Filming Kashmir: Emerging Documentary Practices (2015)

Filming Kashmir: Emerging Documentary Practices

Max Kramer

The Nation and Its Contested Region: Representations of Kashmir inHindi Cinema and the Documentary Challenge1

After the end of British rule in South Asia 1947, questions concerning thepolitical belonging of the former Himalayan kingdom of Jammu andKashmir keep one of the world’s long lasting geopolitical conflicts boil-ing.2 Since then, India and Pakistan – today both nuclear powers – foughtseveral wars over the region claiming it as integral to their nationalprojects and their related tropes: ‘Secular India’ and ‘Muslim Pakistan’.Representations of the Valley of Kashmir have seen numerous articula-tions of a timeless touristic and spiritual paradise linked to the shakygrounds where terrorists undermine the stability of the Indian nation state– often by crossing the ‘Line of Control’.3 The region has always figuredbig in the Hindi Film culture with crews enjoying their stay in Kashmir,blurring the lines between touristic films and romantic memories of their

1 I am grateful to both the editors, Nadja-Christina Schneider and Carola Richter, fortheir several critical readings of the drafts. I also want to thank Abir Bazaz for longevenings of discussions on everything related to Kashmir, as well as Iffat Fatima,Sanjay Kak and Pankaj Rishi Kumar for their trust and support.

2 The literature on the conflict is legion: e.g. Puri (1993), Schofield (2003) and Bose(1997, 2003, 2007). Recent studies have fruitfully re-visited the often-rehearsedsubjects of geopolitics and postcolonial history by engaging with them from a gen-der perspective (Kazi 2008; Shekhawat 2014) and by investigating the historicalformation of Kashmiri identities (Zutshi 2004; Rai 2004). A good introduction torecent activities within the field of Kashmir Studies offers Chitralekha Zutshi’s arti-cle “Whither Kashmir Studies? A Review” (2011).

3 As a result of the first Indo-Pakistani War (1947–1948), the former state of the lastMaharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Hari Singh, was divided in 1949 along the ceasefire line later renamed ‘Line of Control’, functioning as the de-facto internationalborder (Bose 2003: 2). Today the Muslim majority Valley of Kashmir forms togeth-er with the regions of Jammu and Ladakh the Indian federal state of Jammu andKashmir (J&K).

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sojourn in the valley (Gaur 2010: 196–209). From the early times of theHindi Film, Kashmiri landscapes became particular attractions, a processclosely linked to the introduction of Technicolor film (Gaur 2010: 193).Later, the visual essence of Kashmir was substituted by Switzerland dur-ing a time when the high intensity conflict4 of the 1990s rendered produc-tions inside the valley more difficult (Dwyer 2002).

Scholars working on representations of Kashmir in the Hindi Film havepointed out a set of tropes through which the valley has been depicted.From the 1960s to 1989, the region primarily figured as a playground forIndian middle classes against the backdrop of mountains, lakes and flowerfields. Later, the same landscapes were re-framed through barbed wireevoking the loss of paradise after the onset of the armed conflict (seeKabir 2009). On the other hand, the trope of Kashmiriyat as ‘the valley’ssyncretic culture of traditional tolerance’ was established by the juxtaposi-tion of temples and shrines where the region’s particularity – as somethingnecessary for the federalised Indian state – is redeemed in the notion ofKashmir taking part in the political project of a unitary national visual sec-ularism (Gaur 2010: 42; see also Zutshi 2004: 3). Images of the lakes, inparticular the Dal Lake, and boat journeys thereupon have served to set thestage for many Kashmir based plots to unfold, often used as a frame to in-troduce the region before zooming into shrines, temples, flowers andbarbed wire. In the depictions of honeymoon romance in the films of the1960s, the Kashmiri Other was over-determined by the natural beauty ofthe valley, as flower girls (Kashmir ki Kali, 1964) or boatmen (Jab JabPhul Khile, 1965), while the Indian (read Hindu) hero, embodied by thetwisting Shammi Kapoor, delved into modern enjoyments associated withnew patterns of middle class consumption (Kabir 2009: 37–41). The lakeand shikara5 boat rides have been central motives in Kashmir’s imaginary

4 Following a rigged election in the year 1987, parts of popular discontent in the Val-ley of Kashmir took the form of a militant uprising, which at the time had large sup-port amongst the local population (Bose 2003: 4). During the early 1990s (until ap-proximately 2003), several militant groups, primarily the Hizbul Mujahedeen andthe Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front, were fighting against the Indian military,while renegades (former militants employed by the Indian army) carried out someof the most gruesome human rights violations. A heavy crackdown by the Indianarmy in the early 1990s resulted in the loss of many civilian lives and turned theregion into one of the world’s most densely militarised zones (see Bose 1997; Kazi2008: 83–115).

5 A small Kashmiri boat.

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as a ‘paradise on earth’, the former figuring in the ‘sublime landscapes’ ofcolonial travel literature (Ahmad 2011) and photography (Kabir 2009: 54–75). Their endless reproduction, on postcards and as attractions in Hindifilms, has established the tourist gaze as a ‘way of seeing’ the region (Ur-ry 2002; Gaur 2010: 207).

