Kashmir: Everyone has lost in their own way

Four displaced women in Kashmir talk about their lives to Indian journalist and peace activist Sonia Jabbar in ‘Autumn’s Final Country’ (66 min, 2003), a devastating and sensitive film made when Jabbar, journalist and peace activist “steeped in Kashmir” (to quote a mutual friend), was asked to arrange for displaced Kashmiri women to testify at the South Asia Court of Women in Dhaka, August 2003.

Unable to arrange the travel costs, she took a crash course in filmmaking, bought a camera and recorded their testimonies instead. The effect is not just to make you ache with sadness at what these women have undergone. Its real value lies in its shattering of the myths and nationalistic notions constructed over the years by the respective governments of Pakistan and India and the non-state actors engaged in the conflict in Kashmir. This is not meant to be a film on the Kashmir problem, but the complexities of the situation seep inexorably through the stories of these four women.

The stories unfold gradually as the women talk, a range of emotions expressed through their faces filmed up close and personal. You cannot but be drawn into their stories and on an immediate level, empathise with them.

The film starts with visuals of rural Pundits migrating. Cut to Part I, and Indu in Jammu, a cultured, well-to-do Pundit teacher of English who left Srinagar 1990 because of feeling threatened by the rising tide of ‘Islamic’ militancy. “We had grown up with Muslim friends and neighbours, we never felt we were different,” she says. But after the uprising of the late 1980s and an announcement from her neighbourhood mosque about ‘Nizam-e-Mustafa’ (Islamic system), she and her family locked up and left. They faced many hardships, initially all crammed together in a room “as small as the one we used to store coal in, back home”.

Some Kashmiri leaders and activists claim that the departure of the Pundits from the Valley was orchestrated by the government and certainly, much political capital has been made of the exodus of some 300,000 Pundits from the Valley. Now refugees, their traditionally secular outlooks are eroding under pressure from the Hindu right wing parties, who are the only ones to have reached out to them in the camps. There is less focus on the almost 18,000 who refused to leave -- Sonia Jabbar is one of the few journalists to have followed up this aspect in newspaper articles. In this film, however, she focuses on one Pundit woman, Indu, who left because she felt unsafe; she names at least two people she knows who were killed.

Indu reveals that she has been back once since, met old neighbours, shopkeepers and colleagues – but couldn’t bring herself to go back to her old house, because of reports that the staircase she loved as a child has been destroyed. There are too many memories there… This is when her composure cracks, and she cannot hold back the tears. This, and the regret that she could not cremate her father among his many friends but alone, in Jammu, where she now lives. She acknowledges that perhaps she is doing perhaps better than she would have done in the Valley, working “with a vengeance”, helping other women – but in the end, “you have your regrets… you have your regrets… Everyone has lost in their own way.”

Indu is the only “English-educated” woman in the film. The others speak in Urdu/Hindi, with English sub-titles. Part II is Zarina, an unexpectedly dark-skinned woman in a Kashmiri ‘phiran’ – a Bengali from Dhaka, who came here with “an old man” when she was 14 or 15, lured by the promise of a job. “No one forced me,” she says -- no one, but poverty. They lived in a tiny thatched-roof hut and would only eat if the father, a daily wage labourer brought in some money. There were days when he earned nothing. Zarina describes the journey from Morshidabad to Kashmir – there were four other young girls with her, but they later “disappeared”. Homesick and lonely, Zarina wanted to go home – but was beaten until she agreed to get married. She has been in this Kashmiri village for over 20 years. She went back once about ten years ago, but doesn’t know if her parents are still alive.

Her husband paid the tout Rs 3000 for her. It was a good investment. She now supports him because he is too ill to work. She encouraged him to take a second wife – a fatherless girl whose mother begs on the streets – because she herself couldn’t have children. The second wife has two sons, the elder boy adopted by Zarina. “Yes, I am happy here,” she says. But her feeling of entrapment is apparent. “Where can I go?” she asks, her eyes welling up with tears.

As the text following Zarina’s story says, this is not her story alone. The trafficking of Bengali girls and women to Kashmir is a regular business that traps thousands every year.

Possibly the most devastating story in this film is that of Shahnaz, in Part III, pain etched in her delicately beautiful features. The daughter of a policeman who earned Rs 1000 a month and a mother ill with kidney problems, she was taken away from Siringar by militants from Afghanistan or Pakistan, from organizations like Al Baraq and Al Jehad. They kept her for “six months and nine days” at a mountain camp near Baramulla. After their leader Javed, who was also her protector, was arrested the others did to her “what they had to do”. Her ordeal didn’t end with rape – she was drugged, tortured and cut with razor blades – the scars are still visible. The filmmaker evokes the horror with shots of bare feet, walking in the night.

The militants, she says, later killed her mother who had come to see her. Afraid they would kill her too, Shahnaz escaped by promising to marry one of the militants – but turning him over to the police instead. Her ‘saviours’, the Indian IB, took her to Delhi where they kept her for two years, using her as an informer to catch militants. Addicted to drugs by now, Shahnaz was also expected to “please” senior IB officials. She eventually married, had two children but when her husband learnt that she had been sexually used by both the militants and the Indian IB, he divorced her. She now works at people’s houses to feed her two children, for whom she lives.

Part IV starts with a refugee camp where Anju Choudhry, about 17, has lived for over four years since fleeing along with other border villagers because of firing from the Pakistan side aimed at a nearby Indian army post. They were used to the shelling, she says, but that day, January 22, 2000, it was fiercer, and there was no option but to run to the bus stop down the road, mortar shells raining around them. “The army is meant to protect us, but when they were shelled, our homes were in the way, and they just stood by,” she says bitterly. Worse, they refused to provide a car to take her father, a 55-year old former soldier, to the hospital after he was hit by a mortar shell, “even though my brother showed them his army ID card”.

He had intially stayed behind because of their precious cattle. As the shelling intensified, he let the cattle loose, and ran to join his family. He never made it. Anju’s pain as she talks about his slow, painful death from a direct mortar hit is heart-wrenching. By the time he reached the hospital, he had lost too much blood, there were many other injured there, and the doctors could do nothing. “Maybe if the army had let us use their car, my papa would be alive,” she says, her large eyes bright with tears.

Anju and her family can’t go back because their farmlands are mined. They return briefly with the filmmaker to their deserted village, the camera following their trek past a landmines warning sign, as they fumble at the lock to the house which obviously hasn’t been opened in a while. Inside, the rooms are stripped bare, and Anju fingers through some remaining books and papers. It is a painful visit. The ritual keening of Anju’s mother as they squat before the grandmother’s shrine in the courtyard echoes on long after there is silence. Three women, red-eyed from weeping, lock up and leave the house once more. The camera focuses on young Anju’s lost face as she takes a last look…

(Ends)