Life & death in Kashmir

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Harud (Autumn)

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Harud (Autumn).JPG [2]

Harud is a deeply political film that gently, but brilliantly, captures and conveys the experience of living in a land that’s caught in the middle of an interminable ego clash between two nations. In this land, life and limbs move at a cautious pace and the film’s climatic scene explains why.

The stunning ordinariness of a dead, bleeding young boy at the entrance to his house is so deeply traumatic that fear stalks everyone, all the time, because here even a slightly odd gesture or sound doesn’t attract curious looks but a hail of bullets. The only way anyone can live with this sort of constant fear is by checking out of life, either physically or mentally.
Aamir Bashir, who has written, produced and directed this feature film along with a talented team of men and women, is a Kashmiri himself. Harud is his impressive and significant debut film dedicated to Kashmir and its people. The only other film I can recall that did justice to telling Kashmir’s story is Onir’s I Am.
Harud’s cinematographer Shankar Raman (who also shot Peepli [Live] and has co-written Harud's script) uses his camera as a sensitive, sentient observer which follows the film’s protagonist, Rafiq (Shanawaz Bhat), and others connected with him going about their daily business of living and dying.
Harud, shot in 2009, completed in 2010 and being released this week in limited cinema halls in a few cities, tells many stories.
First there’s the story of living in Kashmir. This is the story of a land tied up in barbed wire and being held hostage at gunpoint, literally. It’s the story of families whose young, unemployed, angry sons either cross over to Pakistan for arms training or travel around the country selling shawls; it’s the story of a city where insurgency/terrorism has spurred happy little retail businesses that sell tragedy for $250 a piece; it’s the story of mothers and sisters who sit in peaceful but serrated demonstration with laminated photographs of their missing sons, husbands and fathers, demanding either information or bodies. This story is told through Rafiq, who constantly feels the presence of his missing brother Touqeer, his traffic constable father Yusuf (Reza Naji), and his stoic mother Fatima (Shamim Basharat).
They all live in a small house in an old, narrow residential lane at whose entrance sits an ominous gunny bag bunker covered in net, with the nozzle of a gun trained at Rafiq when he goes on his cycle to deliver newspapers, at the frail father who quietly goes insane, and at the mother who attends the monthly APDP (Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons) meetings and often sits on the street offering modur pulav (sweet pulao) to people without uttering a word.
At the other end of this gun, inside the bunker, sits a man with a walkie-talkie, his finger on the trigger. A stranger from a far away land who doesn’t speak their language, his only reaction to the petrified father’s rambling is calling in extra troops.
Harud also tells the story of Kashmir’s children who walk past security men in battle gear and negotiate rolls of barbed wire to get home from school, of men who are routinely stopped and frisked, and of families who are told by a voice in a hovering helicopter to gather in a maidan so that security personnel can search their homes for evidence of rebellion, in tin jars of dal and rice and in their clothes and quilts.
Harud is also the story of boys who return from across the border and sometimes sit in an Omni at a busy street junction clutching a grenade; boys who, just before pulling the pin, plead for help. Harud tells all these stories and more — it briefly talks about Kashmiri Pandits — without getting maudlin. Kashmir’s collective and individual tragedies are never overstated. Harud has anger, yes, but its tone is matter-of-fact. It does, however, have an eye for the ironic, like when it tells the story of the “gifts” that the Indian government doles out to Kashmiris on special occasions, like cellphone services before Id.
Harud tells another very important story, a story of state propaganda. Harud ran into trouble with the censors for not just using the word azaadi, but even for a “hypothetical reference” to it when Rafiq and his friends loll around dreaming and talking of an independent Kashmir’s own football team playing at the Football World Cup (this scene was cut out). And just before its release, censors objected to its promo which shows the word “Azaadi” spray-painted on a wall. The censors, incidentally, were okay with “We want freedom” and “Jannat ka rasta Pakistan ho ke nahin jata”, but not the word azaadi or azad. If you happen to go to Srinagar, you will see this word on many walls, hear it in many places. The censors didn’t alter Kashmir’s reality; they just managed to distort the conversation between two Indians.
It’s this deliberate muzzling, more than anything else, that has led to what Bashir describes as “widely prevalent post-traumatic stress disorder” in Kashmir. “So many people are clinically depressed, and they have just one psychiatric hospital to go to where, at best, the doctors can spend five minutes counselling them,” he says. Kashmir gets by not on the government’s “bold steps” aimed at “reducing alienation”, but on antidepressant prescription drugs.

Inspired in its storytelling and camerawork by Iranian films, it’s a pleasure to see Iranian actor Reza Naji on the Indian screen for the first time. Naji, who played the father in Majid Majidi’s Children in Heaven and won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his performance in The Song of Sparrows, has few dialogues, but is unforgettable.
Harud uses real security men and old news footage, and most of its cast is made up of gifted amateurs who use their eyes and stillness to tremendous impact, especially Shanawaz Bhat and Shamim Basharat. Though the film is mostly shot on-location in Srinagar, often there’s little ambient sound to catch. The film’s silence is eerie, and it lingers in your head for a long time after it is over.