On many levels, 'Jashn-e-Azadi," Sanjay Kak's 139-minute documentary on Kashmir, is likely to be a difficult film to sit through for Indian viewers, but that's all the more reason to watch it. Article by India-West reporter Ashwaque Swapan.

Related Links
Dreams of Harmony Once Dreamt
Sloganeering in Srinagar
Rethinking Kashmir Politics
Dangerous Portents in Jammu and Kashmir: A View From Doda

The affecting, impressionistic documentary; which was screened here Dec. 12 with the filmmaker in attendance, not only skewers the comforting (and convenient) assumptions of many Indians regarding the ongoing Kashmir tragedy, It also experiments with the documentary format itself as it searches for that elusive holy grail - the truth.
 
Kak's most biting critique is the title of the film - 'Jashn-e-Azadi" (Urdu for "celebration of freedom)" - and there is an almost surreal quality in the contrasting images of the official unfurling of the Indian tricolor and the robust declaration of Indian pride on India's Independence Day in Srinagar's Lal Chowk and the Utterly deserted streets.
 
"For more than a decade, such sullen acts of protest have marked 15th August in Kashmir, and this is the point from where Jashn-e-Azadi begins to explore the many meanings of Freedom-of Azadi-in Kashmir," says the film's companion Web site.
 
'In India, the real contours of the conflict in Kashmir are invariably buried under the facile depiction of an innocent population, trapped between the Terrorist's Gun and the Army's Boot. But after 18 years of a bloody armed struggle, after 60,000 civilians dead (and almost 7,000 enforced disappearances), what really is contained in the sentiment for Azadi - for freedom?"
 
In the Web site, Kak dismisses the convenient simplistic assumptions of the powers that be.
 
'Amidst the everyday violence and ever-present fear in Kashmir, there are no easy answers to such questions," the Web site declares. 'Where truth has been an early. victim, all language - speech, poetry, even cinema - becomes inadequate to describe what we know and feel here. So we reshape our curiosity, and point ourselves at what we can see, what we are allowed to see."
 
Shot and edited between August 2004-2006, the 132-minute film is a searing critique of the violence and humiliation that the Kashmiri people have suffered. Today, Kak said, there are 700,000 Indian military personnel in Kashmir to take on an estimated 1,000 militants.
 
The form of Kak's documentary challenges viewers as much as its politics - used as we are these days to dumbed down, slickly packaged, pre-digested morsels of information in the mainstream media.

Kak's film questions the central assumptions of the conventional documentary format. It is one of the greater ironies of the modern media how much of the 'news" itself is manufactured for, the media - news conferences, the continuous public relations operations of various interested parties, 'embedded" journalists, and controlled 'tours". 

Documentary filmmakers face a dilemma. The camera cannot be everywhere when news happens, so the conventional fall back position is to depend on interviews, official sources and footage, and occasionally use even dramatization.
 
Kak, instead, uses impressionistic footage including anonymously provided actual images of the conflict itself. He told. .the audience that he avoided interviews of Kashmiris regarding their experience under military rule because the climate of suppression was too great to allow people to speak freely.
 
His impressionistic montage of haunting images of the Kashmir valley tells its own harrowing story - in a nutshell, the terrible toil exacted by violence on a hapless people obliged to live in a state torn apart by an insurgency and one that is bristling with military personnel from out of state.
 
Poignant recitation of poetry, heartbreaking images of a father looking up from the grave of his son in a graveyard, a psychiatrist talking to people severely traumatized by military violence, angry villagers bitterly lamenting the loss of their homes following an army attack, the day-to-day
humiliation of Kashmiris being frisked by military personnel- these are images that collide with a contrasting reality promoted by the army, one of promoting welfare by helping in public works, schools, giving out radios to villagers.

The plight of Kashmiri Pandit is mentioned, but it gets relatively short shrift.
 
Predictably, the film has raised the hackles of many Indians, and the accompanying remarks segment of the film's Web site has Kak, a Kashmiri Pandit, being called a Muslim and being accused of taking funding from Islamist groups.
 
However, Kak said his experience of screening the film extensively in India has been heartening.
 
There is a growing, healthy skepticism of what he views to be the official government spin, he said, and while Kashmir remains a sensitive issue, more people are willing to question official assumptions.
 
Kak's view- amply highlighted in his film - that the consistent denial of the democratic rights of the Kashmiri people by the Indian government is at the root of the conflict is apt to be questioned by many Indians, though it is shared by human rights activists in India and abroad. However, it is
harder to question his broader point about addressing political crises with military means.
 
The use of military force is a brutally blunt instrument, as attested by the numerous examples of its use including within India and abroad -northeast India, Punjab, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Palestine and Iraq, and its consequences for the targeted population has invariably been an unmitigated human disaster. Regardless of where one stands on the Kashmir issue, this
sobering point of Kak's film is incontrovertible.
 
For more information, visit on http://kashmirfilm.wordpress.com/