MTV’s Change: Kashmir

For some weeks now, the website of the US based youth channel MTV Iggy, has been hosting an interesting set of conversations on Kashmir, with the tagline “let’s raise awareness to bring peace to paradise”.

The site hosts some basic information resources on Kashmir, as well as a pretty broad range of people speaking about the conflict. Apart from the well-known—like Arundhati Roy, Fareed Zakaria and William Dalrymple—they have also featured some very articulate young men and women both from Srinagar and Jammu.The diversity of positions represented on the clips is useful, and sometimes also disturbing. (Watch, for example, the Indian journalist Tarun Tejpal for a viewpoint that is uncomfortably close to the status-quo rigidities of the Indian State).

Those who follow the strange meanderings of Jashn-e-Azadi will be happy to see several clips from the film show up on the MTV Iggy space as well: you could click on the clip “What frenzy is this?” and then look around the other videos. I would particularly recommend a peek at the Kashmiri American band “Zerobridge”…

There is an interview with Sanjay Kak there too, predictably speaking in favour of taking “contrary positions” and a few other things besides. Enjoy!

A Collaborator in Kashmir

Amitava Kumar, writer and academic, has a new story out in PEN America, described as “a journal for writers and readers”. A Collaborator in Kashmir is a troubling account of a journey that Amitava makes to Sopore in north Kashmir to meet with Tabassum Guru, wife of Afzal Guru, the man sentenced to death for his part in the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. It makes a welcome addition to the unmasking of the terrible apparatus of oppression that has been spawned in the last two decades of military occupation in Kashmir.

I quote a passage from the piece here, because it connects Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul with our own Srinagar:

Reading those words I thought again of Srinagar. I had flown in from “a rich Western city,” and everything there looked drab to me, draped in a dirty military green. Every house that was new looked gaudy and vulgar or curiously incomplete. Many structures were shuttered, or burnt black, or simply falling down due to disrepair. Pamuk writes that those who live in Istanbul shun color because they are grieving for a city whose past aura has been tarnished by more than a hundred and fifty years of decline. I believe Pamuk was also describing plain poverty.

Jashn-e-Azadi had shown me another Srinagar. The film’s richness lay in the space it created, in the viewers mind, despite the violence, for thought and for color. The filmmaker had discovered again and again in the drabness of the melancholy the gleam of memory: the memory of blood on the ground, of the beauty of the hills and red poppies, of the keening voices of mothers, and painted voices of village performers. Also the memory of the dead, of falling snow, of new graves everywhere, and the shining faces crying for freedom.

Others have spoken to me of a sense of connection between Pamuk’s evocations of Istanbul and Kashmir, but Amitava Kumar evokes that synapse with grace and unusual intelligence.

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.

on making Jashn-e-Azadi: an essay in pratilipi

The online bilingual literary magazine Pratilipi, has quietly built an exceptional reputation  for its quality, the regularity of its bimonthly appearance, and the fact that it is genuinely bilingual, carrying excellent translations of all articles, in English and Hindi.

Readers of this blog may enjoy reading a series of essays on the Indian documentary, commissioned by Guest Editor Sridala Swami, with reflective pieces by filmmakers Paromita Vohra, Surabhi Sharma, and Kavita Joshi. In the December 2008 issue I have written an account of the making of Jashn-e-Azadi. Enjoy!

Jashn-e-Azadi, Zakhm-e-Azadi

Jashn-e-Azadi, Zakhm-e-Azadi (Celebrating freedom, Wounded by freedom) is the title of a review of the film by Priyadarshan, the poet, writer and journalist. It was first carried by the Hindi newspaper Aaj Samaj, New Delhi 15 March 2008, and for those who can read Hindi, it’s also available on Priyadarshans’ lively blog bharosa.blogspot.com

We are making available here an (unauthorised!) translation of the review:

Jashn-e-Azadi, Zakhm-e-Azadi (Celebrating freedom, Wounded by freedom)

Looking at the young faces present in that little room in the Arts faculty of Delhi University, I was more anxious than pleased. Brought up on the glamour of Bombay cinema, of films like Chak de India and Taare zameen par, would these boys and girls be kept interested by Sanjay Kaks’ two and a quarter hour long documentary? A documentary that does not have a clear story line, no actors, and a complicated conclusion which fuses History and Geography in ways that seem always ready to slip out of one’s hands and mind?

