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Can we celebrate freedom?

Sanjay Kak’s film speaks the truth about Kashmir while it interrogates our understanding of it

Photo: Murali Kumar K.

SELL OUT Sanjay Kak: ‘Media plays the same games and now shares the Indian State’s position’

When Sanjay Kak, a Delhi-based independent documentary filmmaker screened his latest documentary “Jashn-e-Azadi” (How we celebrate freedom) as part of the Films for Freedom screenings “Notions of a Nation” recently, a member o f the audience asked him what the position of Muslim women in the Kashmir valley is. The documentary has images of women of the strife-torn valley questioning the present and expressing their rage – and all without a veil. The director replied: “The mainstream media usually focus only on Aasiya Andrabi of the Dukhtaran-e-Millat (Daughters of Islamic Community). She’s their favourite; covered from head to toe, her arms covered in long gloves, only her eyes visible.” He adds: “But if you leave that aside, I certainly see more women in a burkha in places like Delhi or Ajmer or Baroda or Hyderabad - but not in Kashmir.” “Jashn-e-Azadi”, completed in March 2007, is an attempt to shift the frame of the lens to the voices of the valley’s Kashmiri Muslims and go behind the ‘veil’ created by the media.

Kak says it all began in the mid 1980s, the “exciting times” between 84-87, when the doors opened for television in India, and Kak finding himself a job with them. “Whether it was the first quiz show with Siddharth Basu, or the first Election Special with Prannoy Roy, television was being reinvented in India. But the heady days soon wore off, and I was instinctively suspicious of a system that only respected one kind of success - that of ratings – and knew only one kind of reward – which was financial. Television was an industry, and once I realised that, I had to get out. I did get to make documentaries funded by Doordarshan, including a series on the Ganga. But since the 1990s, I’ve been on my own.”

The motivation for “Jashn-e-Azadi” came in 2001, sparked off by the Parliament Attack, in which the Delhi University Professor S.A.R Geelani was an accused, and his defence lawyers asked Kak to translate the recording of a tapped phone for them. Kak says: “I was taken aback: why me? There were other Kashmiris who could have done it better. They admitted they needed a Kashmiri Pandit. So I said, surely there were other Kashmiri Pandits who could help, why me? They had asked many, but none wanted to be involved. So off I went to the POTA Court with my translation. But that whole experience really made me think about how the State apparatus deals with Kashmir, and following the case closely allowed me to see just how much of a systemic dysfunction our democracy is into.”

“I had the prize money from a Brazilian film festival for my film ‘Words on Water’, on the struggle in the Narmada Valley, so I decided to give myself six months to write or make a film on Kashmir. When I returned to Kashmir in 2003, after 14 years, I was shocked at the level of militarisation. It was only after several months that I slowly began to make friends. Someone knew someone who knew someone who could give me access to the VHS tapes containing archival footage. Kak strongly feels that Kashmir is by and large misrepresented in the media: “Mainstream media has totally lost its credibility - it’s now very much seen as part of the Indian State’s position. They play the same games and are on the same side, whether that’s the side of the police, army, intelligence or the bureaucracy.” We always know what the Police or Pakistan government is thinking, but nobody bothers to ask or report what the people think. But for Kashmiris, what was shown in the film was nothing new or revealing, but it was finally, the truth.

In fact, there was a euphoric reaction in the audience to the movie when it was screened in March in Srinagar. Kak says that the process of colonisation is never complete. “The only difference is that India is now colonising its own people. What the Americans are doing to the rest of the world, we first did it to the Adivasis and now to the rural poor. That’s why Kashmir is important, for it raises fundamental questions. The middle-class Indian will talk about the issues of SEZ, but don’t want to comment about Kashmir. It’s a fundamental challenge - they can’t decipher the “Islamist character” of the State for it’s too “ambiguous”. This is a kind of nationalism I find difficult to deal with – not the crude nationalism of the Hindutva brigade alone, but the nationalism of the secular brand, which is not crude, but its insistence on holding on to their notions of nationality, making it equally worrying.”

Kak’s film has had mixed reactions. Some, particularly on the blog, were far too disturbing. For instance, one belligerently declared : “May your mother be raped.” “We didn’t screen the film for a typically elite audience or invite dignitaries. Word got around by mouth and we had journalists, students, teachers and political leaders all under one roof.

At the Nasik screening however, Kak was surprised that he could have a very civil conversation with an RSS worker who asked him why he supported terrorists. One film, a flood of reactions, and it’s not as if Kak is over and done with the Kashmir issue. “I have to find out what really happened around the mass migration of the Pandits that took place in the early 1990s. I may do a shorter, more reflexive and substantive film, or write an essay on the subject. It’s not easy to walk away from Kashmir.”

AYESHA MATTHAN

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