Tourism is one of the biggest and fastest growing industries of the stateof Jammu and Kashmir.6 The sector has gone through a recent boom dur-ing a time when street protests and responding curfews are daily occur-rences. Tourist routes through the valley and along the picturesque lake-side are bustling with life on days when the highly populated areas of theold town Srinagar, Baramulla and Islamabad (Anantnag) are held understrict curfew. After 1990, most Hindi films on the region have turned tothe depiction of terrorist threat within the ‘double vision’ (Kabir 2009) ofa lost paradise. Recently, however, conflict torn connections7 between theHindi film industry and the tourist image of the valley have been renewed,as can be seen by major Hindi Film productions such as Yash Raj’s JabTak Hai Jaan (2012), starring Shahrukh Khan and featuring the popularsong “Jiya Re”. In “Jiya Re”, we see Shahrukh Khan and Anushka Sharmaengaged in various sporting activities (rafting, running over green slopes,crossing a river on a robe, driving military jeeps) and later a dancing sceneon the lake in an open shikhara accompanied by a large group of boatmenwearing Kashmiri phiran (a winter cloth used here in summer to marktheir ‘Kashmiriness’). The boatmen have their boats full of flowers andimitate the Punjabi-style dance put across by the happy-go-lucky heroineArika (Sharma) dancing in the centre of the image.8 The lyrics sung to the

6 The Indian Ministry of Tourism offers an account of recent developments in thesector, online available at http://tourism.gov.in/writereaddata/CMSPagePicture/file/marketresearch/Tentavely%20Identified%20circuit%20for%20various%20states/new/Jammu.pdf.

7 Since the 1960s, the travel agency of Nazir Bakshi has facilitated most Hindi Filmson Kashmir. In a personal interview (in Srinagar, May 20, 2014), Bakshi mentionedthe importance of a film like Jab Tak Hai Jaan to reinsert the tourist perspective onthe valley. He stated that the film had a substantial impact on the touristic climateof the valley, particularly when two of the biggest star persona of the industry(Khan and Chopra) came to shoot and give positive feedbacks in their press inter-views. Chopra, who shot a large number of films in the valley, also mentioned thegenerous support by the local tourist department (Gaur 2010: 204), which accordingto Bakshi mostly facilitated licenses and spaces to shoot and stay.

8 She happens to be a documentary filmmaker in the story of the film.


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images on the lake sum up individual freedom and enjoyment: “pinjre seuṛā; dil kā śikrā; khudī se maine iśq kiyā re; jiyā jiyā re” (“the hawk ofmy heart has flown from its cage, I loved myself and embraced life”)while the Kashmiri ‘public’ of the sequence is happily tuning into theheroine’s enjoyment of the place.

In what follows, I look into the ways independent9 documentary film-makers attempt to use the boat journey as a formal element through whichthe lake and the river become places of memory, loss and political asser-tion of Kashmiri subjectivities. I connect this to a discussion of a widerpolitical aesthetic practice10 the filmmakers engage in, particularly theconcern for the proliferation of platforms where the films can be shownand discussed. I argue that through an inversion of the tourists gaze, thefour filmmakers introduced here, Iffat Fatima, Sanjay Kak, Tarun Bhartiyaand Pankaj Rishi Kumar, challenge central tropes of Indian nationalismand tourist normalcy by reinserting Kashmiri subjectivities into the over-exposed landscapes of the valley. This is an extension of a line of thoughtput forward in Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s book Territory of Desire (2009),where she analyses a range of artists’ attempts to ‘undo’ the ‘fetish of par-adise’ through psychoanalytically informed readings of handicrafts, paint-ings, poetry and film. In a discussion of Abir Bazaz’ and Meenu Gaur’sfilm Paradise on a River of Hell (2001), Kabir stresses that “Bazaz’s at-tempted reinsertion of the Kashmiri into the landscape is tied to memorywork that cannot be disentangled from its production and perpetuation bythe camera” (Kabir 2009: 53). In the next section, the crisis of ‘paradise’after the onset of the armed conflict will be contrasted with a ‘normalis-ing’ tourist gaze supported by government and tourist agencies duringtimes of intense political contestations.

9 The filmmakers I am conversing with often value their ‘independence’ conceivedas a range of political-aesthetic freedom that involves not only the films but alsotheir modes of distribution, production and reception. In the wider networks of ‘in-dependent filmmakers’, a rather old opposition between ‘alternative’ and ‘main-stream’ is sometimes articulated. This opposition carries a rather problematic de-partmentalisation of the suspected interests of the spectators. It may also suggestan empirically ungrounded normative understanding of a film’s political effect orpotential.

10 My understanding of practices as part of ‘political aesthetics’ follows the concep-tualisations of Jaques Rancière (2013) extended by sociological questions directedat ‘articulations’ on various levels (representation, production, distribution and re-ception) and ‘figurations’ (as more meta level considerations, see Hepp 2013).

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Tourism in Times of the ‘Kashmiri Intifada’ and the Rhetoric of Normalcy

The explosion of a shikara on postcard like Dal Lake and the scene wherea group of terrorists enter a houseboat right at the beginning of the box of-fice hit Mission Kashmir (2000) had given a serious blow to the influx oftourists to the valley as it was directed right at the heart of the paradisiacimagination.11 After many years of Kashmir as a terrorist haven, images of“Jiya Re” suggest a return to touristic ‘normalcy’ without any substantialchange in the political scenario. In fact, the term ‘normalcy’ has oftenbeen used by non-separatist politicians (and centralist articulations) to sig-nal some hope for a time without regular eruptions of violence and somedegree of developmental progress (Staniland 2013; Bhatnagar, Lanham &Bidish 2009; Panjabi 2009).12 Its usage is bound up with a constant defer-ral to initiate political change, e.g. to cancel the draconic Public Safety Actand Armed Forces Special Powers Act,13 reduce the armed forces and en-ter into a meaningful conversation with the inhabitants of the valley. Con-trary to this political rhetoric, the valley has recently – after a land rightsissue in the year 200814 – gone through a major socio-political transforma-tion. The militant-renegade-military conflict has given way to new formsof popular contestation known under the term ‘The Kashmiri Intifada’(2008–2014). This Intifada, condensed in the image of the stone pelting

11 This is again the observation of veteran tourist agent Nazir Bakshir (see FN 7) thatcan be backed up by a recent research paper (Sharma, Sharma & Waris 2012) ac-cording to which the numbers of non-yatra (non pilgrimage) domestic tourists tothe valley have dropped almost half from 1999 to the year 2000 only recoveringafter the year 2005.