But Jashn-e-Azadi began, and all my doubts were dispelled. On that mottled white wall, as images and sounds emerged, the wall itself disappeared, the room vanished, and despite the ambient light in that room, so did the faces of those who had gathered to see the film. What emerged slowly was the truth about the valley called Kashmir, where freedom is an illusionary word.

This is that tattered Kashmir, where amidst falling snow a father looks for his sons’ grave – once a commander with HM, the Hizbul Mujahideen, now dead. The father has come on Eid day so that he can read a benediction in his sons’ memory. In this Kashmir people count their dead as if they are remembering things lost. In this Kashmir a young girl is terrified by her own recounting of an event. In this Kashmir, family members look for a lost child, a photograph in their hands. In this Kashmir young girls carry the marks of terror in their hearts, and even in their dreams they see their dying fathers… In the midst of this, a sadhu mendicant who has come for the pilgrimage of the Amarnath Yatra warns anyone who even lifts an eye towards Kashmir, that he will gouge their eyes out.

No, this is not a film that plays with your emotions. Sanjay Kak has probably intentionally kept away from that easy path. All these images you have to search for – to try and figure out that what it is in this apparently calm film that leaves you so troubled. For it does not give us the luxury of being emotional just for an instant, and then be allowed to forget about it. In this search, when you look beyond a deserted Lal Chowk, where soldiers raise the Indian tricolor and sing the national anthem, or when you see a huge crowd raise slogans of azadi, freedom, its then that you see these faces. That’s when you can see that behind the silence–or clamour–of Kashmir is sadness, we see that tragedy where there are burnt homes, the marks of what looks like dried out blood, and futile attempts to wash out the fresh blood.

Sanjay Kak does not show us too much or tell us too much. Incidents and characters are allowed to speak. On a beautiful lake in Kashmir floats the voice of a poet–binding lost times and places with its lament and its pain. And around this pain there is also the boorish tourist gaze, for whom Kashmir is just some snow upon which they may slide, or a beautiful garden: the excited screams of these tourists inform us that this Kashmir is better than Switzerland. Other than the tourists, there are the Soldiers– running schools for orphans at one place, distributing portable radios at another, and promising that more nice things will follow, and for everyone…

At every step of the film this maze of contradictions seems to hold us back, and often we feel that this film should now get over. But the film is not done even after it is over. While it is clearly a political film, its lessons are still not those of an easy politics. All that one can see is that with 700,000 soldiers, Independence day still has to be celebrated in silence, and events with school children too need to happen behind impregnable security barriers. On the other hand, when the Army kills someone in a so-called “encounter”, the funeral procession for the dead boy turns into a rally for the azadi of Kashmir. It’s quite clear that anger against India’s hegemonic politics and militarised policies has survived all the oppression.

The film raises several important questions about history and the present. Sanjay Kak sees the struggle of the Kashmiris as linked to 500 years of servitude. This leads to a kind of unmediated simplification in which its not easy to understand the dilemmas that have arisen after 1947, as Kashmir has swung between India and Pakistan, both in its society and its politics. Secondly this film does not attempt to articulate the kashmiriyat that is spoken of so frequently. If it did, it would perhaps make it even clearer that identities do not have just one definition, they have many layers, and kashmiriyat too is constructed out of just such layers.

In any event, Sanjay Kak does not seem to be in a hurry to raise the questions or provide the answers. Nor is he trying to weave some sort of story out of all this. Instead, between the scrambled dates and places, he shows us a Kashmir where in twenty years 70,000 people have lost their lives, he takes us to those graveyards where people are recognized not by their names or faces, but by numbers. In the entire film, no Kashmiri Pandits are visible, and this is also represented by Sanjay as a sort of emptiness, towards which peoples’ attention must be drawn. Like a blank space in a painting, which still adds meaning to that picture. Perhaps it’s due to this distant neutrality that the film doesn’t have a specific beginning or end. It seems to go on– and even after it is over.

