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

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

Reflections on Sanjay Kak's Jashn-e-Azadi

A father stutters in remembering the name of his son in an ice  
covered martyr's graveyard. He is looking for his son's grave.

In a found video footage from the 90s, a girl in her late teens  
passionately, but viscerally, describes the body of a young man in  
the neighbourhood, killed during an army operation. The body is lying  
in the crossroad amidst the houses; no one is allowed to approach.  
"Even the dog did not go near it," she says flatly.

In an OPD ward of the post-trauma centre, the doctor listens to the  
story of a woman. In her dreams, figures in white shrouds appear -  
and never reveal their faces.

Sanjay's film is a cautionary tale to not make light the depth of the  
feelings around the word "Azadi" in today's Kashmir. The feeling is  
deep and resonant with halted lives of 100,000 dead over the last 18  
years.

The film discovers this latent, almost volcanic, subterranean layer  
by entering the journey through the dead. It uncovers video archives  
of the dead, moves with a team that is trying to ascertain the count  
of dead and disappeared, stands in at doctors' chambers in a post  
trauma therapy center, moves with a funeral procession, visits a camp  
where orphans sing Iqbal's 'Sare Jahan se acha' and records the ashes  
left behind by relentless military operations (highest and  
unimaginable civilian to military ratio anywhere in the world.)

***

To recall the dead and to make it speak, is at all times a difficult  
existential and philosophical task. It is to the filmmaker's credit  
that he attempts this and we will try to understand how he does so  
and what are the conceptual difficulties he is working with.  
Hopefully through this we may achieve a vantage point to think with  
and beyond the film, into the landscape of the unsayable,  
incomprehensible terror that the film wants us all to wake up to.

The conceptual axis is built around understanding of the  
reverberating word 'Shahid'. The martyr. The one who has given his or  
her life for a defense of a conception of life. The word Shahid  
vibrates at all corners of the landscape of the film. It is the mute,  
troubled figure that links Zulm (oppression) and Azaadi (freedom).

The film tries to give a new entry point to this given conceptual  
structure by bringing in the latent meaning hidden in Shahid - that  
of a witness in its Arabic etymological roots (and we may add also in  
its Greek etymological roots). So martyr is no longer just the dead,  
but a person who has a testimony.

Agambem in his commentary (Remnants of Auschwitz) on testimony and  
the archive opens out an internal tension in the concept of witness  
and the martyr. One meaning of witness could be one who is brought  
into the trial as a third party and the other is one who has been a  
part of the event from the beginning and therefore bears witness to  
it. The second sense of the term is not concerned with the trial or  
the judgement, but opens us to the gray zones of life, questions that  
law or juridical reason do not or cannot exhaust.

Martyr could be seen as someone who bears witness to a destruction. A  
martyr cannot but remember. It is she who remembers to keep alive a  
conception of life. But, martyr is also someone who is a sufferer or  
felled by that which is horrible, terrifying, without a life giving  
form, without sustenance. A martyr death is also a senseless death, a  
death that its perpetrators or executioners visit upon people without  
an understanding of what has been undertaken. A death visited, that  
halts a life, it is without purpose. A death that a future must abjure.

***

The film tries to organise our relationship to the years of  terror  
and mutilation by a repetitive visit to sites and images of violence  
in more or less similar ways. The reoccurring shots of the walk back  
of army contingents after an assault on a settlement creates an  
overwhelming spiral with no end in sight. An inchoate weight of  
senselessness is produced. Shot over two years, the filmmaker  
communicates over each journey a sense of life that is perpetually  
halted. An emptiness soaks into the way it renders landscapes and  
places. Death roams around loud.

This repetition is sought to be balanced by poetry and metaphors from  
poetry. Only popular performers/jesters (bhands), poets and silent  
nature can speak the unspeakable. The possibility of language to  
think can be found in an unblinking look at the lyrical beauty of  
nature, a poet's anguish and popular performers' indomitable spirit  
to produce meaning and a sense of what it means to live in these  
times. These are also the few remaining bleak signs of life in the film.

Within these two threads - one relentless, overwhelming and the other  
fragmentary, fragile - nests the archive of the dead and the  
testimony of the one who bears witness. The images that we referred  
to in the beginning appear here. They are a stutter, a visceral  
detail, a nightmare, difficult accounts that refuse to slip into  
settled frameworks of knowing. It is here that the film starts  
encountering its problem. The idea of martyr as dead, fixed and  
organized in a language of politics, mobilized for judgement collides  
with the martyr who bears witness. The film does not allow this  
collision to take shape and grow. The collision gets further frozen  
by the stance of the filmmaker who produces the account of a third  
party in his voice-overs. A fall back on the idea of witness as  
"outside".

The two classical documentary modes - a disembodied voice that  
contextualises and a juxtapositional play to comment and draw meaning  
- are deployed by the filmmaker to cohere the various trajectories  
that his journey had opened out. It is here that the films weakens  
itself and lends itself to simpler ideological readings. These  
ideological readings will play on the inclusion and exclusion that  
any narrative will need to produce to cohere. But, the crucial  
vector, as to why these aesthetic modes were deployed, would remain  
unthought.

The filmmaker is there in the film in its very grain. But the  
structure that is built on repetition and fragments creates a problem  
of stance. The voice tries to intervene. The unease of not achieving  
a stance is mediated by the voice and juxtapositional commentary. For  
example, the rapid "cut performance" with tourism industry's  
vulgarity and tourists' ennui is an extremely weak  ground to stand  
on when the ambition of the film is to engage with the deepest  
dilemmas of today. Similarly the voice takes an authority to comment  
on ghost figures. One wonders what in the encounter or the material  
is this authority being drawn from. It is in these moments that one  
misses most the "diary" of the filmmaker during his journeys. If the  
landscape and the archive is barely audible, one would have thought  
that the filmmaker would let us enter this space of silence, this  
space of death through his attempts to listen to this inaudibility.  
The urge to comment thwarts the process of making sense in a trying  
journey. The logical impossibility of various meanings of witness and  
martyr ever meeting remains unacknowledged.

****

The way the film captures the feeble and shabby attempts by the armed  
forces to produce for itself an image of also being a carrier of  
signs of life is moving. The images of the school, the orphanage, the  
donation of portable radio sets mark a total depletion of the signs  
of "development". A hollowness that is haunting.

A retired army-man now counts, names and locates the dead. A battle  
with his' and others memories to keep alive atleast a faint  
recollection through "just the name". He acknowledges that a few  
could have been left unnamed. A witness who cannot do anything else  
but try to remember.

A fire in a building that refuses to die out. The electric wires  
keeps burning. The mounting debris of ash and wood remains.

Also remains an unfulfilled promise of the deeper acknowledgment of  
the materials and the notes. We would make a comradely request to the  
filmmaker to not see the film as the end of this specific journey.  
The materials and the notes need to appear in other forms, and then  
maybe over a longer period we will learn and educate ourselves, as to  
what it means to live in the now that the film opens for us.

****