I

This summer the people of Kashmir threw a big surprise. After a period of relative quiet, with five years of what the official apparatus calls ‘normalcy’, they rose up in a massive upsurge, and filled the streets with the exuberance of a hundred thousand marchers. Nothing like this had been seen here since the early 1990s, when a full-blown armed rebellion first broke out. And this time the protest came without the taint of armed violence, with even the militant groups keeping a discreet distance. The sheer scale and energy of the mass protests confounded everyone, particularly the Government, and the Intelligence agencies. Taken off-guard, the security forces seemed to remember only one method of dealing with any sort of protest: with bloody severity. In three months they shot dead more than 50 non-violent protestors, most of them with a bullet between chest and knee.

In the midst of all this, my friend Ranjan Palit, cameraperson and filmmaker, landed in Srinagar, to shoot images for his new film, a reflection on his craft as a maker of documentary images. Ranjan knows Kashmir quite well. Apart from other journeys he has made to the valley, we both traveled together to Kashmir at least seven times over 2003-04, putting together the material for the film Jashn-e-Azadi (How we celebrate freedom). As a veteran cameraperson, he has over time learnt how to be careful, when to put his head down, and when to put the camera away.

There Ranjan was, then, walking through the emptied streets of what’s called ‘downtown’ Srinagar, on another morning of protests, in the lull after a round of the mandatory stone-pelting and tear-gassing. He wasn’t too rattled when he was stopped by a group of young protesters. He could hardly have known that this summer the camouflage provided by this mad warren of streets of ‘downtown’ Srinagar had failed the young protestors. Brought under the scrutiny of surveillance video, young men were being systematically located in their homes, dragged out, given a brutal thrashing, and then a few days to dry out in a lock-up. (And sometimes a more stringent sentence under the draconian Public Safety Act).

He had also not taken on board another difference: that on this morning he was not shooting with the more ‘serious’ looking camera he works with. Instead, he had a small handycam, identified increasingly as a tool of the intelligence agencies, of police surveillance. And used regularly by security forces in Kashmir to identify and locate those with awkward political leanings. There was no sound-recordist either, with boom rod and conspicuous microphone, things that flag you off as a ‘professional’ film crew.

The questions to Ranjan fast took on the quality of a hectoring interrogation: Who are you? Show your card. Why are you shooting us? Were you the one who shot here yesterday…? Questions were giving way to angry shouting, and anyway, what were the right answers that would satisfy and reassure this bunch. The pushing and jostling started: it was beginning to look ugly.

Then a friend on the fringe of the posse had an idea: she picked on what looked like a sensible young man, pulled him aside from the group, and asked:

“Have you heard of Jashn-e-Azadi?”

“Not just heard of it”, he answered combatively, “I’ve even seen it. Several times!”

“Well, this man you’ve caught hold of, he’s the one who shot it…”

“Hey, this one is a brother”, said the sensible one, wading into the group, “let him go, he’s made that film…”

Like many cliffhangers, this one also ends predictably, as the angry core of that little posse was suddenly transformed into its welcoming heart. Ranjan was hugged and kissed, and sent off, handy cam and skin intact. (Like a good professional, he had put the camera down while talking to the boys. But he never pressed the stop button. Rolled it through: no picture, but very telling soundtrack.)

Documentary filmmakers all have a cache of favourite screening-stories; of audiences saying and doing things that make the time and energy (and the endless solitude) of making a film all seem worthwhile. So although this really is Ranjans’ story, I’m putting it down as mine.

[flashvideo filename=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ApbTHYWLdM /]

II

This is 2003. Here is the predicament of the documentary filmmaker as he squares up to thinking of a film in Kashmir: How is one to make sense of the silence? How is one to craft an account of a disturbed place, and a fractured time, but represent it through its tongue-tied muteness? Kashmir is, after all, a conflict zone. And I am Kashmiri, even if returning ‘home’ after fourteen years, after 1989. So while I too am witness to what everyone else can see, how do I prepare myself to see a little more?

I start by ignoring the physical co-ordinates of the valley itself: tear myself away from its magical mountains and crystal streams and jeweled lakes. Turn away from the images of stone-pelting urban intifada; and resist the fascination with uniformed soldiers and masked militants. Steel yourself away from the half-widows. Walk past the fully orphaned.

Instead, one must isolate the silences, find meaning in them.

But wait, I’m assuming too much. Because to hear the reticence, absorb it, you have to learn to sense it first, is it not? The silence we wish to make material is not merely the absence of noise, the lack of all sound, but something outside of it, behind it. It can’t be enough to say –shhh! watch! listen! – and expect that we’ll all hear it. We must train ourselves to glean it, only then can it be shared.

