An introduction
In a true war story, if there’s a moral at all, it’s like the thread that makes the cloth. You can’t tease it out. You can’t extract the meaning without unravelling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there’s nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe ‘Oh’. (Tim O’Brien, quoted in Balfour 2012, 35).
My work with theatre in times and places of war began more than ten years ago, in northern Uganda. Since then, as my research and practice have evolved, my theatre-based interventions in conflict and post-conflict zones have taken place in a number of different capacities: as a student, researcher, workshop facilitator, director, and writer. While my first few years of theatre-in-war research were framed by being a complete outsider to the contexts in which I intervened, the struggles and ethical implications that came from being in that position led to my return to India in 2008. And once I was ‘home’, given my intention to continue my work in conflict zones, it was perhaps only natural that a year later – in 2009 – I made my first trip to the region of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).
My initial visits to Kashmir in 2009 and, later, in 2012 led to the observation of a three-pronged division that consistently emerged in narratives surrounding the conflicts in the region – a division that seemed to separate J&K into three groups that are defined by larger perceptions of ‘victimhood’ and ‘perpetration’:
- Civil Society: an umbrella term that is used to encompass those who were or are ‘victims’ of violence but are unlikely to have used violence themselves.
- Militants/Ex-militants: individuals who use or have used violence as a strategy and are or were not (explicitly, at least) supported by the Indian government. I particularly mention the Indian government here since the Pakistani government’s involvement with Militant/Ex-militant groups in Kashmir is an entirely different area of study.
- Armed Forces: Indian government soldiers who are stationed in the Indian-Administered area of J&K and are often accused of perpetrating acts of violence against civilians and (suspected) Militants/Ex-militants.1
What began as initial observations soon morphed into a doctoral project, which led me to return to Kashmir in 2013 and 2014 to investigate the use of theatre practice in engagements across the ‘victim’/‘perpetrator’ binary in the Kashmir Valley. Information for Foreigners: Chronicles from Kashmir (IFF Kashmir) grew out of this doctoral work and took place in collaboration with a theatre company2 in Srinagar in July 2015.
From its inception, therefore, my work in Kashmir has sought theatrically to explore the space between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’: what Primo Levi (quoted in Agamben 1999, 21) puts forward as the ‘gray zone’, a space in which ‘the “long chain of conjunction between victim and executioner” comes loose, where the oppressed becomes oppressor and the executioner in turn appears as victim’ (Agamben 1999, 21, in part quoting Levi). It is important to clarify, however, that my work does not seek to apply the term grey zones strictly in Levi’s terms. Instead, Levi’s proposition functions as a point of departure to encapsulate spaces that are nebulous, unclear, and not black or white. My theatrical interventions ask what these grey zones are in Kashmir and how theatre might facilitate an exploration of them.
My early work in Kashmir revealed that any manner of cross-community interaction between Civil Society, Militants/Ex-militants, and the Armed Forces in J&K is near impossible for the region’s locals to undertake because of the ‘gazes’ that many Kashmiris (I learned in interviews and conversations) perceive themselves to be at the receiving end of: the gaze of the Indian government, the gaze of the Pakistani government, the gaze of Militants, and the gaze of Civil Society. Being subject to varying kinds and degrees of, what might be called, ‘surveillance’ coalesces with each Kashmiri’s personal affiliations to the region’s conflicts, creating an amalgamation of causes that makes cross-community work between ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ groups extremely dangerous for local artists to undertake. Outsider theatre practitioners therefore, while subject to other kinds of risks, find themselves presented with avenues for cross-community work that might not be available for Kashmiri creators. As James Thompson (2003, 20) has pointed out, ‘One of applied theatre’s strengths is in its status as the outsider, the visitor and the guest.’
Of course, a theatrical exploration of the grey zones between victimhood and perpetration in an active conflict zone like Kashmir immediately becomes intertwined with the identity politics embodied by researchers/practitioners: their context and the manner in which they position themselves with regard to the conflicts. I must acknowledge here the complicated intracultural (Bharucha 1993) identity politics: my relationship to a nation that is seen by some as a ‘colonial oppressor’ in Kashmir, my presence as a woman in a context that is dominated by men and maleness, my history as someone with Hindu familial ties in a primarily Muslim context, and in the use of a common second language to communicate with local collaborators.3 Such intracultural affinities and fractures between myself as researcher and my Kashmiri co-creators, interviewees, and spectators results in an inside/outside positioning that both helps and hinders my artistic research in the region.
An overview of Kashmir 4
While there are multiple (conflicting) histories of Kashmir that are available, the overview below speaks to the socio-political context as I have come to understand it over my years of artistic research in the region. I do not claim that this is the ‘correct’ history: it is simply one way of approaching a complex array of narratives and has emerged through conversations, workshops, and performances in the region.