12 In a recent article on the relation between the Kashmir Conflict and tourism, Shali-ni Panjabi points out a number of state measures – advertisement, financial assis-tance, clearance of tourist places from military presence – to boost the tourist sec-tor in “the concomitant effort to ‘normalize’ the situation” (Panjabi 2009: 228).

13 While the Public Safety Act (PSA) enables authorities to detain without formalcharges, the Armed Forces Special Authority Act gives the armed forces near im-punity during operations in “disturbed areas”.

14 The government of J&K wanted to transfer forestland to the Shri Amarnath ShrineBoard, the organising body of the pilgrimage to the holy cave of Amarnath, aname for the Hindu-god Shiva. The pilgrimage has in the last years rapidly in-creased in numbers. Many Kashmiris perceived the potential construction of addi-tional pilgrim shelters on forestland as a form of Indian centralist intervention.This led to massive demonstrations against the transfer, which in turn triggereddemonstration in Jammu in its favour (Chowdhary 2009).


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youth of the valley, upholds strong imaginary ties to Palestine, a countrythat shares for many young Kashmiris a similar history of occupation andresistance.

While the commercial Hindi Film is returning with a large number ofproductions to the valley as an ‘invited guest’,15 independent documentaryand feature filmmakers have to struggle with all kinds of immobilities. Be-ing stopped and interrogated by the army and hiding their data out of fearthat they may be confiscated and destroyed are some examples of howtheir movements get restricted by the military presence in Kashmir. Incontrast, the Dal Lake has so often been depicted that the filmmakerAamir Bashir remarked during a post-screening discussion of his filmHarud (2012), “If you want to avoid trouble while filming in Kashmir,just shoot the lake” (FD Open Zone, May 31, 2013), evoking that the mili-tary surveillance of filmmakers’ movements in the valley is softenedthrough the tourists gaze, the official way outsiders are invited to relate tothe valley.

Bashir’s work Harud is one of three recent realist films16 blended withdocumentary aesthetics. The blurring of genres (e.g. realist documentaryand realist drama) and modalities (e.g. fictional and factual) have alreadybeen discussed in the field of documentary film studies before the digitalshift took place (see Nichols 1994). Today the cheap digital equipment hasgiven these formal possibilities a new reality, strengthening amongst Indi-an documentary filmmakers a tendency towards stylistic experimenta-tions17 (Rajagopal & Vohra 2012: 10). On the level of circulation, digitaltechnologies furthered practices of copying and ‘mixing’ that challengeconventional notions of intellectual property and profit realisation (Liang2003). Pirated film circulation converges with media practices “whichmay exceed the legal, normative, and even ethical frameworks legitimatedby a critically oriented public sphere” (Vasudevan 2010: 412). Regardingthe production, non-linear editing software and high quality DSLR cam-

15 ‘Invited’ has to be understood only from the perspective of some (although power-ful) authorities and interest groups, in particular tourism. There have been a num-ber of local demonstrations against commercial Hindi Film productions in the val-ley during the last years (see for example Fayyaz 2013).

16 The others being Musa Syeed’s The Valley of Saints (2013) and Tariq Tapa’s ZeroBridge (2011).

17 Although there is a trend towards new formal experimentations within the Indiandocumentary, limits continue to be set by the guiding principles of many fundinginstitutions (Rajagopal & Vohra 2012: 10).

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eras potentially make documentary film a media of mass participation,while on the side of screening practices light weighted digital projectorscan turn street corners into places of collective reception and debate.18 Inthe following section, I will discuss some features of the media figurations(Hepp 2013) within which a digital documentary wave on Kashmiremerged starting from the year 2001.

A New Wave of Digital Documentary Films on Kashmir

Although a few earlier attempts have been made to produce films in Kash-miri language that deal with Kashmiri subjects19, recent years have led toan unprecedented rise of filmmaking by Kashmiris who either were bornin the valley or belong to one of its diaspora/exile communities. Thesefilmmakers from Kashmir explore issues that range from gender, humanrights abuse, memory, loss, azaadi (political self-determination20), secu-larism to ‘the everyday’ as their films evoke a time-space of conflict, po-litical assertion and potential reconciliation. Before the year 2001, filmsset in Kashmir or using a particular imagination of Kashmir as an attrac-tion usually came out of India’s film industries based in Bombay/Mumbaiand Chennai or, in the case of documentaries, the Films Division of theIndian Ministry of Information. Many of the post-2001 documentary filmsattempt to challenge these hitherto dominant frames by articulatingmarkedly ‘Kashmiri’ experiences and political subjectivities. These filmsare situated at the juncture of two larger trends: the decline of armed war-fare in the early 2000s, which made the valley more easily accessible for

18 To give just two Indian examples for both of these processes: the Video Republicin Orissa is a participatory political video project run by indigenous groups, whileJan Cinema (‘peoples cinema’), a filmgroup based in the north Indian city Mathu-ra, is turning slum walls into screens for ‘world cinema’ (see https://www.facebook.com/Video.Republic/info?tab=page_info, last accessed November 27, 2014).

19 These were Prabhat Mukherjee’s Kashmiri language film Shayar-e-KashmirMahjoor (Mahjoor the Poet of Kashmir, 1972) and Pran Kishore’s TV-serial GulGulshan Gulfam, 1987 (see Gaur 2010: 132–144).

