Watching Kashmir through 'Harud'
Does Harud match up
to world cinema standards? Has Harud changed the cinematic fairytale about Kashmir
preserved through Bollywood? Does Harud explain the Kashmir "issue"? How
much will the DVD of Harud cost?
Do these questions
really matter? I don’t think so.
For me, they are as redundant as "issues
and their promoters" for whom film-festival gloss or box-office entertainment
value scores over blood spilt in real life.
What matters is a
film like Harud got made and got released mainstream. What matters is another
season lost in strife has some cinematic record where very few exist.
As for
"Bollywood" - even though I continue to adore Bollywood for 'some' of
the gems and escape from reality it creates amidst all the obvious flesh-show,
a film like Harud and Bollywood cannot really be spoken of in the same
breath.
Rafiq and his friends are not likely to exist in a Bollywood film of
this generation without being branded as either terrorists or tourist guides. Where else can their reality of making sense of life within conflict, in the
fall of burnt chinar leaves and unannounced gunshots find a home, if not a film
like 'Harud'!
The fairytales may
have halted but cameras never left Kashmir - news cameras, occasional
documentaries have captured shades of the conflict consistently, but the
intimacy that cinema provides can’t be replicated by the excess of blood soaked
tv, documentary or stock footage, neither can the irony of existing silently at
the pace of life right in the midst of loud political drama that dominates life
in this conflict zone.
This duality reflected in the brilliantly etched
character of the traffic policeman and of course equally brilliantly portrayed
by Reza Naji who wades through the chaos of noisy traffic and himself exists in
stoic silence, his seasoned eyes reflecting the age that would have seen the
fairytale deteriorating into a blood soaked curfewed zone, perhaps each day,
one day at a time.
The presence of the Armed Forces lingers consistently in the backdrop and foreground, and
eventually gets surrounded by the collective silence of the Association of Parents
of Displaced Persons, they still seek answers, whereabouts of their children
who 'disappeared' within the conflict. The questions remain.
In another scene,
Rafiq’s boss asks if he knows of any Kashmiri Pandit, Rafiq answers that he
doesn’t. Although, the film-maker merely glances over the shoulders of a Pandit
family who explain they are not keen to live in today's Kashmir, he doesn't
make the circumstances in which they would have left in the first place, part
of this story. And yet, it’s clear these too are people who 'disappeared' - from
their homes. Those questions too, remain.
I can’t help but
feel connected to the film, it takes me back to glimpses of a severed
relationship that became my eyes to see life in contemporary kashmir till a few
years back, when no such film existed. Now there is Harud.
Thank you Aamir Bashir
and team, for preserving glimpses of life from a land, whose people are often
conveniently forgotten and where life itself is capable of disappearing
silently in the name of ‘conflict’.
CLICK LINK TO GO TO PASSIONFORCINEMA BLOG EXCERPTS
CLICK LINK TO GO TO PASSIONFORCINEMA BLOG EXCERPTS
