Children of the Tehreek

The August 2010 issue of Himal Southasian magazine has a commentary contributed by me on the recent events in Kashmir:

When columns of the Indian Army drove through Srinagar on 7 July, rifles pointed out at the city, it was meant as a show of force; to tell its ‘mutinous’ population – and those watching elsewhere – just who was really in charge. Disconcertingly for the Indian government, it has had the opposite effect…

Do read the rest of Children of the Tehreek too.

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.

blogflash: gorakhpur film festival

This last week has been an exciting journey into an important new territory. It began appropriately, with a screening of Jashn-e-Azadi at the closing day of the 3rd Gorakhpur Film Festival, organised by the Expressions film society of Gorakhpur, in the heart of what is known as the “hindi heartland”.

Gorakhpur is the home of the legendary publishing institution, the Gita Press, of the writer Munshi Premchand, the poet Firaq Gorakhpuri, and of course the eponymous Gorakhnath temple. (In recent years it has also emerged as the site of a particularly virulent format of right-wing Hindu chauvinism, and the importance of the Gorakhpur Film Festival has to be located particularly within this last quite considerable challenge.)

In the 60th year of Indian Independence, the festival significantly chose to stay away from the officially generated celebratory hoopla, and commemorated the event under the sobre slogan of visthapan aur vibhajan ke saath saal (sixty years of division and displacements). It opened with a screening of M S Sathyu’s classic representation of the trauma of Partition, Garam Hawa, and closed on Feb 26th with the first festival screening of our recently completed “Urdu/Hindustani” version of Jashn-e-Azadi.

The Gorakhpur Film Festival showed an interestingly curated range of films, from contemporary documentaries (Ajay Bharadwaj; Biju Toppo; Surabhi Sharma; Vinod Raja) to classics old (Ritwik Ghatak) and new (Saeed Mirza), and a whole Sunday devoted to films for children. There was also theatre, and poetry…

The very well-attended screening of Jashn-e-Azadi was followed by an intense Q&A. This was hugely helped by the fact that the GFF had brought together an excellent group of progressive writers, critics and teachers associated with the Jan Sanskriti Manch (Forum for People’s Culture); and they came from Allahabad, Basti, Bhilai, New Delhi, Patna… Once again the openness and the complex thinking that people brought to their viewing of the film was a vindication of the value of sharing an apparently complex argument. (Never complicate what is simple. Or simplify what is complex…)

In the days immediately before and after the Gorakhpur screening I have had very similiar experiences with discussing the film with groups of young college students at the Jamia Milia Islamia (Awam) and at Delhi University Arts Faculty (Premchand Vichar Manch). Already more and more groups of people have expressed an interest in using the film in India, to raise questions around the hard issues of Nationalism, and Nationality.

Could it be that the film is finally finding it’s mark…?

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)

[ blogrumination: intifada! ]

At a screening of Jashn-e-Azadi in Hyderabad I was asked if there was a reason why the word ‘intifada’ was used in the context of Kashmir. I tried to explain that the news of the first Palestinian Intifada (and in particular, the television images) came to Kashmir at a very crucial time: in the aftermath of the infamous rigged election of 1987 . The character of the street battles that followed surely took inspiration from what was happening in Palestine…

Someone then asked me what the precise meaning of intifada was. The unsure nature of my response has egged on another viewer of that day to send us this – thanks, Bhashwati:

As a verb intifada means “to be shaken, to wake up”. As a noun it means “shudder, awakening, uprising”, with the implication of “a shaking off” — referring to the process of shaking off sleep or shaking off the dust from one’s feet.
In the context of 37 years of Israeli military occupation (as of 2004), Intifada represents a ‘shaking off’ of the chains of occupation.
The word was first coined in 1987, to describe the first Palestinian uprising against Israeli military rule.