20 All terms used to translate azaadi are contested. The range is between highly con-tested terms such as ‘independence’ and ‘alienation from India’ to rather decon-tested ones such as ‘freedom’ and ‘self-determination’. The last two are both use-ful translations that retain some degree of the situational flexibility of a demandfor azaadi as it is performed as a political assertion.


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filmmaking, and the emergence of new institutions that fund and distributedocumentary films linked to the advancements of digital technologies.21

The independent filmmakers introduced in this article all live and workoutside the Valley of Kashmir in Delhi and Bombay/Mumbai where thereis more freedom22 to practice and closer access to the networks of docu-mentary filmmaking. Their work is marked by a high degree of mobilitythat involves travelling with their films discussing them with varying audi-ences and promoting them within translocal and transnational networks.The digital shift pertaining not only to the production but also to the regu-lation and circulation of documentary films furthered a process of decen-tralisation of the cinematic public sphere disregarding the ideological“checkpoints” nation states have put up (Ezra & Rowden 2006: 6). Someof these films, although still few compared to the total output of documen-tary films on Kashmir since 2001, include formal experiments and newpatterns of circulation and production build on the rise of new civil societyfilm festivals, NGO funding and circulation structures within particularfields such as human rights, woman rights, academic and educational in-stitutions. In this context, the Delhi based government-funded Public Ser-vice Broadcasting Trust (PSBT) needs special mention for promotingmany young Kashmiri filmmakers.23

21 Editing films on laptops with easy to handle non-linear editing software, excellentvisuals provided by cheap digital cameras and the often dwarfed crew sizes turnedfilmmaking into a practice available for everybody who can acquire the few neces-sary technical skills and instruments, thus furthering the cause of more indepen-dent modes of film production (see Mollick 2006; Naficy 2001).

22 Today, the near absence of independent feature and documentary filmmaking in-side the Valley of Kashmir depends largely on the lack of funders other than theTourist Board of J&K and the state TV Channel Doordarshan. Among filmmakersbased inside Kashmir, the political instability creates anxieties ranging from thelack of support through Kashmiri networks and the threat of cinema phobic funda-mentalist groups to state censorship under the Public Safety Act (Conversation,Srinagar, April 20, 2014, with Kashmir based filmmaker and theatre director Ar-shid Musthaq who directed the first Kashmiri language feature since Shayar-e-Kashmir Mahjoor [1972, see FN 19] called Akh Daleel Lolich [A Love Story,2006] with a local theatre group).

23 To my knowledge, Bilal Jan is currently the only documentary filmmaker living inthe valley and working independently on controversial political subjects. He re-cently directed a much debated film on a mass rape conducted by the Indian Armyin the Kashmiri village of Konan Poshpura in 1991 (Ocean of Tears, 2012, pro-duced by PSBT).

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All of these developments should not conceal the difficulties to sustaina professional career as an independent documentary filmmaker in Indiaand beyond, the fact that the mobilities of their practice are accompaniedby anxieties linked to the financial insecurities of the field. Furthermore,these shifts in the production and circulation have not led to an end ofstate and self-censorship in India. Multiple forms of censorship are verymuch ‘in place’ when it comes to a sensible region like Kashmir, althoughstrategies to circulate films ‘around the state’ have become widely avail-able. As regards the representation of Kashmir, the new wave of indepen-dent documentaries does not avoid the ubiquitous images of Kashmir’stourist attractions that emerged from the commercial Hindi Film. In fact,there is hardly a documentary on Kashmir that does not use the boat jour-ney as a formal element or a shot of Kashmiri landscapes through barbedwire. However, as I said above, these lenses have also been innovativelyused to render power relations visible that lay hidden behind discourses oftourist normalcy and terrorist threat. I shall now begin the discussion withPankaj Rishi Kumar’s film Pather Chujeari (The Play Is On, 2001), whichhelps us to zoom into depictions of the nation and its claimed region byinverting a central-statist eye through the metaphor of the boat journey.

Pather Chujaeri: The Boat Journey as a Challenge to the Logic of Centreand Region

Pankaj Rishi Kumar graduated from the Film and Television Institute,Pune, India, in 1992 and initially worked as an editor for television andfeature films in Bombay. He shifted to the documentary after his first self-directed film Kumar Talkies (1999), based on a cinema hall in a smalltown in northern India that used to be owned by his father. The filmPather Chujeari follows groups of bhand24 artists finding themselvesmarginalised under “paternalistic and nationalistic cultural policies”25. In astatement given to the Arsenal cinema in Berlin, Kumar recounts whatbrought him to make this film:

“How does art survive in a regime of fear? This question began to preoccupyme after I first visited Kashmir in 1999, to photograph the villages on the In-

24 Bhand pather is a form of Kashmiri folk theatre.25 Quoted from a short film description which is available on the Arsenal website

(Arsenal n.d.).


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dia-Pakistan border during the mindless Kargil war. On my way back, Istopped in Wathora and Akingam to meet with two groups of Bhands, per-formers of the traditional Kashmiri theatre, the Pather.”26

Together with the Kashmiri filmmaker Ajay Raina, he is the convener ofthe travelling film festival “Kashmir before Our Eyes”27 that shows arange of (mostly documentary) films dealing with Kashmir from variousperspectives, touching upon issues of azaadi, exile, gender and national-ism(s).

