The building blocks
The content for IFF Kashmir emerged over the course of 2013 and 2014 through two performances that were devised during month-long theatre workshops with the theatre company with which I always collaborate. The first of these performances (Pinjare; Cages) spoke to the experiences of Kashmiri women; the second performance (Meri Kahami Meri Zabani; My Story My Words; MKMZ) spoke to the narratives of some ex-militants in the region. Cages and MKMZ were integral to the creation of IFF Kashmir and the feedback that these two performances received from spectators and co-creators was seminal in my considerations of how to interweave narratives of victimhood, perpetration, and the grey zones in IFF Kashmir. While I have analysed Cages and MKMZ in other work (Dinesh 2015a, 2015b, 2015c), overviews of the two performances are also given below.
The theatre company in Srinagar is housed in a two-storey building with multiple rooms: smaller rooms that function as sleeping quarters for actors, larger spaces that are suitable for workshops and intimate performances and locations that serve as kitchen, storage spaces, and washrooms. While the theatre company has since acquired both stories of the building, during Cages, we only had access to about five rooms (including the veranda). With Cages #1 and #2 using two spaces each, and with just the right number of performers to function as two households, the decision was made to invite only two spectator-participants to each performance. Furthermore, given that Cages sought to give spectator-participants an embodied insight into Kashmiri women’s experiences, our target spectators were men from the region – though, on two occasions, particular spectators requested that their female colleagues also be invited to the piece.
Cage #1
Situated at the entrance to the house – on the veranda and right inside the front door – is an installation depicting the story of a young girl who at the tender age of three saw her entire family being gunned down. Frightened, the girl sought refuge in a chicken coop in her family’s backyard; haunted by the trauma of what she had seen, she made the chicken coop her home as the years went by. Cared for by her older sister, who had to put her life on hold to take care of her younger sister, this story explores the relationship between these two young women. The girl in the cage is the first image that greets the two audience members when they arrive; while the guests progress onward to the other journeys in the play, the two young women continue living out their day – punctuating the other two households’ events in the mohalla (neighbourhood) (below) with occasional sounds, shrieks, and visits.
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Cage #2
One audience member is ushered in by an actor. ‘Where have you been my sister, Shazia?’, he tells the audience member, ‘everyone is waiting for you. We must go inside.’ Immediately understanding that s/he has been given a character in the play, the audience member enters the building with the actor playing his/her brother and is taken into a room, which s/he soon understands is his/her maternal home.
The audience member is asked to wear bridal clothes and await her father-in-law who will now be coming to see her.
The bride is visited by her father-in-law who negotiates with her brother the ‘gifts’ that need to be given to him and his son. The word ‘dowry’ is never used, but the bride knows that it is her price that is being negotiated and it is up to her how she (as the active audience) reacts to this situation. An agreement is reached between the two men, and the bride is then taken by her brother and left at her in-laws’ home (another room in the building). She begins to realise that her husband is not around and that no one seems to know where he is.
The bride is made to change out of her bridal clothes into more everyday female attire, and is put to work in her new home – cleaning rice, washing vessels, sewing shirts, making chai (tea) – all the while listening to her in-laws talk about her husband, the husband who has still not been seen.
When an actor playing a ‘border guide’ comes to the bride’s new home, she realises that her new husband has decided to cross the border to Pakistan. He sends her a letter and money to his parents and asks that his new wife send him a letter in return. The visitor (the guide) leaves and the bride has to return to work in her new home.
A little while later, the visitor returns, takes the bride’s father-in-law out of the room, and tells him that his son has been martyred. The bride hears this through the door and when her father-in-law returns into the home – broken – all he tells her is, ‘There has been some bad news. We need to do a Khatam Sharif to pray for your husband.’ [Khatam Sharif is a ritual in Islam that was said to represent a prayer for peace in Kashmir.]
Through all these stories, actions continue to take place in the hallways between the rooms where the audience/brides are. Creating the mohalla atmosphere, the actors continue interacting with one another in their characters, even though the audience members are not watching them. This leads to sounds from one conversation invading other spaces, enabling the audience member always to be aware that there are many other stories that are happening around him/her. S/he is just one more story.
