The missing fathers of Kashmir

Director Ashvin Kumar is no stranger to Kashmir — some of his most acclaimed films, including the Oscar-nominated short film Little Terrorist (2004) and the documentary Inshallah, Football (2010), are set in the Kashmir Valley. His latest is a feature film — mostly in English — called No Fathers in Kashmir , the story of 16-year-old Noor (Zara Webb), a Kashmir-born British girl, who returns to her homeland for the first time in over a decade. She is accompanied by her mother Zainab (Natasha Mago), who has told her daughter that her father Basheer left them just before they settled down in London.

The truth, as Noor quickly learns, is harsher: Basheer was “picked up” by the Indian Army 14 years earlier, like hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young men in the Valley over the last three decades. Zainab is thus a “half-widow”, in the Orwellian register of Kashmir, unable to remarry until she, along with Basheer’s parents Abdul Rashid and Halima (Kulbhushan Kharbanda and Soni Razdan, respectively), drops her husband’s disappearance case.

BL ink spoke to Kumar ahead of the film’s theatrical release on April 5.

There is a scene in the film where your character Arshid talks about dogs in Kashmir eating human flesh, dogs roaming the streets with a limb in their mouths. Talk me through that moment, its starting points.

There’s a friend of mine, a journalist called Baba Umar. He wrote an article much after I finished filming [the 2012 documentary] Inshallah Kashmir , on how the dogs of Kashmir had developed a taste for human flesh, because of the bodies dumped after torture and interrogation at various places. And there was an incident where a dog was seen with human limbs in its mouth, which, as you can imagine, is a powerful, grotesque image. So when I wrote that scene, I was inspired by this very graphic detail which gives you a clear idea of what a human being can do to another.

One scene where the visual style of the film changes radically is when Noor’s phone is destroyed by a soldier in front of her — we see images from her phone collapsing into each other rapidly. Is that, perhaps, the first time this British-Kashmiri girl understands what her grandparents are going through, in terms of memories being destroyed?

It’s supposed to take this innocent person who’s from the Instagram generation and show them the difficulty of dreaming in Kashmir. That sequence encapsulates this; all her memories, right from her time in London all the way to her Kashmir trip, are destroyed, including the forensic evidence that she had collected against the armed forces. It is a powerful metaphor for how memories have been erased in Kashmir. The erasure project is going on in India today, the way history books are being rewritten, the way school textbooks are being rewritten — it’s a memory erasure project and this has been underway in Kashmir for a very, very long time.

Photographs seem to be a big part of the plot…

There is a cycle, a reiteration of how memories, photographs are being used as evidence. My character, who in a way acts as the engine of the plot, betrays his friend whom he has been photographed with. The armed forces think: “If one person in the photograph is suspected of being a militant, the rest must be too; let’s pick them all up.” They (armed forces) are out there to do a job and they’re doing it in the most effective manner possible. But the collateral damage is huge and uncontrollable.

No character has paid a higher price than Noor’s grandfather, perhaps. Yet, when Noor is about to do something that would almost certainly get a bad man killed, he stops her very calmly. Where do you locate that sense of Zen?

Everywhere in Kashmir, really. Anybody who has lived in Kashmir for a long time [Kumar’s grandfather is from Kashmir] has to come to terms with the situation, has to accept. The wisdom that comes with...having to accept... is from Buddhist philosophy. The sense of Zen that you find is reflected in the philosophies of acceptance and surrender. It’s not like Noor’s grandparents are not concerned about their son anymore. They’ve just accepted the reality, to cope with the uncertainty of not knowing. A top psychologist in Kashmir told me that people fall back on the 500 or 1,000 years of Sufism in the Valley to be able to live with the reality of their lives.

Was it a deliberate decision to not reveal too much about your character Arshid’s past, especially about his time in college when he was called ‘Jeans’ by Noor’s parents?

I think so, because that would have taken the film to another subplot. I keep saying, this film needed to be a television series, something like a Buniyaad based in Kashmir. Each of these characters has such a powerful back-story.

Also, the name “Jeans” tells you all that you need to know — you understand that this was a person from a liberal dispensation, a carefree person. I like to get audiences to join the dots themselves.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based freelance writer

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