As an Indian filmmaker coming to Kashmir from the ‘outside’, his ver-sion of the boat journey scene at the very beginning of his film can be re-garded as a reflexive entry of an imaginary Indian spectator into the con-flict: a shikara is rowing on Janpath, one of the main roads in New Delhi,as a regional tableau on the Indian Republic Day Parade of the year 2001.The events commentator says, “when we think of Kashmir, we think oftourism.” Before the panel came floating over the central axis of New Del-hi’s colonial layout, we saw images of the marching Indo-Tibetan BorderPolice. The commentator speaks about how many medals “these sturdyand brave soldiers” have earned fighting “at the northern border and incounter-insurgency operations in Kashmir.” These conflicting ways ofstaging the nation28 and its claimed regions are preceded by a scene wherethe camera takes up the same vector and velocity of the national panels inJanpath, thus evoking some kind of continuity. It floats over polluted wa-ter with sunken shikaras interspersed by the texture of water-flowers andtheir twisted roots.

An important challenge put forward by the filmmakers in discussionthat gets in turn contested by violent public performances from politicalgroups of the Hindu right is the Indian national trope of ‘unity in differ-

26 A PDF document with the full statement can be found in a provisional online filmcatalogue published by Arsenal cinema and film archive in Berlin. It can be down-loaded at http://www.arsenal-berlin.de/berlinale-forum/archiv/katalogblaetter/category/video-4.html.

27 The festival was held in 2013 in a number of large Indian cities.28 In her study on the Indian Republican Day Parades, Srirupa Roy (2007: 66–104)

speaks of “stating the nation” by which she refers to how the images of the “statein action” take centre position instead of a horizontally understood social bond(e.g. of the culturally homogenous nation). For her, it is more a question of verticalintegrity, the power of the state to safeguard national sovereignty while the region-al panels stand in as cultural resources through which the state balances its order-ing logic (suggesting ‘unity in difference’ as a formal principle).

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ence’. The Republic Day Parade not only stages the regions in the centrebut extends this logic of centralisation and dispersal by simultaneouslystaging these parades in the centre and the regions (Roy 2007: 72). It alsosuggests an understanding that sees the interconnectedness between thetourist image of the valley and the nation state’s interest in representingthe region through a tourist gaze (Roy 2007: 90).29 Later in the film thereis a repetition of the parade scene: the regional Republic Day Parade inKashmir is staged in front of army men and specially invited guests in astadium securely away from a wider public audience. Kumar’s cameracaptures a number of other cameras, which stand in a straight line whiledirecting the same gaze at the spectacle. As they are filmed from the side,their features merge into what seems to be a multi-facetted technologicalmonster, hence evoking a difference to the little digital camera with whichKumar was shooting his film. The next section deals with another filmtaking a ‘view from the side’ by discussing the way conflict temporalitiesare weaved into the boat journey in Sanjay Kak’s film Jashn-e-Azadi(2007), edited by Tarun Bhartiya.

An Alternative Archive of the Conflict – Martyrs and Witnesses

Sanjay Kak is a self-taught filmmaker who studied sociology and eco-nomics at the University of Delhi. He belongs to a generation of filmmak-ers whose practice and understanding of politics was strongly shaped bythe opposition to Indira Gandhi’s emergency regime that lasted for 21months from June 1975 until March 1977. His own journey as a markedlypolitical filmmaker began with the film One Weapon (1997), which can beunderstood as an appraisal of representative democracy, despite its flaws.He followed this up with three films, often labelled now the “Trilogy onIndian Democracy”. These films enter the antagonistic spaces of social

29 Roy stresses the importance of culture as a state resource to articulate the nationthrough its particularities where Kashmir among the other Indian conflict zones inPunjab and the north eastern states of Assam and Manipur becomes articulated asa cultural resource in the empty time of the nation: “[…] spaces otherwise config-ured in the national imagination as areas of danger and sedition filled with terroristand militants […] are on display as desirable zones of carefree cultural expression.The defining attribute of culture in this vision is its atemporality and its disconnec-tion from social and political processes of change and contestation” (Roy 2007:90).


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movements: Words on Water (2002) on the protest against the construc-tion of the Narmada dams; Jashn-e-Azadi (2007) on the struggle for self-determination in Kashmir; and Red Ant Dream (2013) on the struggle andculture of the tribal communist groups and protesters in Punjab carryingon the memory of the revolutionary Bhagat Singh. Although born a Kash-miri Pandit, his political intervention into Kashmir ‘as a Kashmiri’ fol-lowed as a consequence of the aftermath of the December 13, 2001 attackon India’s parliament, where he became involved in the defence of one ofthe prime accused, the Delhi University teacher S. A. R. Geelani, both as atranslator of a vital piece of evidence and as a member of the defensecommittee set up to acquit Geelani.30 In the last years, Kak made twofilms together with Tarun Bhartiya as an editor (Red Ant Dream andJashn-e-Azadi).

In addition to his extensive editing work, the Shillong31-based Hindipoet and filmmaker Tarun Bhartiya has directed two documentary films:When the Hens Crow (2013) and Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (2010).Bhartiya graduated from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, in Mass Communi-cation32 in the year 1995 and first worked for news television as an editorand producer. Recently, he won the National Film Award in editing for hiswork In Camera (2009) and collaborated with documentary filmmakersincluding Ranjan Palit and Vasudha Joshi. Both Bhartiya and Kak areclosely linked to the film festival movement in the north Indian cityGorakhpur, as I shall discuss further below.

The film Jashn-e-Azadi (“This Is How We Celebrate Our Freedom”,2007) was partly funded by Kak himself after receiving prize money for aprevious film and through a finishing fund of the International Documen-tary Film Festival Amsterdam. This helped to provide Kak with the econo-mic freedom to take several years for the making of the film (2003–2007),doing extensive research in the Valley of Kashmir. Jashn-e-Azadi wasscreened and discussed throughout the past years of the ‘Kashmiri Intifa-da’ and gained a considerable momentum, provoking numerous articles,

30 Conversation with Kak, New Delhi, February 15, 2013.31 Shillong is the capital of the North East Indian state Meghalaya.32 The A. J. K. Mass Communication Research Centre at the Jamia Millia Islamia

University, New Delhi, is one of the most influential institutions in contemporaryIndian documentary filmmaking. It was founded in 1982 by Anwar Jamal Kidwaiwith the support of documentary veteran James Beveridge, the joint founder JohnGriersons National Film Commission in Canada (see Schneider 2013: 95, FN 7).