I first ran into that silence in the August of 2003, with a sudden shock, like a hand chancing upon a gaping hole in a well-loved coat. Of course this was a silence that was possible to anticipate, for it was also literal. On a bright morning in the public heart of Srinagar, the everyday bustle of Lal Chowk had evaporated. Instead of the noise of shoppers and hawkers, buses and horns, only an awkward hush remained.

The sharp reminder that this was not just a holiday calm came from the middle of the square, where twenty ceremonially starched soldiers prepared to hoist the Indian Tricolour. Another couple of dozen officers, lined up to applaud them, to salute the flag as it went up the shabby little Clock Tower, and to congratulate each other. All this watched over by perhaps a hundred other soldiers, from atop every building around the square, in heavy flak jackets, their binoculars and guns at the ready.

Sudden bellowed commands to present arms.

Steel-edged boot heels brought down sharply.

Flourish of slightly off-key trumpets…

All this was still never enough to cover the hush across Lal Chowk.

This was Independence Day in Srinagar, Kashmir. Jashn-e-Azadi.

I walked away from the empty square and its squalid pageantry. Meandering through ‘downtown’ was like walking through a film-set while everybody is off at lunch. (Perhaps somebody forgot to switch off the studio lights too?) It was mid-morning, and yet not a single soul stirred in this usually over-populated part of old Srinagar. Of course there were the stray reassuring leaks of sound that suggested people: a snatch of distant radio song, perhaps it was Rafi; a pressure cooker whistle for an early lunch; a ‘howsthat!’ appeal from a well concealed game of street cricket. People must have been around. Perhaps a few were even watching me idly from behind the barred doors and shut windows.

Twenty years of armed conflict. The presence of half a million soldiers. Seventy thousand dead. Several times that many thousands injured, maimed in body and mind. Despite all that, and perhaps because of it, in the silence of Srinagar that morning, I read a quiet rage of the spirit, and a sullen resistance.

III

Exactly a year later, August 15, 2004, Independence Day, and I was back at the Clock Tower. This time it was with Ranjan Palit, on the first of our many visits to Kashmir. Although Kashmir was ‘home’ for me, I had become something of a stranger to it for at least 14 years. (And perhaps even earlier). As a ‘visitor’, but one with older instincts, I could see that the ‘Kashmir problem’ had spawned an array of very sophisticated gatekeepers, in Srinagar, in Delhi, even across the world. Their sole function seemed to be to subtly corral the newcomer, provide them with the ‘correct’ perspective, and keep them from straying from that straight and narrow. This brief was simple: the people of Kashmir are victims, sort of innocent, squeezed between the Militants’ gun and the Army’s boot. What is called ‘Azadi’ is actually Pakistan in sheep’s clothing. Take that troublesome neighbour out of the calculus, and in Kashmir you will have only happy, born-again Indians. And now, today, all that they want is something called peace, which is available only with India.

In this version, if there was any politics, it ended here. And it’s ‘minders’ came from many disciplines: media, academics, bureaucrats, bankers, intelligence agencies, former soldiers, and from the scores of NGO’s that work on Kashmir. They were probably fuelled by different motivations too: power, fear, insecurity, careers, money, whatever. To me they seemed bound in the main by their desire to preserve the silence – the very silence one wanted to explore – and maintain a status quo of perceptions. Research meant then, learning to tiptoe past the gatekeepers and avoid getting snared in their line. Like most Kashmiris have learnt to do so well.

The books I wanted to read had been read, leaving me free to stare at newspapers from both Delhi and Srinagar, to see past their small everyday lies and their accumulating obfuscations on Kashmir. I had met a few of the “important” people, and then decided I didn’t want to meet more. I had talked – endlessly, over endless cups of tea – with the less important people, with ordinary journalists, students, poets, and performers. I tried – with occasional success – to travel out of the absurd normality of “safe” Srinagar. Most critically, in a time of war, I made friends.

So even if it was not conventional “research”, it was a time used to think of an organising principle, a form, that would allow us to first locate, and then explore those spaces that we believed must yield a story. No script, no narrative, just a sharp eye out for a perch, a position from where we could look. As we began making tentative forays with the camera, that epiphanic moment on Independence Day led us to other quiet places:

A graveyard in a walnut grove, in Kupwara, north Kashmir, to meet with a group of young volunteers, men who had made a personal mission of burying the unclaimed bodies that were regularly “found” in the forests of Kupwara. Their narratives, of blood soaked bodies and headless torsos, were trying so hard to be flat, drained of even the possibility of emotion, that the effort of the restraint seemed to vibrate through the dappled grove.