Last week there was a connected comment on this blog from yet another viewer of that days TEFLU screening – thanks, Shafeeq:

This was something I had to ask after the screening at TEAFLU, Hyderabad:
In your docu, the resistance seem to have the language of Islam, also there is this reference to ‘Intifada”. Now, even though an influence of cable TV, intifada carries other connotations too, of an Islamic struggle against the infidel imperialists.
So, what exactly is the role of Islam, is it a garb in which resistance carries itself forward? or is it a programme in itself?
Is Kashmir existing in a metaphysical space (of course, a resistance fighter was pointing to metaphysical battle) for the Kashmiris, in oneness with Palestine and Chechnya, or are they aware of the concrete geopolitics which then can’t avoid Pakistan from referencing? Can’t that be one of the reason why while West [of Kashmir] is so familiar to Kashmiris, South [of Kashmir] is so distant?

I think this is an important question, which I’m unable to answer. We’re posting it here in the hope that sometime in the near future (days, weeks, months, even years), some people will reflect upon this, and share their ideas with all of us.

[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 3 - robin ]

After ‘Jashn-e-Azadi’

The kite of the smoky chinars is not a symbol
The rose has migrated from the garden of paradise
Freedom will never come
Poured into goblets waiting to be raised
Martyrdom is a handout from god the hagiographer.
Only poetry of ruins is real.
The dumb rose still blooms
From some beloved breast torn open.

Robin S Ngangom
26 May 2007

Robin S Ngangom is one of the major Indian poets writing in English today. He is based in Shillong and also writes in Meitei.

[ blog connection 2 - wasim bhat ]

here is something on mystic poets of Kashmir by Wasim Bhat. it would have been a disservice to let it go just as a comment:

Alamdaar, the Standard Bearer-I

by Wasim Bhat

Salar Sanz lived in a time that is somewhere after the 1320 just after the marauding hordes of Zulchu the Mongol, had sacked the region. Salar was a person with a mystical bent of mind, his ancestors had settled in the Kashmir Valley after migrating from the outlying area of Kishtwar. The turning point in Salar Sanz’s life came when he met Hazrat Mir Syed Hussein Simnani, a renowned mystic who lived in Kulgam in south Kashmir. Salar Sanz spent a time with the mystic and eventually accepted Islam at his hands. Henceforth he was called Sheikh Salar u Din. In some years Salar u Din was married to a lady called Sodar and they lived at Kaimuh in Kashmir.

It was here that a son was born to them, he was called Noor u Din, the birth and the subsequent events after the birth of Noor u Din are wrapped in layers of legend. The legend goes that Noor u Din after he was born would not suckle at his mother’s breast. At this his parents were completely distraught thinking that if this continued their son would die of starvation. As if to answer their prayers Lalladed who was a renowned Shaivaite mystic of those times appeared at their door and took Nund, for this is how he was affectionately called, in her lap and suckled him and the infant who had refused for so long to suckle started to do so eagerly and hungrily.

This veracity of this incident is shrouded in legend but numerous historical sources attest to this and it finds a mention in many writings of the time and as well subsequent writings. The point however to note is that through this incident a spiritual event and a lineage is established which Noor u Din extolled repeatedly when he became older. In one of his shruks he says, [1]

Tas Padmanpore chay Lallay

She, the Lalla of Padmanpore,
Drunk the nectar long and deep,
And beheld Shiva with a bewildered eye,
Lord! Grant me the same demeanour.

This intimation of a spiritual lineage is a constant in the life and the poetry of Noor u Din. The pivot of spiritual and the mystical universe is the spiritual master without whom the effort spiritual efforts are futile and likely to go awry………

At the age of thirteen Noor u Din married Zaided, they had two children a girl who was named Zoonded and a boy Baba Haider. Apparently Noor u Din was leading a happy marital life but underneath the surface there was a simmering spiritual discontent. Noor u Din yearned to satiate his spiritual yearnings and at twenty he left home and started to live in cave in Kaimuh. He abandoned his family and children. His family was distraught at his action; sources relate that in an attempt to persuade him to come back home to his family his two children were one evening brought to the cave and left there. They were found dead the next morning.

This incident is a formative and critical one which symbolizes the break with the materials world and its concerns for Noor u Din. Now there is nothing that ties him, he is unfettered of the shackles that bind ordinary mortals.