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summoning flash mobs that sometimes physically attacked the filmmaker.Kak traveled with it through the global festival circuit and spoke as an ex-pert on Kashmir on “Democracy Now!”33 and in numerous universities inthe United States. His widely distributed publication of the book Until MyFreedom Has Come (Penguin India) with articulations of young Kash-miris and Kashmir scholars has given another pull to a public visibility ofthe ‘Intifada’ of 2010. Kak and Bhartiya are both engaged in a new civilsociety festival movement which started in the north Indian town ofGorakhpur in the year 2004 and thickened into a larger political public,where various social movements become articulated in a program linkingManipur, Orissa (since 2011 Odisha) and Jharkhand with Kashmir, ar-guably creating common mobilising patterns of issues34 and affects35. Thenon-metropolitan venues of the Gorakhpur Film Festival Movement haveemerged through the intersection of digital technologies (projectors, lap-tops and hard discs) and new connectivities established between the mo-bile central unit called ‘The Group’, members of local film-societies andindependent filmmakers. Tarun Bhartiya points out the importance of theGFM screening spaces for his practice in an interview with ‘The Group’:

“It is easy to make a political film, but to make films in a political way is dif-ficult. Where does the money for the film come from? How should the filmsbe shown? These are all political questions. It is also very important to showfilms in a democratic way” (Bhartiya and Kak in conversation with Joshi2014: 11; translation and italics, M. K).

In the program of the 8th Gorakhpur Film Festival in March 2013, Bhar-tiya gave an introductory presentation on the politics of the documentaryform followed by a lively discussion with the audience. All these ways offraming and discussing are understood by Kak and Bhartiya not as bring-ing visual literacy to ‘the audience’ but rather as a constant joint move-ment towards collective sense-making, something explorative.

33 “Democracy Now!” is an independently syndicated news and analysis programlinked to a large number of North American TV channels and radio stations.

34 The convener of the GMF, Sanjay Joshi, subsumes the thematic fields under “thethree J’s: jangal [forest], jal [water], jameen [land]” (Joshi 2014: 7).

35 For example, slogans of azaadi, highly emotive images of land-rights protests inOrissa and the Anti-AFSPA movement in Manipur. I extend here an argument ofRahul Mukkherjee (2012) made in the context of indigenous filmmakers and theirtranslocal publics.


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The film evokes human loss and political assertion through highlyevocative editing strategies including the usage of various kinds ofarchives: news footage, poetry, recurring photographs of disappeared ormartyred men, and the footage of the ‘unknown cameraman’36. Thesearchives mediate temporal layers in the filmic textures, perhaps best ex-pressed by the voiceover mulling over two meanings of the Arabic wordshahid: martyr and witness.37 This is achieved for example by digitallymarking some of the found footage with TV lines, evoking the absence ofthese minor images at the time of high intensity conflict while simultane-ously suggesting a mediated memory.38 I will describe the politics of thefilm’s form through the boat journey scene at the films beginning beforethe title appears.

The camera floats on a boat over winter’s Dal Lake’s placid surface.Distorted, mirrored and upside down images of objects (a boggle, a crowstanding on a stick in the mirror of the lake) and patterns of bushes andtrees pass us by while through double exposure the textures are intercededby images of street protests and violence. These elements are reiterated ina circular structure throughout the more than two hours of the films lengthevoking the continuation of the struggle for independence and the sacri-fices which have come with it. Through the double exposure of archivematerial and original footage, two temporalities, the past of the ‘unknowncameraman’ and the present journey on the shikara, are intertwined into ametonymical presence. In one of these, there are at least several ‘expo-sures’ in a complex texture of smoke, demonstrators and police. In be-tween them, a photo journalist is moving seemingly in reverse until he dis-

36 Kak was inquiring for footage material of the high intensity conflict years between1989 and 1995. One day a box with dusted footage was “put in front of thedoorstep of the place I was staying without any notice to whom it belongs” (Kakin a personal interview, October 9, 2013). Kak describes the footage as belongingto someone who shot for both, the Mujahedeen and the Indian state. Tarun Bhar-tiya suggested an editing strategy to cut of the affective climax of the archival ma-terial, which effectively sets the film apart from many documentaries on Kashmir,translating the effects of atrocity videos into their own textures.

37 Jeebesh Bagchi, media practitioner and member of the Raqs Media Collective,elaborated in one review on the shahid as the ‘conceptual axis’ around which thefilm is build. He engages in a philosophical discussion employing Giorgio Agam-ben’s commentary on concentration camp testimonies and the archive (Bhagchi2007).

38 Conversation with Kak and Bhartiya, New Delhi, April 15, 2013.

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appears into the forward marching group of protesters. I see this last imageas a somewhat fitting depiction of Kak’s political subjectivity as he pos-itions himself reflexively neither ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’ the movement butrather – as the title of the film This Is How We Celebrate Freedom suggest– at the open space of an (im-)possible ‘we’ that gets constantly reflectedand reassessed through the mulling39 voice of his commentary.