By the time the film ended in that room in Delhi University, the numbers of those gathered seem to have grown suddenly, and Sanjay was faced with a pile of questions. Questions that tried to understand the extremely complex reality of Kashmir, questions related to the politics and neutrality of the film. Amidst these questions it was clear that Jashn-e-Azadi was successful in its aims–it touches you from a distance, and without your knowing it, goes deep inside of you. That is its major achievement.

blogflash: “Alternative Radio” interview

Alternative Radio, the independent weekly series hosted by David Barsamian, its award winning founder and director, will this week carry an interview with Sanjay Kak – Kashmir: The Struggle for Freedom. Taking as it’s starting point the film Jashn-e-Azadi, this is a free-ranging conversation about Kashmir, present and past, and follows Barsamian’s own travel in Kashmir in December 2007.

Alternative Radio is a unique experiment in radio journalism, a weekly one-hour public affairs program offered free to all public radio stations in the US, Canada, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and on short-wave on Radio for Peace International. It consequently reaches over 125 radio stations and millions of listeners. If you are anywhere in these parts of the world, then do go to the Alternative Radio site to check out the exact schedule.

David Barsamian, is a legend in independent radio, having done literally hundreds of interviews across the world in a career that spans 30 years. The many books that have emerged from this distinguished career include Targeting Iran, and What We Say Goes with Noam Chomsky; Speaking of Empire & Resistance with Tariq Ali; and Original Zinn with Howard Zinn. His earlier books include The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile with Arundhati Roy; Imperial Ambitions with Noam Chomsky; Eqbal Ahmad: Confronting Empire and The Decline and Fall of Public Broadcasting.

Screenings in the UK

Riding on the air-miles of the Amsterdam appearance of Jashn-e-Azadi, the film travelled to the UK, where we did four screenings in quick succession:

The first was on Dec 3, 2007 at the Royal Holloway College, University of London, at the instance of the Department of Media Arts, and Dr Lina Khatib, who has written quite prolifically about cinema in the Middle-East, in particular that of Lebanon. A small group of students and faculty attended the screening, as part of the HARC Fellows’ Seminar Series, and there was a long and detailed discussion that followed, moderated by Dr Yasmin Khan, who is herself the author of a new book about the Partition of the Indian sub-continent.

On Dec 6, 2007 there was a screening at the University of Leeds, in their wonderful Workshop Theatre. The School of English offers a very dynamic course on the Kashmir conflict, taught by Dr Ananya Kabir, so we had an excellent turnout of students and faculty, as well as a sizeable presence of people from the wider community around Leeds, and the nearby towns of Bradford and Birmingham. (This was a relief, since there was a rumour that something called the Kashmiri Indo-European Forum had written into the University authorities asking for the screening to be called off because–and hold it right there, folks–it glorifies terrorists! This sort of irresponsible campaign of calumny is quite familiar to all of us, and ends up contributing nothing to the discourse on Kashmir, and only ends up in a waste of energy.)
For some reason, unfamiliar “tech” gremlins crept into the second half of the screening, and the DVD consequently skipped the last 10 minutes of the film. Several DVDs were offered to the machine, but it was firm in its rejection. But this seemed to not distract the audience too much, and a long Q&A followed. While many of the questions followed a by now predictable pattern, for me what was a completely fresh perspective, were the questions brought in by people in the audience who come from that part of Kashmir that is variously described as Azad Kashmir/Pakistan Controlled Kashmir/Pakistan Occupied Kashmir… One of things that I realised, with some surprise I must admit, is that there are more than 600,000 people in Britain whose origins lie in that part of Kashmir, traditionally described as Mirpur, hence, ‘Mirpuris’.

