[Reader-list] Mukul Kesavan on Sanjay Kak's 'Jashn-e-Azadi'

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Friends,

Many on this list in Delhi would probably have been present at the 
screening of Sanjay Kak's new film <Jashn-e-Azadi> at the Habitat Centre 
on the 13th of March. Here (below) is a brief text about the film by 
historian and writer Mukul Kesavan that appeared today in the Telegraph.

For those of you who have missed the Habitat Centre screening, there 
will be another screenign on Friday, 23 March 2007, at Sarai-CSDS, at 
5:00 pm

best

Shuddha
----------------------------


CELEBRATING FREEDOM - Jashn-e-Azadi and what Kashmiris think about the 
occupation
Mukul Kesavan

The Telegraph, Thursday, March 15, 2007
http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070315/asp/opinion/story_7516679.asp

It often happens that you judge the world by yardsticks that you don’t 
apply to your own country. Sometimes that inconsistency is brought home 
to you. This happened to me yesterday after I watched the first 
screening of Jashn-e-Azadi (How We Celebrate Freedom), a long 
documentary film on Kashmir, directed by Sanjay Kak.

The ‘present’ of the film is the period between 2004 and 2006, the time 
in which it was shot. From this present, it makes forays into its past, 
which is the period between 2004 and 1989, the year that the violent 
struggle for self-determination/ secession/azadi began in Kashmir. The 
film travels backwards by incorporating within itself footage shot by 
unnamed Kashmiri cameramen. This footage is formally marked out from the 
rest of the film with the help of subtitles: it also looks grainier and 
less finished.

For a long, complex film, the film’s editorial position isn’t hard to 
summarize. The military occupation of Kashmir is sketched in with 
voice-overs, subtitles, interviews and grim vignettes from Kashmiri 
life. You learn, for example, that India has seven hundred thousand 
soldiers in Kashmir, or one soldier for every fifteen civilians. Right 
through the film, the figure of a hundred thousand Kashmiri dead comes 
up in conversations and political speeches. Spread evenly through the 
film like a chorus is footage from a longstanding attempt to 
systematically verify the number and provenance of the dead. The film 
doesn’t endorse the figure — the one subtitle that refers to the subject 
speaks of disputed and wildly fluctuating totals — but nor does it take 
issue with it. The implication is that the total, by any reckoning, is 
so large that the moral culpability of the Indian state and its 
occupying army for the killing is unlikely to be diminished by a correction.

The subject of the film is the response of Kashmiris to the occupation: 
their defiance, their rage, their suffering, their trauma, their 
resignation, their irony and, occasionally, their acquiescence. But the 
acquiescence is rare and temporary: this film has a moral and it is 
spelt out by the director of the film (who is also its narrator). In the 
middle of the film he says (and I paraphrase from memory), “The lesson 
from the most militarized region in the world is that domination doesn’t 
mean victory.”

Bereaved women, schoolchildren, politicians, old men, poets, alive and 
dead, ulema and a travelling troupe of players demand freedom and 
simultaneously count its cost. On the other side, the ‘Indian’ side, 
tourists, sadhus, ‘renegades’ (turncoat militants) and be-goggled army 
officers are variously loutish, strident, deluded and murderously 
violent, all in the cause of claiming Kashmir for India.

Kashmir’s inhabitants in this film, the protagonists of azadi, are the 
Valley’s Muslims. The film does not apologize for this. It refers to the 
exodus of Kashmir’s Pandit population and gives us two figures: two 
hundred were brutally killed by militants and, as a result of these 
murders, a hundred and sixty thousand left the Valley for refugee camps 
in Jammu and the plains. No Kashmiri Pandits figure in the frame. The 
film’s cameras don’t visit their homes or refugee camps. Two telephone 
conversations with a Pandit poet, his poem about the lost intimacy of 
winter nights, and shots of abandoned Pandit homes sum up their exile. 
They are present as a hole in the film, as an absence.

The film’s treatment of this issue caused a stir in the cinema hall as 
angry Kashmiri Pandits heckled the director (a Kashmiri Pandit himself), 
disputed the facts of the film and asked with some anguish why a film 
that bore such scrupulous witness to the suffering of Kashmiri Muslims 
couldn’t find a single Pandit to talk to. Kak stood his ground; he 
acknowledged the tragedy of the Pandits, but insisted upon his right as 
a film-maker to tell his story in the way he thought fit. He was not, he 
said, making an encyclopedic film on Kashmir, but a personal one.

Similarly, the role of Pakistan in stoking the insurgency isn’t directly 
addressed by the film; it happens offstage. There are references to 
foreign militants but they occur in passing. The film insists that the 
viewer, especially the Indian viewer, should attend to its central truth 
before reaching for nuance or qualification, and the truth is this: the 
Indian state occupies Kashmir against the will of its inhabitants and is 
primarily responsible for the violence and death that follow from the 
occupation. Not to acknowledge this, the film suggests, is to remain in 
an indefensible state of denial.

After the screening and the question-and-answer session that followed, 
the conversation touched upon the film’s formal qualities and defects, 
but finally settled into a debate about the film’s ‘simplifications’. 
The film’s critics thought that it had collapsed several political 
projects into one struggle for azadi. It had, by default, fore-grounded 
the ‘jihadi’ definition of the struggle for self-determination. Its 
treatment of the Kashmiri Pandit predicament was criticized as tokenism, 
naïveté, even self-hatred.

In the middle of all this, a friend observed that in Iraq, a country of 
twenty five million people, the American army of occupation was a 
hundred and fifty thousand strong. In Kashmir, a place with a third of 
Iraq’s population, the military presence was four-and-a-half times as 
large. It’s the kind of comparison that I’m generally hard-wired to 
reject, because it seems so facile, so blithely heedless of time, place 
and context, but with the film still buzzing in my head and arguments 
about it swirling around me, it seemed plausible. Someone made the point 
that the film was wrong-headed in simplifying the Indian presence into 
an occupation because Kashmir had had democratic governments constituted 
by monitored elections for years. Didn’t those governments count for 
something? This suddenly sounded quite a lot like American arguments 
about the democratic legitimacy of the present Iraqi government. Then I 
heard myself argue that not all the killing in the Valley had been done 
by security forces: some of it, surely, was the handiwork of jihadis, 
whose conception of freedom was theocratic tyranny. Even as I made the 
argument, it seemed to bear a family resemblance to Dick Cheney’s 
argument that those who argued for American withdrawal were, in fact, 
endorsing a ‘free’ state based on fundamentalist prescriptions.

A day afterwards, as I try to reconstruct the discussion from memory, 
the correspondences between the American occupation of Iraq (which I 
unequivocally condemn) and the Indian ‘presence’ in Kashmir (about which 
I am more ambivalent) don’t seem as compelling as they did immediately 
after the film. But the scale of the military presence, the tens of 
thousands dead, the justificatory arguments in the two cases seem 
uncomfortably similar. An account of the struggle for azadi that skates 
over the purge of the Pandits or the role of Pakistan must invite 
scepticism, but so must an intellectual position that makes an 
acknowledgement of the suffering of Kashmiri Muslims contingent upon 
equal time for Pandits. Good documentaries don’t necessarily change your 
mind; they do, however, prompt you to take your opinions out of 
mothballs and give them an airing. Jashn-e-Azadi is that sort of a film.