Naipaul, travelling in Srinagar in the 1960's had felt that he was in a medieval city, a world that 'had not developed a sense of history, which is a sense of loss.' But each Kashmiri is a keeper of another kind of history, one not of loss but of a distinctive acheivement. Under the fourteenth century mystic poet Lal Ded, who was born in a Brahmin family but was very much influenced by Islam, and also under saints like Hazrat Nuruddin who followed Lal Ded and was revered as Nund Rishi,there had flourished in the Valley a religious movement that had brought Hindus and Muslims together in a unique way. The sense of loss that Naipaul had found missing in the 1960s, and which now pervades every street and every home in Srinagar, is also in part about what a recent documentary film abpout the horrors in Kashmir calls 'the momories of those days when we were so proudly human'.
The documentary i have just quoted from is Ajay Raina's Tell them, 'the tree they had planted has now grown'. The film's title comes from a statement that the wife of an old family servant makes when the film-maker returns to the home in which he had lived with his parents, the home where they had planted pine trees and from where they had fled after the violence began. Raina is a Hindu and in the film he returns to Kashmir after more than a decade and talks to people about the region's recent past. The film is beautifully made, it's poetic texture mirroring in many ways, the film maker's sensitivity and anguish. There are moments, however, when Raina cannot escape the prison of his own subjectivity. He sees the struggle in Kashmir, like many other displaced Kashmiri Pandits, as a fight between democracy and fundamentalism. At one point in the film Raina makes the simple minded and innacurate claim that 'the soldier representing secular India is locked in a mortal combat with the jihadi from across the border'. But other voices in the film nudge into view alternate claims and understanding of the situation in Kashmir. In fact, rather early in the film, the Kashmiri writer Akhter Mohiuddin tells Raina about the way in which the dominant Pandit community was seen as oppressive and in complicity with the distant rulers of the Indian nation - sate. Mohiuddin, who had returned the Padma Shri awarded to him by the Indian government to protest it's actions in Kashmir, tells Raina on camera, 'India betrayed us and the Pandits supported them during every betrayal.' The Kashmiri Muslims, 96 per cent of the poulation in the Valley, had a literacy rate of only 0.8 per cent. Hindus formed about 4% of the entire population of the Valley but it was they who occupied many of the administrative and political positions of power. If 63.4 per cent of the population in the Valley is today unemployed, than these new resentments feed into and distort a very old rage.
Raina's film is more successful in showing in a series of images from Charar-e-Sharif shrine, the agony and the faith of the Kashmiri people. The Chrar is the shrine of Sheikh Nuruddin and was gutted in 1995; the security forces as well as the separatist guerrillas blamed each other for the fire. In Raina's film, we see ordinary men and women weeping at the shrine, their hands held open in ardent prayers, tears flowing down their faces. I'll give you my life, dear beloved, of all universe. at In this gesture of prayer, at a shrine which had traditionally been shared by both faiths, what is expressed in the chant is contrition and love. It is easy and tempting to find only innocence there.
There is innocence, but it takes a more surprising form. In the film, we watch as Akhtar Mohiuddin tells Raina of a 'mini short story' he has written. This is a story that I heard repeated many times when I was in Kashmir. Its popularity might be explianed by the fact that it outlines a situation where the loss of innocence is represented not through assault but by the seduction of violence. The story is titled "Terrorist". A woman named Farz Ded is walking down a narrow street. From the opposite end of the street, a police patrol approaches her. Farz Ded's young son starts crying. The commander thinks that the kid is scared and he reassures him. Farz Ded says to the man,'This rogue is not afraid of you. He sees the soldier and cries, 'I want a gun...I want a gun."
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