Dec 7, 2007 there was a screening in London organised by SACREDMEDIACOW, which describes itself as ‘an independent postgraduate collective on Indian media research and production’ at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London. We had an excellent turnout, and that healthy indicator of audience interest–only a handful of the almost-full Khalili Auditorium left before the 2 hour 19 minute screening time! The discussion after the screening was moderated by Sumantra Bose, Professor of International & Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics, whose books on Kashmir are probably the two most balanced accounts of the contemporary Kashmir situation I have read. In the course of the last 9 months, over perhaps 40 Q&As, this particular session will remain a high-light: there was something about the audience’s response to the film itself (apart from the Kashmir issue, that is) that was extremely focused, even intense. The best Q&A sessions are those where you find yourself responding with things you’ve never said–or even thought of–before. This was one such.

Dec 8, 2007 saw the UK screenings rounded off by a last-minute improvised screening set up with some friends in the Mirpuri community in Birmingham. About 50 people, almost all of them middle-aged Kashmiris, watched a film about a Kashmir that none of them had ever been to: one of the invisible legacies of that brutal partition of 1947, when most of them were not even born. And yet most in the audience seemed to describe themselves as “nationalists”, by which they referred to their identity as Kashmiris, not as Pakistanis, or even people from “Azad” Kashmir. We talked about the current situation in the valley, the militarisation, the impact of changes in the politics of Pakistan, but there was also a very keen interest in knowing more about the complex issue of the Kashmiri Pandit minority… Over dinner, I must admit, the conversation was much more of an eye-opener for me than Jashn-e-Azadi is for many of the Mirpuri friends: there was at least one insight that deserves a separate post, and I will do that shortly. Watch this space!

Post-script: On Dec 9, 2007 I did a live interview on the Bradford based Aapna Channel (beamed in Europe on Sky Digital 817), a Pahari language (or more accurately Pahari/Potohari/Hindku speaking) channel aimed at precisely the 600,000+ people from the Mirpur district of “Azad” Kashmir. As a concession to my lack of skills in any of these dialects, my interlocutor (the very affable–and yet very political–Shams Rahman), spoke to me in Urdu/Hindustani, and over 90 minutes we really had a good conversation about the film, and Kashmir. We took several calls too, and once again there was a long conversation about the tragic departure of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley in the early 1990s…

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.

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

blog report – 21 days on the road (part 1)

Last week, Jashn-e-Azadi finished a hectic round of preview screenings in the US and Canada, so time to do a little reporting.
(For the record, that was a whirlwind tour: 21 days, 9 cities, 12 screenings…)

The Sep 18 start was on a day properly auspicious (sheets of rain in Minneapolis until half an hour before the screening) as Jashn-e-Azadi played at the Bell Museum, at the center of the sprawling campus of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Until recently, the Bell hosted an active film club, so it continues to have a proper projection ambience, big screen, excellent sound (even 35mm projectors!). Despite the rain we had a good turnout, more than 60 people, and the 7 pm start helped gather an interesting mix of students and faculty, as well as people from the wider South Asian ‘community’ in the area. That mix also helped to open out the Q&A session that followed, because the usual questions that Indian audiences will ask (about Pakistan’s support for the movement; about the consequences of self-determination in Kashmir) were mediated with more specific questions about the nature of what is happening in Kashmir’s present. (The Q&A ended well after 10 pm!) The films journey to Minneapolis was hosted by the College of Liberal Arts at UMN, and the discussion around it was carried over to the next afternoon, when a smaller group of graduate students and faculty met at the South Asian Seminar series, chaired by Ajay Skaria, eminent historian of South Asia, and we had a more detailed conversation around the film, the process that led to it, and its implications.

The impeccably modern facilities at the MacMillan Center at Yale University in New Haven was the venue for the Sep 20 screening of the film, for a group of about 35 students and faculty with an interest in South Asian history and politics. (And a smaller group who had joined us from the nearby Connecticut College as well) The Q&A was moderated by Mridu Rai, another excellent historian of South Asia (and particularly of Kashmir) , and we got off to a particularly lively start with an enthusiastic critic (who turned out to have driven 4 hours to share his views) launching into a diatribe against Jashn-e-Azadi, from a position that is both familiar and predictable to us, and by now probably even familiar to readers of this blog. (Summary: the film is partial, inaccurate, sympathetic to the wrong people, etc.) Since this was an educational institution, the critics had helpfully brought along xeroxed notes, which were generously distributed, containing pointers to the films flaws, as well as a ‘review’ of the film. I draw attention to this handy little package because the same text kept showing up all over North America. So even film criticism has become a networked business in these times… But as usually happens, the audience had an independent–and I dare say, different–reading of the film, and a more complex discussion followed, which flowed into a dinner reception, the event hosted by the South Asian Studies Council.

