endlessly.

So started the saga of Pandit community’s migration from the valley which has since been attributed to many reasons and debated greatly. While Muslim begrudge their migration, in moving away from violence and safeguarding their lives, future and education of children. Many attribute the then Governor Jagmohan for engineering their mass exodus. The former pro-India Chief Minister of Kashmir, Farooq Abdullah went on record, as he answered the query about Muslims driving the Pandits out of Kashmir, saying, “No I don’t agree with that. But the situation was such that they were frightened that they could be a target. And the Governor of that time Jagmohan told them to go away for some time promising them that they will be brought back (Shibli, M., Kashmir Affairs, 2006)”

The Kashmiri Muslims for long have had to bear the burden of getting blamed for mass Pandit Kashmiri migration in the early 90’s towards other parts India, mainly to Jammu and Delhi. A huge debate rages within the two communities as choicest blames, are heaped upon each other, the Kashmiri struggle for Independence and the administration of that time. It should also be noted that during the early 90’s not only Kashmiri Pandits but also prominent Muslims with suspect political leanings became targets especially those who were pro-India. Ordinary Muslims who supported but were not a part of the movement opine that they had nowhere to run or were not willing to leave, so they roughed it out while the Pandits left. Pandits on their part blame foremost the Kashmiri movement for selectively targeting Pandits and their Muslim brethren for becoming a silent witness to the treatment meted out to them.

There are grudges on both sides.
This migration, as has the Kashmir issue as a whole has become a great melting pot of problems, resolutions, explanations, and chaos, wherein people draw whatever suits their viewpoints and augments their own arguments.

The Raging Silence In-between

There is always a human need to establish a dialogue over the long angry silences that reign between estranged communities, that is, if the cacophony of hatred is to be driven out. The fact remains, the Kashmiri Pandits and Muslims, are entwined together in their shared history, their motherland, tragedies and troubles. In early 2000 I became a part of the group which sought to visit each other’s final reality, the sense of what we had become and if at all, it was possible to reach a common amicable ground even as the death toll in Kashmir continued to rise and the watery political theatre began to dilute the Kashmir issue.

We saw Kashmiri Pandits, in various stages of living their life outside Kashmir.In the camps of Purkhu, Muthi etc in Jammu, at privately-owned residences, businesses, schools they had established by then. We also met many Muslims who had migrated and were living in camps. We met many like-minded Pandits, mainly women, who finally became the Hindu component of our venture and were ready to respond with a parallel process towards understanding and reconciliation (even if returning to Kashmir was a remote possibility).

As we met, the decades old tragic history, which we (Muslims) were living and breathing and which they (Pandits) had left behind had produced two different symptomatic effects, that made us what we were and the reason for doing what we were doing, to each other per se. Our group from Kashmir comprising of Muslim women, seeking to understand, ease the estrangement and bridge the divide somehow, were living in a litany of incessant deaths and witnessing the political theatre wedded to eroding the very soul of Kashmir struggle; the Kashmiri Pandits, pursued explanations and deliverance while frozen in the amber of the ordeal they had faced and left behind in the early 90’s.

The conversations, between us to an outside ear must have seemed to emerge from two different time zones. From the point we had broken off in history, both the sides had walked different paths; our views were colored uniquely by dalliances in the homogenous cocoon of our insecure and estranged communities.

While we as Muslim Kashmiri women were journeying over the piling heap of over one lakh deaths and gross human rights violations in the valley, Pandits lamented the early deaths they had faced and the excruciating loss of the homes and property. Although it seemed a common ground was a shaky prospect, we soon came to realize there was too much to lose in not going further with the process that we had begun.

After that fist meeting of rage and fury, it seemed a certain catharsis had taken place. In due course, tears replaced the anger, the biting words became a muffled cry; at least at personal level, it seemed something like a travesty of empathy and patience was taking root. At least that was a start. Even if the vested political interests would not take heed for yet another decade and more.

Celebrating Freedom – Looking Forward

Such events have taken place since, in the personal lives of countless people in the valley, as the resistance movement goes on and a political solution remains elusive. There may not be an overflow of empathy or acceptance, but there is a modicum of tolerance in the narratives emerging from both communities. At an intellectual level, where film, theater and art steps in, artists from both Kashmiri Muslim and Pandit community are trying to understand the humanizing realities of each other’s situation.

As a certain validation for this sentiment, a film titled, “Jashn-e-Azadi” (translates into celebration of freedom) has been made by a young Pandit Kashmiri filmmaker, Sanjay Kak, who is based outside Kashmir. For sure, the communally dividing hawks must be eating their heart out to see a young Kashmiri Hindu making this revealing and honest film about a movement that has been predominantly seen as Muslim resistance to a Hindu India; an issue that has been exaggerated as being more religious than political.

Sanjay’s film tries to understand Kashmir’s cry for freedom in the less sought historical perspective wherein Kashmir has always been oppressed by external forces. The film has been received well in Kashmir where pro-independence audiences have been moved to tears, some bestowing Sanjay with emotionally significant gifts, which they relate to their right for self-determination and ultimately independence.