“My Yusuf, I Call Out, Come”: Dream Work and Gendered Resistance

Iffat Fatima was born and grew up in the Valley of Kashmir. In the year1989 when the armed uprising began, she moved to Delhi for higher edu-cation and completed her Master’s degree in Mass Communication atJamia Millia Islamia in 1990. Since then, she has been working as an inde-pendent documentary filmmaker and installation artists. Her recent workin Kashmir is closely linked to a former documentary film she made onthe Sri Lanka conflict called Lanka: The Other Side of War and Peace(2005). In this film, she is driving up the highway A9 that used to beclosed during the high intensity conflict between the Tamil north andSinghalese south of Sri Lanka. On the road, she encountered people whoselives have been afflicted by disappearances. Although she regularly kepttrack of the events in the valley by visiting her relatives, it is through theprevious film and the changed socio-political setting in the mid 2000s thatshe decided to undertake a project on disappearances in Kashmir.40

The mothers and wives of the Association of the Parents of Disap-peared People (APDP)41 holding pictures of their disappeared family

39 The film was attacked for ‘seducing’ people into the movement represented, but Irather agree with the filmmaker Surabhi Sharma who pointed out in a discussionof Kak’s films at the “Persistance / Resistance” film festival in Delhi (February2014) that the mulling quality of his voice is challenging such an understanding. Infact, the often violent reactions to his films seem to point exactly into the oppositedirection, the film eventually shaking Indian audiences to such an extent that theysometimes are not willing to watch it to the end.

40 Conversation with Fatima, New Delhi, February 16, 2013.41 The APDP, headed by Parveena Ahangar, is an organisation which strives for

making the army accountable for human rights violations and enforced disappear-ances of the last 20 years committed under the draconic Armed Forces SpecialPowers Act (AFSPA). The AFSPA gives impunity to the operations of armedforces.


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members have in recent years become some of the conflict’s more visibleimages. In a number of documentaries, they have been framed as depictingthe ‘human side’ of the conflict, displaying the sorrows of the waitingwomen, while sometimes linking them up in a somewhat departmentalisedway to the suffering of other groups, in particular Pandit and Sikh women.Fatima’s film On a Trail of Vanished Blood (2012) takes a rather differentroute by an explicit political positioning, formal experimentation and along-term production. The film was funded by the Norwegian womanrights’ organisation Fokus as part of a long-term project supporting theAPDP. While Fokus did not pressurise the filmmaker to make anychanges in the film, questions were raised why she neither develops acharacter-driven narrative nor positions herself more reflexively in thefilms textures. Fatima holds that this would be detrimental to both the po-litical nature of the Kashmir conflict and the assertive political articula-tions of gendered resistance which have hitherto been rarely expressedoutside the discourse of human rights abuse with a focus on passive lossand sufferings inflicted by the ongoing conflict. The film has taken morethan five years in the making. In the first two years of the project, Fatimadid not shoot much of footage because of a crisis the APDP was undergo-ing at that time. The money of Fokus was first used to stabilise the institu-tional set-up and later extended for three more years. The film has notbeen released so far, but a provisional version (2012) was screened threetimes, once in Norway and twice in India where it received one ratherheated discussion provoking the filmmaker to rethink its modes of ad-dress. These changes include the beginning scenes of the film wheregroups of young men and women throw stones and perform a ragḍaaround a blazing fire in the night. In Kashmir, a ragḍa has become a newtechnology of resistance, practiced since the year 2008: a group standingin a circle and stamping their feet on the ground, often burning some ob-ject in the middle. This may be an Indian flag or a figure (straw men) of apopular Indian politician. Although in the scene the object between thestamping feed is not clear, the intensity of the rioting was later regardedby Fatima as a potential threat to Indian spectators’ engagement with thepolitics of the film.

Approximately in the middle of the film, Parveena Ahangar addresses amystic Yusuf in a song performed while she leads the members of theAPDP sitting in protest opposite of the Press Colony in Srinagar, as theydo on the 10th of every month since several years. Parveena Ahangar singsin Kashmiri: “My Yusuf I call out, come … you are still young, do not go

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… my bridegroom, do not yet go, your mother cries out, do not go.” Whilein Jashn-e-Azadi the notion of the shahid has been the key to move be-tween alternative temporalities of the conflict, in Fatima’s film the songabout Yusuf may serve as a key to embed the filmic story in the poetic ar-ticulations emerging from the life-worlds of the APDP members.42 Whilethe oldest sources of this narrative are found in the Abrahamic revelations,the closer influence here is the 15th century Persian poet Jami, who elabo-rated on the – sometimes mystically interpreted – longing of Zulaikha, thedaughter of Taimus, King of Mauretania, for the moonfaced boy Yusuf.Although the latest relevant literary version may be its 18th century Kash-miri poetic rendition of Mahmud Ghami, these lines also circulate withinan oral tradition amongst the woman of the APDP – a powerful poetic re-source to engage with loss and injustice. In Yusuf stories, dreams are ofparticular importance. In the Qur’an, Yusuf is a master of dream interpre-tation, while in Ghami’s rendition Zulaikha sees Yusuf in her dreamwhich starts her endless longing for the beautiful boy.43 The notion ofwaiting and remembering are framed by Fatima through the formal experi-mentations of two boat journeys as dream-sequences: one of ParveenaAhangar and the other of Shameema Banu on the Dal Lake and its back-waters.

We see the sparkling blue of the Dal Lake with numerous colourfulshikaras against the mountains of the valley in the background like wewould see it on a postcard. Parveena remembers that her son used to swimhere on Sundays. While the shikara is approaching the touristic BoulevardRoad, Parveena says, “Look at this jamboree of outsiders, paradise Kash-mir has been made hell for us, outsiders come here and enjoy it.” Now wesee Parveena sitting somewhat majestically under the canopy of an elabo-rate shikara while she is passing tourists on other boats. We see barbedwire flanking the waterside. Behind a yellow texture of a canopy, a groupof armed soldiers on another shikara emerges, visibly enjoying the ride.