A pre-dawn flight from Hartford, in a tiny 12 seater plane, across the border and into Canada, had the advantage of an unforgettable view of sun-rise from the air. (Ink-black, blood-red, through to blue) Later that afternoon of Sep 21, the film was screened by the Center for the Study of Asias and the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto. Once again, well before the screening began, representatives of the same group of critics arrived, half-a-dozen very vociferous and somewhat aggressive gentlemen, with impeccably put together ‘press-kits’ with the same xeroxed pointers, and a bonus in the shape of a DVD of a film that they insisted be shown immediately before/after/during Jashn-e-Azadi. Since this was clearly not possible, they were very politely refused by the chair for the afternoon, Ashwini Tambe, who handled the unusual requests with infinite patience and tact, and transformed what they intended to be an acrimonious rough-house into a very civilized and productive session. Written questions were passed onto her, and eventually we managed to cover a lot of ground in the Q&A. And to be fair to the gentlemen who came with the intention of disliking the film, at least two of them were quietly appreciative of what the film was trying to do, and said so, however difficult it might seem to accept in the present. (Their other colleagues were happy to admit that they had no interest in what the film was saying, so seeing it–or not seeing it–made no difference to their existing critique of it.)

On Sep 22 an additional preview screening of the film was organised at Toronto’s Royal Cinema, under the banner of the South Asian Left & Democratic Alliance, for an audience of film-makers and film enthusiasts, activists from the Toronto political scene, and some students. The Royal, which is one of the venues for the Toronto Film festival, is now mostly used as a re-recording theatre for film, so has the most astonishing sound system and projection. (Seeing the film projected on that huge screen was a sensation that I was totally unprepared for: working as we do on modest desk-top systems, calibrating image and sound on pro-sumer systems, you always fear that the digital video output will not bear the scrutiny of the “big cinema” experience. That day at the Royal was vindication that the Sony PD170 + Final Cut Pro combination, with lashings of patient care from camera-persons, editors and sound designers, can give you a film that certainly looks and sounds as good as the best…) The Toronto film-maker, Ali Kazimi, who both Canada and India claim to be one of their own, had generously put together the screening, and moderated what turned into a really thoughtful Q&A, which ended only when it was time for us to vacate the Royal. (For a regular screening of Michael Moore’s Sicko!) I carry away the memory of a Senegalese Canadian activists’ comment: “I see the film as deeply hopeful”, he said during the Q&A, a response that one always hoped someone would have. To struggle, and resist, is to have hope…

On Sep 23 Jashn-e-Azadi moved to Bostons’ MIT, screening at the stunningly conceived Frank Gehry building in the heart of the campus. Hosted by old friends AID (Association for India’s Development) and Alliance for a Secular and Democratic South Asia, the Sunday afternoon screening attracted a diverse audience: the generalised ‘South Asian’ coming across as Indian, Pakistani, Kashmiri, American. But the active curiosity–and the general sense of unease–created by the arguments of the film led to an excellent Q&A which lasted for more than an hour. The best reaction of all was that several people wanted copies of the film, so that they could pass the film on to others, and organise more screenings. The familiar one page Critical Guide to Jashn-e-Azadi surfaced here too, distributed by two gentlemen whose question in the Q&A (about ‘factual errors’ in the films titles) stems from a misreading that has happened from the first screenings of the film in March 2007.