A Psychiatric Out Patients Department, in a tiny overcrowded consultation room, where a friend made it possible for us to sit in the midst of Babel, with an endless stream of patients and their kin, all literally hammering down the doors for a place at the good doctor’s table. In that din too a practice of heightened watchfulness was beginning to emerge.

At the Mazhar-e-Shouda, the martyr’s graveyard of Srinagar, on a snow-licked morning, a chance encounter with a father come looking for his son’s grave. It’s not just his somewhat distracted grief that we are drawn to, but also the resonances of this place, where lie hundreds of men (and a few women, and several children) and where a terrible part of the history of the last two decades in Kashmir is interred.

Little by little, images began to accumulate.

[flashvideo filename=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7flEQSjozI /]

IV

For a craft that is so intensely collaborative, accounts of documentary films tend to gloss over the influences that arrive (and sometimes collide!) in the process of their making. For me, Jashn-e-Azadi is ‘a film by Sanjay Kak’, but in precisely what ways is strongly shaped by the faculties and strengths – and idiosyncrasies – of its key collaborators. For example, it’s not as if each encounter could not be filmed in other ways as well, in ways that drew out whatever else one might have been looking for: ‘characters’, a gripping ‘narrative’, ‘humanity’, ‘pathos’…

Nudged by my lack of interest in pursuing these other modes, and guided certainly by the instincts that distinguish his vast range of documentary work, Ranjan Palit’s images slowly began to find a tone for the film. (Of course this ‘tone’, and the search for it, remained unspoken between us then. And may have remained so – until he reads this!)

It’s probably only hindsight that makes it possible to articulate it:

Locate places apparently ordinary and everyday, but underwritten with such a density of emotions that their presence, just below the surface (and kept just below the surface) work to destabilize the viewer. And eventually – hopefully – create the space to open out the viewers’ perceptions of a place and its people.

So by looking hard at these zones of silence, we sought to break them. But not by setting off an explosion, to borrow from Kashmir’s troubled present. It did not need to take the form, say, of a detailed investigation into the phenomenon of “fake” surrenders of militants. It need not be a shocking expose, say, of the discovery of anonymous mass graves… Instead the silence we sought to scrutinize was that of the ordinary sigh. And it was to be understood – and contested – by making it intelligible, and quietly. And equally importantly, it was to keep away from the parameters set by the conventional ‘human rights’ discourse, whose narrow ‘humanitarian’ goals often work to completely obscure – if not actually confound – the politics.

Six months later, the tapes began to be read. In the old fashioned way, notes taken by hand, in a long, ruled register. Each sequence of the raw footage, irrespective of length or significance, was reduced to a brief one-line description, lettered in on a yellow post-it. It seemed natural to then arrange these pieces of paper in a corner of the studio wall. In associative clusters, one obviously laid claim to be called Jannat. Another, with many post-its, Shaheed. Predictably, Azadi was another busy group. And then Ghulami…

Heaven. Martyr. Freedom. Servitude.

Finally, Shahid – Witness.

These were the themes that editor Tarun Bharatiya and I were to turn to in the edit.

If working with Ranjan goes back nearly twenty years for me, viewing the material with Tarun began an altogether new relationship. We had never worked together – he lives in distant Shillong. And though he has experience cutting for television, and had done some documentaries, he had never worked on a long film. But he came with an unusual recommendation for a film editor: “he’ll get the politics”. Eventually, Tarun did more than ‘get’ the politics, he actively led its shaping.

As we watched the material coming out of the present of 2004, we realised that much of its resonance came from our own access to the past, the accumulation of the last twenty­ – even fifty – years. But the film we wanted to shape was not going to be a history lesson, a Kashmir for learners. What we wanted was a way of suggesting where the politics of the present was coming from, and how it was sustained and renewed. Memory was very important then. It was also obvious that in the brief thaw of 2004 – what the media-PR machinery called the ‘healing touch’ – while there was a space for filmmakers from Delhi to move around in Kashmir, and shoot a film, a deadly burden of silence still sat upon most Kashmiris. As a way of arriving at any kind of ‘truth’ telling then, speaking to people – the ‘interview’­ – was clearly not a useful device. Who could take the risk of speaking truth to tape, when you don’t know where or how it was going to be used. One could almost hear the questions racing through the minds of people: What do they want to hear from us? What would be the best answer to give?