42 Conversation with Fatima, April 14, 2014.43 Fatima mentioned in the above (FN 40) mentioned conversation the circulation of

the Yusuf tale among the women of the APDP. The Qur’anic version contains theintense waiting of Yusufs father Jacob, whose favourite son was taken by his envi-ous brothers and thrown into a well. Jacob, however, does not give up hope easilyto see his son again. A Kashmiri transcription and Latin translation of the Ghamitext, Mahmûd Gâmî's Jûsuf Zulaikhâ: romantisches Gedicht in Kashmîrî-Spracheby Karl Friedrich Burkhard (1885), is available online at http://menadoc.biblio-thek.uni-halle.de/dmg/periodical/titleinfo/62848..


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The scene ends with two birds the camera catches in its frame. A hawk isseen through the thickets and a kingfisher is sitting motionlessly on astick, perhaps summing up a placid natural setting with the military pres-ence. While the scene continuously adds up distance between the prettyscenery at its beginning and the natural setting – somewhat cleared of themilitary occupation of the lake – I suggest that the montage of the boatjourney is evoking a markedly dream-like quality, further elaborated byFatima in the sequence of Shameema Bano.

Shameema is steering her boat through the backwaters of the quarterswhere she lives as a member of the Hanji community dwelling in the lakesof Srinagar. She speaks about the memory of her disappeared husbandwho came to her in a dream saying, “I am Shabir”; she replied, “You can-not be Shabir, I have put a mark on him […] we have to do a DNA test.”The camera is nervously touching the dark surface of the lake and jolting –for not more then two seconds – over a sparrow which flips out of the leftmargin of the frame. Next we see a group of men sitting in boats and theclose-up of one of them smoking quietly his water pipe while a little birdmagically lands on his right shoulder. Now the camera zooms fast into awet field while becoming out of focus before we see Shameema again stir-ring her boat, saying, “Some fleeting moments […] I feel he is alive.”

Iffat Fatima stresses that her film attempts to reclaim the spaces takenaway from the Kashmiris by the physical and imaginary occupation of theregion. Commenting on what motivated her to include the boat scene ofParveena Ahangar into her film, she pointed to a documentary by Zul Vel-lani called Aatish-e-Chinar (1998)

“which begins with this man sitting relaxed on the Dal Lake just rowing and[he] says something like: ‘Oh what a wonderful thing this is, this great Kash-miri Culture!’ Sitting on the boat as if he’s in complete control, as if he’s themaharaja there, that’s why I put Parveena in that style” (Fatima in conversa-tion, New Delhi, April 4, 2014).

Fatima attempts to show how these women exercise their agencies bymoving through the militarised spaces of the valley, suffusing them withmemories and dreams of loss and assertion. Shameema Bano’s boat jour-ney challenges the countless representations of the stereotypical maleHanji, always ready to serve Indian tourist as they enjoy their toursthrough the valley like in the song “Jiya Re”. The mentioning of the DNA-test in a dreamlike sequence marked by its ruptured editing is a shockingtestament how the legal framework the APDP must operate within is per-vading the women’s lives, eating its way into their dreams.

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Conclusion

By discussing three recent films, Pather Chujaeri, Jashn-e-Azadi and Ona Trail of Vanished Blood, I have pointed out ways through which docu-mentary filmmakers question tropes of Indian nationalism and the nation-alist othering of Kashmir by employing tourist images of the Valley ofKashmir. Within the context of changing media figurations of the digitaldocumentary, I have highlighted how the filmmakers participate in theproliferation of new platforms and networks of distribution and produc-tion, thus posing a challenge to the attempts of the Indian nation state toregulate Kashmiri voices through the discourse of touristic normalcy andterrorist threat. They often circulate their films around state-regulations bythe means of global funding and the participation in the global festival cir-cuit. Simultaneously they give high importance to screenings and debateswithin India where they show their films in the new multitude of civil-so-ciety festivals that emerged together with digital technologies, pirated filmcirculation and light weighted digital projectors. However, these highlymobile practices are linked to the financial insecurities of the field of inde-pendent documentary. Positioned at the juncture of social movements andthe politics of form, they assert Kashmiri political subjectivities in dia-logue with the emotional and intellectual responses of local and trans-localaudiences. Extending an argument of Ananya Jahanara Kabir (2009), I in-vestigated how the image of the boat journey on the lakes and rivers ofKashmir has been turned into an inverted tourist gaze through which thefilmmakers inscribe Kashmiri subjectivities into the overexposed land-scapes of the valley. The enjoyments of the tourist figure exposed to a nor-malising gaze of consumption have been linked to the memory of thoseliving in a region held under the sway of an overwhelming military pres-ence. While Pankaj Rishi Kumar uses the image of the boat journey toquestion the dynamics of the centre and its region, both Iffat Fatima andSanjay Kak attempt to reclaim the tourist’s spaces for Kashmiri subjectivi-ties by inserting the memories of conflict into the tourist gaze. Finally, Iwonder if an image – luring as a formal element invested with naturalmovement – which is closely linked to the South Asian desire for Kash-mir’s ‘sublime landscapes’44 may eventually overcome the binaries of par-

44 See also Ahmad’s (2011) and Kabir’s (2009) discussions of ‚sublime’ Kashmirilandscapes in colonial travel literature and photography.


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adise and hell the valley is haunted by. Paradise on a River of Hell (AbirBazaz, Meenu Gaur, 2001) is the title of one of the first independent docu-mentary films done by a Kashmiri. It has taken a clue from a line by AghaShahid Ali’s poem ‘Farewell’: “I am being rowed through Paradise on ariver of hell: Exquisite ghost, it is night.”

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Filming Kashmir: Emerging Documentary Practices (2015)

Documents