Kashmiri papers have called it by far the “boldest political statement in the contemporary Kashmiri discourse.” The film tries to understand freedom, not only in the contemporary context but through a historical perspective where Kashmiris have never been free of occupation. The film is significant not only for the rare and profound exegesis on Kashmir’s cry for Independence and resistance to occupying powers, but also for the fact it is conceived and made by Hindu Pandit.

This unlikely contribution validates the universal soul of the Kashmiri struggle from a historic and contemporary lens.

In the scenario of what is the Kashmiri carp-club (Kashmir sympathizers or non-sympathizers who use Kashmiri bashing to explain the tragedy that has befallen the valley); it’s a welcome departure that explains it is not weakness but centuries of “handed-down” subjugation that has deprived and oppressed Kashmiris.

The film weaves in the “Bhands”, the traditional folk theatre troupes of Kashmir, who have incorporated theme of resistance in their plays and have been performing them since centuries. A leading daily reports, “The apparent contradictions in the people’s quest for Azadi (independence), for example, elections, their own people unleashed as collaborators on them, plight of the Kashmiri Pandits, or, a man struggling to locate the grave of his son in Srinagar’s Martyrs Graveyard, vanish in the film’s grand narrative.”.

The most poignant and crucial realization from the film is, “The ultimate reality that people want Azadi (independence) emerges untouched among these contradictions.” This is no news to Kashmiri ears or those who have witnessed the struggle around them, the fact that the validation is coming from the other side of Kashmiri community, marks a significant moment in the history of Kashmiri struggle.

Kudos to Sanjay for taking the first step.

[ blog flash 3 - srinagar ]

5/04/07 | 9.20 am

Kashmir Times report (a cached view)

4/04/07 | 2.21 pm

David Lepeska in Kashmir Observer- an evocative report, on the film and its Srinagar screening.
And Amitava Kumar’s celebration of the film.

1/04/07 | 7.03 am

First review of the film and its ‘celebratory’ screening at Srinagar in Greater Kashmir and a urdu review in Kashmir Uzma
also a recently published review in The Statesman (it unearths almost every theme in the film)

31/03/07 | 6.03 pm

>> if you were at srinagar screening post your comments/experiences here. if you have images from the screening email them to us at jashneazadifilmATgmail.com.

31/03/07 | 5.00 pm

a long interview with Sanjay Kak, a version of which also appears in Tehelka.

31/03/07 | 1.54 pm

in about half an hour, srinagar preview is on. all technical problems sorted. managed even a camera which will play large DVCAM tapes. unlike Habitat screening in Delhi, we will have stereo sound and yes, a bright new projector.

we will keep you posted.

[ poetry ] Loss

Aes bayo naeb nishanae rov
Kaet tsarav panun, thikanae rov
Thael thael yath aes vaens vuchan
Tath purni kuluph makanae rov
So brothers our address is lost
Where do we look for our own, that place is lost
What we gazed upon with love all our years
That shelter is locked, our home is lost

Haal Village | Autumn 2004

Kas kharav taem gatkaruk rah
Dum phut gae, vaeh, bahanae rov
Tsengis gath dith zajaov paan
Patay gatt zool gav, parvanaye rov
Who for that darkness do we blame?
Stifled, alas, that reason is lost
Fluttering around the lamp, burnt ourselves
Darkness fell, the moth is lost

Kar yi pheerith su vond vushnaer
Vand ratsan hund yaaranae rov
Sombrith bas aes akh partit
Voth banas thann, khazanae rov
When will return that heart-warmth?
The intimacy of winter nights is lost
All we’d garnered was one faith
Lidless our pots, the treasure is lost

Srinagar | Winter 2005

Aekhir gayre yaelle noon chond drav
Dai zaanan, kaemsana vanay rov
Yus tsaenan aus paghuk raz
Sui darvesh, mastaney rov
At the last, when we leave with nothing
God knows, what places were lost
The one who knew tomorrow’s secrets
That dervish, that mad seer is lost

Piarey ‘Hatash’, Kashmiri poet, Jammu

[ keywords ] an incomplete glossary of words

If acronyms confuse you. History bores you. Check out
KEYWORDS and a MAP too if you are interested.

[ blog life 1 ]

Was Posted as a comment by J on

http://kashmirfilm.wordpress.com/?page_id=36

Witnessing a pro-independence rally in 1990, an immense sea of people, I saw people tearing of their clothes in ecstacy. It was not rage against any recent killings by the Indian army that had brought them out; but the pure joy of being able to express a desire for freedom, made possible by this collective action. Women sang the azadi slogans to a rhythm. They brought back memories of martyrs of freedonm struggle by singing songs that spoke of loss and meloncholy at the same time as courage and heroism. Songs from different parts of the rally spilled into each other. There was no direction to go; it had not been decided. For many hours, braving the icy winds of early January, people just stuck to their places. No stones were hurled, till police got impatient and started teargassing. Women, old men, children seperated; young men went ahead and hurled stones and chased police. More police came, and chased back people. This went on for quite some time, till shots were fired, and three people lay dead.
This went on, day after day, till Jagmohan imposed a three month long curfew to starve Kashmiris. And when curfew was lifted in the first week of March, even those who had missed it the last time came out on streets.
I think it was much more than just slogans… It has kept Kashmir’s struggle for freedom going.