The screenings of the first week ended on Sep 25 when the New School for Social Research, in New York hosted a screening in downtown Manhattan. Once again, the diverse nature of New York provided an eclectic audience, and the Q&A that followed reflected these multiple perspectives. For me, there was the added pleasure that the discussion was moderated by Faisal Devji, a young historian whose recent work (distilled in his very thoughtful book, Landscapes of the Jihad) has much stimulated my thinking on these areas. Not unexpectedly, people tend to view films, particularly those which have an open-ended form (and don’t necessarily drag you to the finishing line of conclusions!) like a Rorschach test: they see in them what they want to imagine… There was a comment, for example, that the film only focuses on a “harsh Sunni Islam”, and ignores Kashmirs tradition of “more gentle Shia, Sufi practices”. Not only is this a flawed reading of the images in the film (the Sufi shrines appear frequently in the film; and how does one differentiate between Shia and Sunni aspects of the movement in Kashmir?) it is also a fundamentally incorrect reading of Islam in Kashmir. My admittedly non-specialist correction to this notion–that the Sufi should not necessarily be seen as non-Islamic or even anti-Islamic–was helped immeasurably by the presence of Faisal Devji.

The next day, Sep 26, Jashn-e-Azadi screened at Vassar College in Upstate New York, an old and highly regarded liberal arts college, where a totally unexpected audience of almost a hundred under-graduates walked in for a late evening screening of the film. Unexpected, because our screenings on north American campuses usually tended to draw in a small and focused bunch of graduate students (usually with an interest in South Asia) and of course the South Asians on campus: here we had a totally diverse set of undergraduate students, from backgrounds as varied as Anthropology, Literature, Political Science, and so on, with no real substantial investment in Kashmir, or the issues it raises… And much to my surprise, most of them stayed till the end of our rather long film, and many stayed on for the discussion. The event had been arranged by Amitava Kumar, writer and novelist, and Professor of English at Vassar, and he moderated the excellent Q&A that followed.

[ part 2 follows ]

[ blog connection 7 - place to weep ]

Haven’t posted for a while. Sometimes the off line world has more to ask than the online. This blog is 30,000 views old.  For a seven month old blog, I don’t think that is a bad number (to confess to blogmistri’s initial under confidence when he registered the blog, he was willing to bet on 10-15 thousand views by now, and he lost the bet to Sanjay on it). But more than the numbers, the range and quality of conversations is what i feel proud about. In lieu of the long silence, I am posting a poem by Manglesh Dabral, who is probably amongst the best known contemporary poets writing in the Hindi language, and he won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2000 for his collection Hum Jo Dekhte Hain.

Place to Weep

(Dedicated to Rahul Dholakia’s film Parzania & Sanjay Kak’s documentary Jashn-e-Azadi)

Some time ago, places to weep were limited
Showing your tears just anywhere meant demeaning them
Some cried alone at home or in their backyard
Under a tree or on a lonely footpath
A surprise meeting with somebody, would wet our eyes for a moment
Sometimes an ancestor would appear in our dreams wiping his eyes
At the time of mourning, genteel people would hide their eyes behind dark glasses
When something like a lament would churn our insides
It was unnecessary to interpret the meaning of its romance

These days weeping surfaces from just about anywhere
You notice tears in just about every place
Glittering markets banish their darkness to their backyards
While crossing them, it seems that a river flows
Living together as a family
Beggars, lunatics, orphans, helpless animals, homeless dogs multiply
Mother and father keep searching
For their children slaughtered by the rioters
Weeping for them is like a long road
At the end of the day month year few scenes from a film
Best Bakery Gulbarga Naroda Patiya
In Yavatmal a farmer is seen for the last time
Cupping some earth from his field
In Kupwara dilapidated men and women
Are taken to identify their sons
On a narrow track made by army guns
One innocent dead appears in place of another innocent dead
Who is known by the name of a third innocent dead

Injustice continues to feed on the body of this nation, Raghuvir Sahai used to say
Lorca’s guitar like heart – still pierced with five stars
Impossible to silence it
In this happy well fed world
Kabir’s waking and weeping continues
Ghalib’s saaz is full of pain, tears flow out just as it is strummed
There is a place to weep inside poetry
She invites in people wet with tears
Through ever open doors of
Her house, backyard, under a tree, some footpath