It was to create a sense of the past, and especially of the past two troubled decades, that we needed to turn to another source. For the 1990s in Kashmir were certainly years of video, and material from those tumultuous years surely did exist. The only question was, who would admit to having kept such material, since its possession was still considered dangerous. (After all, the presence of an archive of the 1990s would suggest a political memory. In the official version, ‘ordinary’ Kashmiris were victims, innocents without that necessary political agency.) 

As it happened, some of this anonymous, underground archive of video did make its way to us, its exact route still mysterious to me. It came out of one box, a random accretion of images, probably of one person, though even that was never clear. Still it helped to open out the past a little, giving us shards of images that Tarun could hold up to the light of the editing process, and make sense of, in much the same way we were trying to do with images of the present. The archive was an anonymous act of self-less generosity, and perhaps it came out of the endless cups of tea that I had drunk, or through friends I had made in the troubled air of Srinagar. And like all gifts that come out of real friendships, I didn’t even know who to turn to, to thank.

[flashvideo filename=http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=_a_oU5aChmY /]

V

Talk about Kashmir in India usually comes flagged as ‘the Kashmir problem’, and with an inevitable corollary, ‘the Pandit issue’. This is an acknowledgement of the fact that the Kashmiri Pandits, a tiny but influential minority of Hindus in the Muslim majority Kashmir valley, were forced to leave in the early 1990s, becoming ‘migrants’ in the rest of India, in nearby Jammu, and in other cities across the country. Because these years were also the time of a massive political mobilization of ‘Hindu sentiment’ in India, the very real and traumatic departure of the Pandits from Kashmir segued perfectly into the paranoid imagination of the Hindu right wing. Almost ever since, in the public discourse about the politics of separatism in Kashmir, any talk about the idea of Azadi is systematically sought to be reduced – even silenced – with the sufferings of the migrant Hindus. In ‘exile’ in India, the Kashmiri Pandits appeared as the vanguard of threatened ‘Hindu’ sentiment, consumed by a visceral hatred of the politics that brought them out of Kashmir, and by implication, the Muslim/Islamic world. (Words like genocide, or holocaust, trip easily up and down this alley).

The year we began shooting, the migration was already a decade old, and from more than 200,000 in 1994, the valley now had less than 7000 Pandits. A generation of young Kashmiri Muslims had grown up who didn’t even know what Kashmiri Pandits were like; all they knew was that they had ‘left’. Yet, like a huge gaping hole (in a warm coat?) the absence of the Pandits continued to be very real in Kashmir. Much of it came in a swaddling of sentiment, because for many of an older generation this was the precious nostalgia of an ideal past, one that had slipped away. Where Pandits and Muslims lived like brothers, before the haalaat – times – turned bad. For others the departure of the minority did engender a sense of loss, and a failure in some ways, of the politics of the early 1990s.

Perhaps because I came from a family of Kashmiri Pandits myself, and was protected by a physical distance from events in the valley, my own reading of the trajectory of the Pandits tended to be both less angry than the migrants, and less ambiguous than that of those who stayed behind, the Muslims. It came from my curiousity about the ways in which this small, well-educated elite had been co-opted in the systems of oppression that ruled Kashmir in the past. And while generalisations based on roles played by a handful of people tend to be communal stereotypes, the fact is that Pandits had been isolated from the Muslim majority on account of the part played by them in the Mughal and Dogra rule of Kashmir. Some of that had spilled even into our present, when the rule of the Dogra Maharaja gave way to the sway of the Indian State in 1947.

By 1990, with a full blown separatist movement afoot in Kashmir, in the midst of a bloody armed rebellion, and its even deadlier putting down, ugly ideas like complicity, and comprador, and collaboration, did begin to haunt the Pandits. In this reading, the isolation of the Pandits didn’t begin in the 1990s. Just like the demand – and desire – for Azadi did not spring up that year either: both had long convoluted histories. In an inversion of the way this story has been conventionally structured in India, in what was a critical decision that shaped the politics of our film, we decided to tell the latter story first: of the sentiment for Azadi. The Pandits were to be represented, but in a more oblique way, as a gaping hole in the structure of Kashmiri society, as an absence. In the way it was edited finally, Tarun and I took some cues from Pyare ‘Hatash’, the poet-in-exile in Jammu, represented in the film only by a faraway voice on the phone line:

Asi 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
 
His poem was to haunt the bones of Jashn-e-Azadi.

