The Discovery of Kashmir

It was a trip back home after 14 years. Sanjay Kak was taking his daughter to show her Kashmir, where he had grown up wanting to become a good journalist. He had taken his BA and then MA in Sociology because he thought ‘a journalist had to know about society’. He even got himself hired by a leading newspaper, but the six months they made him wait changed everything. That’s when a friend pulled him on board a team which was making a documentary. There also came another feature film to work in.

Sanjay realised this is what he liked more, all the travel and fun, unlike the hectic job his journalist friends had got and hated. And just like that, he became a noted documentary filmmaker who would one day make Jashn-e-Azadi that would bring his name to discussions on Kashmir, a film that brought to light how Kashmiris saw Kashmir.

It was during that trip with his daughter he realised how little he knew about Kashmir. From 1989 to 2003, he had lived in Delhi, but he believed he was well-informed. “It was the extent of the militarisation that took me by surprise: the overwhelming presence of armed soldiers on the streets, the squalid, sprawling bunkers at every street-corner, the checkpoints and barriers in the countryside. I think, the very idea that so much military power was needed to hold down people was the most shocking, because it gave you some idea about the will of the people,” he says sitting in a hotel room in Thiruvananthapuram.

The place is not new to him. Sanjay has been in Kerala many times with his films. This time, he has come to Kerala as the filmmaker in focus for the ninth International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala. He would go to watch the first 15 minutes of his film and then the last 30. “I was surprised there is no Q and A after the screenings. Something stops people from asking questions, maybe it is the language, or maybe they wish to rush to the next film screening,” he laughs.

There have been 11 independent ones so far, including Words on Water about the struggles against the Narmada dams, In the forest hangs a bridge about a 1000-foot bridge of cane and bamboo in North East, One Weapon about democracy. There have been two on England and South Africa, made for Doordarshan.

He is still nervous before every screening. “How will people respond? I don't show my films just in metropolitan cities but remote villages. People get everything.” This is despite him not following an order, alternating between years and many stories like in the case of Jashn-e- Azadi or his last film Red Ant Dream on the Maoist movement.

“The only person to raise an objection is the organiser but I ask, why should we be judgmental that people won’t get it because it is complex. You put out a complex and ambiguous argument and people read it that way. The true test is when they don’t get up and go in between a screening.”

And people mostly stay for his two-hour long documentaries. There were the usual reactions to Jashn-e-Azadi, that it was anti-Army or not showing enough of the story of the migration of Kashmiri Pandits. Sanjay, a Kashmiri Pandit himself had been fortunate he says, and the family had moved away much earlier. But he did not try to be pro or anti anything, he just wanted to show to the rest of India what was wrong with Kashmir.

Sanjay’s last few films never had to go through censor troubles because he never tried to get a censor certificate. “If you screen your film at a college, and someone complains about it, then the police will have to stop it. A censor certificate is not going to protect you from that kind of trouble.” In mainstream cinema too, films showing Kashmir had drastically changed the way they look at Kashmir, from Roja to Mission Kashmir to Haider. “We know they are moving somewhere.”

In Kerala, there has always been alternate cinema, he is happy to note. He talks about the Odessa Collective begun by legendary filmmaker John Abraham, for independent filmmaking. As the IDSFFK comes to a close, Sanjay notes that documentary filmmaking in India now has a vibrancy that is perhaps not enjoyed in Western countries where documentaries are made for television. “They have to stick to certain formats like 55-minute duration and three central characters. In India, we take films whatever way we like.”