Commonly referred to as J&K, the ‘Indian’5 state of Jammu and Kashmir includes the regions of Jammu, Ladakh, and Kashmir. The three regions are divided across religious lines: Jammu consists of a Hindu majority population, Ladakh has a Buddhist majority, while Kashmir is the only state in India that contains a Muslim majority. While Ladakh is involved in territorial disputes between the governments of India and China, the question of Jammu’s national affiliation is often brought up in debates surrounding what it would mean to have a ‘free’ Kashmir – it has been postulated that the Hindu dominated Jammu would prefer to stay with the government of India. When Kashmir is spoken of, therefore, one is usually referring to the Kashmir Valley, the Muslim dominated region in J&K. Similarly, when this writing refers to Kashmir, I refer specifically to the valley and do not include the regions of Jammu and Ladakh within the auspices of the term.
‘Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, explains the importance of Kashmir thus: “We have always regarded the Kashmir problem as symbolic for us, as it has far-reaching consequences in India. Kashmir is symbolic as it illustrates that we are a secular state”’ (Menon 2013, 168 quoting Nehru). Nehru pledged that a referendum would be held ‘when peace and law and order have been established’ (Nehru quoted in Menon 2013, 168) in Kashmir, giving Kashmiris the chance to vote on the region’s national affiliation – that is, whether it would remain under the auspices of the Indian nation state. However, this promised plebiscite has yet to happen and Indian leaders who have followed Nehru have stated that the referendum will be implemented only after Pakistan withdraws its troops from the parts of Kashmir that the latter administers/occupies. In addition, any talk of a plebiscite in Kashmir also brings up a number of additional questions: Are Jammu and Ladakh also included in the referendum? What options would the plebiscite present: staying with or separating from India; remaining with, becoming part of, or breaking away from Pakistan; attaining an independent Kashmiri nation state; or some or all of these options? Since 1947, therefore, Kashmir has been the focal point of many conflicts. At an international level, there have been multiple disputes between the governments of India and Pakistan as to the frontiers of Kashmir, culminating in the creation of a Line of Control (LoC) after the Indo-Pak War of 1972. This line separates Indian-Administered Kashmir from Pakistan-Administered Kashmir and, currently, is a line across which Indian and Pakistani security forces engage in combat.6 At a local, regional, and national level, there are various conflicts at play in Kashmir: political disputes between the Indian central government leadership and the leaders of different political parties in Kashmir;7 violent disputes between Kashmiri civilians and the Indian government’s soldiers stationed in Kashmir; disputes between militants/separatists and the government’s forces/civilians, and so on. Therefore, given the many conflicts that are in motion, I must clarify that this overview about Kashmir does not focus on ‘the interstate dimension (India-Pakistan) of the conflict, but rather on the intrastate dimension (India-Kashmir) of it’ (Munshi 2013, 252).
When considering the intrastate dimensions of Kashmir, then, there are three primary categories/groups into which people are generally seen as being divided: Civil Society, Militants/Ex-militants, and the Indian Armed Forces. There are of course various multifaceted affiliations within each of these larger community groups; however, one’s political position (as a ‘mainland’8 Indian) vis-à-vis Kashmir is often denoted by which of these three groups one interacts with. Generally speaking, those who maintain links with Civil Society are assumed to hold views against all agents that use violence, albeit with different ideas as to where Kashmir belongs; those who are keen to understand the points of view of Militants are usually automatically classified as being pro-azadi or pro-Pakistan,9 and those who maintain relationships with the Indian government’s Armed Forces are immediately termed agents of India who are looking to subvert the Kashmiri freedom/pro-Pakistan movement. While the conflicts in Kashmir continue, much of the rest of India remains oblivious to the complexities of the ongoing violence in the area.10 Rudimentary (often, biased) media reports and the geographical isolation of Kashmir have led to a widespread lack of awareness in the rest of the nation about the many nuances to the conflicts. Kashmir is spoken of either in simplistic terms as an India–Pakistan conflict or as a war zone where the sole perpetrators are the Militants/Armed Forces because of their acts of violence; and, more recently, Kashmir has come to be touted as a tourist’s paradise, with conscious attempts to eliminate narratives of violence. In the midst of this cacophony of opinions, the average non-Kashmiri Indian has very little access to any variety of experience when considering Kashmir. With incredible pressure to take a stand – whether pro-Indian, pro-Pakistani, or pro-azadi – Indians from the mainland either do not have an opinion about ‘the Kashmir issue’ or, when they/we do, are expected to choose a side. The idea of looking at the conflicts in Kashmir as multidirectional, or as relational, is uncommon: partly for fear of repercussions from ‘Other’ groups and partly because of a grave lack of information. There is a lack here, therefore, an absence of efforts that seek to explore and understand the different points of view that are at play when talking about the Kashmir issue. It is this lack, this grey zone, that my artistic research seeks to fill, through the use of theatre.
Next: The building blocks