Sources relate another dramatic event that happens around this time that reemphasizes Noor u Din break from worldly ties. This event contains within itself one of the earliest miracles attributed to him. This event is something that Noor u Din himself preserves in one of his shruks. It relates that his mother implores him to return to his family and claims her milk back on which he had suckled if he does not do so. It is related that he calls his mother and mildly reprimands her for her insistence and finally asks her to fetch a pot, he strikes a rock with his staff and milk gushes forth from the rock, he then asks his mother to collect the milk thus freeing himself of this maternal claim. The event again serves to achieve a breaking free, a rending asunder of the claims and the ties of the world that are but fetters in the path of the mystic and the spiritual traveler.

Finally Noor u Din is free of the claims that the world makes upon him to embark on his spiritual quest.

And what is the substance of this quest and what is the goal, Noor u Din himself describes the state that he seeks in his spiritual quest, a state of faqr, this state is an exaltation for the mystic, its merits are valued beyond measure, the lineage of this state is traced back to the Prophet who in the mystical discourses is the Insan i Kamil or the Perfect Man. It is related in a tradition of the Prophet that the Prophet said “al faqr u fakhri”, that the state of faqr is my pride.

The Prophet being the perfect example this state is then what the mystic strives to in all that he is and does.

Faqr chuy dozakhas warun thuro [2]

Faqr is salvation from the fire of hell,
Faqr, the Prophets observed so well,
Faqr is profit in faith, in sustenance as well,
Faqr is the sweet fragrance of the Yemberzal.

At the age of thirty six Noor u Din decided to leave the cave dwelling at Kaimuh and went on journeys across the Valley, his wanderings took him far and wide and the narratives of his journeys that have come to us through different sources relate incidents that are interspersed with his engaging encounters. A letmotif in these encounters is the engagements of Noor u Din with the Islamic and Hindu clerics of his time. What appears most in these encounters is how the clerical or organized religious establishment sees Noor u Din as a threat because he posits for himself a position that is liminal and that speaks to them from the outside and therefore is critical and in most instances as the narratives demonstrates establishes the moral superiority of the Sheikh, as he was now increasingly referred to by the population of the region.

The Sheikh established a mystic lineage or Silsila that he called the Rishi. In one of his shruks he clearly establishes himself at the final link of a mystical spiritual lineage that ultimately goes back to the Prophet. In this scheme then according to Noor u Din, Ahmad or the Prophet is the ‘Awal’ Rishi or the first Rishi and Noor u Din the seventh in line.

The Rishis of Kashmir, the disciples of the Sheikh carried forward the practices and the values of this lineage and in time the people of the region identified Kashmir so closely with the spirit of the Rishis that the seventh Rishi, Noor u Din came to be refereed as Alamdar i Kashmir, or the standard bearer of Kashmir.

Endnotes

[1] A shruk is a four lined composition in verse and usually the lines are in rhyme.

[2] Faqr is a state of piety of man towards the world and his fellow men and of austerity unto himself. It has material as well as spiritual connotations.

[ blogflash 5 : Patna ]

This post is overdue, but the blogs been struck by sluggishness: our blogmistri is on vacation, and then there’s the heat-wave that’s got much of north India in it’s thrall. Yesterday, Delhi was touching 43° C in the shade…

We’re here to report our preview at the Hindi Bhawan in Patna city, organised by the Jaya Prakash Smriti Sankalp and Lok Parishad, both Patna based groups with a strong comittment to keep open spaces for democratic debate. To those who may not have made this connection, Patna was home to the legendary Jayaprakash Narayan, outstanding son of Bihar (and India), and a man who was always fierce in his defence of democratic rights, and the rights of the under-privileged. JP’s resistance to the brazen misuse of power by Indira Gandhi, then at the height of her autocratic powers, and his role in the Nav Nirman (“building anew”) movement, in the call for Sampoorn Kranti (“total revolution”) and in the founding of the Chatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini (“students and youth struggle force”) remain some of the high points of democratic politics in post-Independence India. He was also one of those rare Indian political leaders who had a clear position on Kashmir, and right from 1947 till he died almost 30 years later, JP always came out clearly and unambigously in favour of the right to Self-determination of the Kashmiri people.