VI

In this working out of the place of the Pandit ‘issue’ in the film, in speaking about the sentiment for Azadi, we had a good sense of what our choices were going to lead to, at least from the hard edge of the Hindu right wing. It became more sharply obvious in the closing weeks of the edit, as we started up a simple blog (http://kashmirfilm.wordpress.com/) to tell people what the film was about, and to create a space for it in the wider world. In the watertight consensus on what was going on in Kashmir, guarded within the old terrorism-genocide gridlock, even the suspicion of an alternative or contradictory telling of Kashmir became a cause of great insecurity. Even before the film was finally done, before anyone had seen it, and weeks before the film was first publicly shown, the blog began to be snowed under with hate mail and abuse. This was initially disturbing, but also offered a quick preview of the dark underside of the venomous techniques by which discussions around Kashmir are disciplined in the public domain.

By the time we scheduled the first screening in New Delhi in March 2007, it was all out there: the open threats to disrupt screenings, followed up with picketing, barracking and disruption. Eventually, as I began to travel with the film, it was followed up by securing the intervention of the ‘authorities’, and in Mumbai, by soliciting the attentions of the Police Commissioner on the plea that the film was ‘pro-terrorism’, and would lead to widespread unrest! So stoppages, seizures, investigations, and the attentions of the Special Branch – the film had an early taste of what the contrary point of view may have to deal with in India, especially when it concerns Kashmir.

A few weeks later we arranged a ‘public’ preview in Kashmir. It was an oddly charged air: spurred by a few emails, and the circulation of SMS, we had gathered more than 300 people in the broken down shabbiness of Srinagar’s Tagore Hall. Many of us knew that this screening, done openly, and without the permission – let alone the approval – of the authorities, was a first in the last two decades. It could also be the last. Within minutes of the start of the film, the cathartic potential of the film swept over us, as it galvanised different sections of the audience. Almost from the start, the young crowd from the University began the full throated slogans that literally shook the old rafters of Tagore Hall, and triggered I noticed, by even the most fleeting images of Indian soldiers. (In the interval, the request for some silence within which to appreciate the film was acknowledged by a young man with a hug, and the assurance that the slogans were not directed at me, it was because they were all feeling “too emotional”… The slogans carried on.) One middle-aged woman professor wept as she held my hand, and thanked me with a poem. In the discussion at the end many, many more recognized the intervention of the film, graciously acknowledging that it was made by a Kashmiri Pandit, with all the inflections that this carried in troubled Kashmir. A psychiatrist hugged me and said the film was an act of expiation, that exquisite word. And somewhere in those thanks, one political activist walked up to the microphone, whipped off the elegant black shawl he was wearing, and draped it around my shoulders. And pronounced it the ‘shawl of resistance’.

It’s been more than a year since that cathartic screening in Srinagar and the several early, disturbed screenings elsewhere. I have now screened the film all over India, and in several parts of the world as well. In the long months of the edit, Tarun and I had prepared ourselves for the presumed hostility of the Indian audience. What has taken us aback is the reaction of Indian audiences, schooled as they are by a lifetime of propaganda and nationalist hype around Kashmir. Sitting through the 139 minutes of the film, they seem to receive the arguments of the film with an openness and an intellectual curiousity that continually takes us by surprise. Often, people are puzzled: the film seemed to fly in the face of what the mass media were saying. It seemed to suggest that it was not all quite ‘over’. It seemed to offer a sense of things turbulent underground. Not just in Mumbai, but also in Shillong, in Nashik, in Patna, in Gorakhpur and Bareilly, in Bhubaneswar, Bangalore, and Hyderabad: screenings have been followed by conversations about the practice of democracy, of the very real dangers of the deadly cocktail of nationalism and militarization, of the culpability of the mass media. There have been some very thoughtful questions on the nature of the movement for Azadi in Kashmir, its Islamic character, and the place of arms in political action. Most of all, there has been an exhilarating freedom from the narrow boundaries that the system has tried to impose on our understanding of the Kashmir ‘problem’. The audience for Jashn-e-Azadi had shown us that there is more resistance built into them than we often acknowledge.

This summer, as Kashmir literally exploded with popular resentment, as the protestors ‘took over’ Lal Chowk, and put up their own flags on the Clock Tower, at least one journalist called:

“Your film was right. Things are really boiling underneath…”

Tucked away in my cupboard, protected by drying neem leaves, is a large, black, delicately embroidered shawl. Over the last year, I have imagined that a part of every such screening and conversation has made its way into its folds. This autumn I have tucked Ranjans’ story into the shawl of resistance.