The audience members are led to the prayers (in another room) and are made to stay in the women’s space of the Khatam Sharif while the men lead the prayer on the other side of the room that has been divided by a curtain. Acutely aware of being separated from the men even within this pious context, the audience/brides are ushered out of the room once the prayers end.
The actor who ushered the audience member back through the hallway and veranda that s/he initially entered through, now asks him/her to take off the women’s clothing that s/he has worn over his/her own attire, and thanks him/her for coming.
As the audience members leave, they see the two girls again, continuing with their lives that are centred around the chicken coop …
Audience is taken to Room 2 where a young man repeatedly writes ‘I am not …’ on scattered pieces of paper while singing Kailash Kher’s (2006) song ‘Lauta do, lauta do, Kashmir dobara’ (Return Kashmir to me again).
Audience is taken to Room 3 (‘The Idealist Monologue’), where they witness a monologue by an ideologue ex-militant. This monologue could be summed up by the character’s line, ‘I am not ashamed of what I did. Yes, some mistakes happened but we were fighting for Kashmir.’
Audience is taken to Room 4 where they see a young man trying to talk, while shackled, who says repeatedly, ‘We are helpless people, we cannot do anything for our lives.’ The line came from an interview about one individual’s experience as an ex-militant in Kashmir. The action was devised in response to an interviewee’s accounts of his time in prison.
Audience is taken to Room 5 (‘The Framed Monologue’): a monologue about a young man who is a ‘paper militant’; someone who was never involved in the militancy but was seen hosting a militant in his home and, thus, was branded one himself.
Audience is taken to Room 6 where three characters in an asylum repeat the phrases ‘I am not Hindustani. I am not Pakistani. Then who am I?’ The piece was created in response to a general sentiment in the interviews: that Kashmiris are stuck between the larger state powers of India and Pakistan while not identifying completely with either.
Audience is taken to Room 7 (‘The Returned Monologue’): a monologue by a young Pakistani woman who married a Kashmiri militant across the border who has returned to his homeland. In her words, ‘I keep lecturing my husband and telling him, you have done this to yourself. We could have stayed there and had a better life but instead you kept saying: “We’ll go to Kashmir, We’ll go to Kashmir”’.
Cage #3
The other audience member is ushered in by another actor. ‘Where have you been my sister, Shahista?’, he tells the audience member, ‘You can’t go wandering off like this before your wedding! You need to come inside immediately. Your new family is going to come soon.’ Immediately understanding that s/he has been given a character in the play, the audience member enters the building with the actor playing his/her brother and is taken into a room, which s/he soon understands is his/her maternal home.
Also given bridal clothes, the second audience member dresses him-/herself as a bride and is visited by her father-in-law who negotiates with her brother the ‘gifts’ that need to be given to the bride’s new husband. The word ‘dowry’ is never used, but the bride knows it is her price that is being negotiated and it is up to her how she reacts to this situation.
An agreement is reached between the two men and the bride is then taken by her brother to be left at her in-law’s home (another room in the building). She begins to realise that her husband is not around and that no one seems to know where he is. Her father-in-law and brother find out eventually that he has been ‘taken away’ by unidentified men; they have no idea where he is. Now considered part of her husband’s home, her brother leaves the bride there and tells her to become a part of her new family.
The postman soon comes bearing a letter, a letter in which the bride’s new husband asks for a divorce. From the letter, it is understood that the young man was taken away by Indian forces, has moved to mainland India, and now has a new wife – or at least, that’s what the letter says.
The bride is made to change out of her bridal clothes into more everyday female attire, and is put to work in her new home – cleaning rice, washing vessels, sewing shirts, making chai (tea) – forced to do what her father-in-law tells her to. And if she refuses, well, her character and that of her family could be called into question.
The bride’s brother is asked to come back; he must now take her home again. In the midst of this heart-breaking conversation between the bride’s brother and her father-in-law – again, a conversation that she is a passive witness to – a visitor comes to tell them of the death of a neighbour’s son and that they must come to the Khatam Sharif that is to be held in his honour. Resolving to clear up the details later, the men guide the young wife into the space where the Khatam Sharif will take place.