The context may have had something to do with the excellent turnout on May 12th, and in a city that does not otherwise have a strong screening culture for documentaries, Jashn-e-Azadi gathered nearly 300 people in the spanking new Hindi Bhawan, in the heart of Patna city, a stone’s throw away from the Radio Station. (The hall has not yet been inaugurated, so the mint condition of the otherwise excellent infrastructure gave us some teething trouble: airconditioning in the first half, audio impedence in the second!) But we had more than a 100 people stay on for the discussion, which finally got over at 9.15 pm …

Apart from the excellent discussion, there was very good coverage in the many Hindi dailies that come out of Patna. Some of these are already cited in the Reviews/Reports section, and soon we will have a readable Hindi PDF, and perhaps even later, a translation as well.

[ what frenzy is this? ]

(Un)expectedly, in all the conversation of (and about) the film, blog mistri thinks the poetry in the film is being silenced. The film–in at least six places–uses poetry to break through its narrative, trying to comprehend unfreedom’s everyday face, holding a dusty old mirror onto the distorted faces of power. A mirror painstakingly made–
I smeared the glass with blood to make mirrors/My image – a stranger…
This refusal to hear the poetic, allowing the rhetorical discourse of power politics to re-establish its dominance over the viewing experience, is tragic.

One could even say that the horror and banality of unfreedom in Kashmir is not in the body count, or the secret war of fear, but in not allowing the ambiguous attempts to hold onto ‘significance’ to seep into the streets of our body. But then, only when you can control and forcibly clarify meaning for all, can you enslave… And thus at some level, attempts to construct a ‘grand narrative’ of right and wrong in Kashmir, which many seem to be doing on the blog and elsewhere, without letting the poets embarass this design, goes on to stuff Kashmir back into the coffins.

I just received images of the screening in Srinagar’s Tagore Hall and was happy to see Zarif Ahmed ‘Zarif’, one of the poet disrupters of the ‘narrative whodunit’ of the film, standing in front of the films poster. So I am re-posting one of his poems … and this time before sifting voyeuristically through all the juicy abuses we have attracted, let Zarif hand you a map of a city of love…

(trivia) : When the poem was posted earlier, it attracted just one comment >>
Rohit on Mar 2nd, 2007 at 11:47 am
Voilence breeds voilence. You sowed it and now reap it.)

WHAT FRENZY IS THIS?

Daem phuit chi gaemits myaen nazar
yoot matsar kyah?
mei rov labith lol shahar
yoot matsar kyah?
My gaze has been silenced
What frenzy is this?
I lost the city of love I’d found,
What frenzy is this?

Poozai karaan aes gaemits vaens me tsayen
aeyov ti mei ma vuch na sahar
yoot matsar kyah?
I worshipped shadows all my life
Did I alone miss the arrival of the dawn
What frenzy is this?

Mei khoon mailith sheesha patyan aaene baneyvim
aeseena panin paana khabar
yoot matsar kyah?
I smeared the glass with blood to make mirrors
My image – a stranger
What frenzy is this?

Mei togh na parun kya chu leekhit posh deewaran
kael gaem tavay laen ashar
yoot matsar kyah?
I couldn’t read the writing on floral walls
my lines of fate turned mute
What frenzy is this?

Sukrath me ahsaan karith gav ne, galath cha?
tyem myan hisukh chav na zahar
yoot matsar kyah?
Socrates did me no favour in leaving
I shouldn’t be saying this, but he didn’t drink my share of poison
What frenzy is this?

Mei rov labith lol shahar
yoot matsar kyah?
daem phuit chi gaemits myaen nazar
yoot matsar kyah?
I’ve lost the city of love I’d found,
What frenzy is this
My gaze has been silenced
What frenzy is this?

Poem by Zarif Ahmed ‘Zarif’, Srinagar, Kashmir