Balance and narratives in IFF Kashmir
Using Griselda Gambaro’s (1992) Information for Foreigners to guide the structure of IFF Kashmir, the first stage in this performance’s development involved a close analysis of the elements from the original text that would be kept or transformed. While the aesthetic strategies of promenade and site-specific theatre in Gambaro’s existing script were elements that I decided to retain without much dilemma (given their emphasis on fragmentation), analysing which of the twenty scenes of the original script would address the outcomes from Cages and MKMZ involved much more meticulous consideration. This consideration involved a reflection around the perspective that the chosen scene would highlight, and on the ways in which notions of victimhood/perpetration/grey zones could be intentionally targeted in each scene. Therefore, after analysing Gambaro’s twenty scenes closely, seven episodes were chosen for the ways in which each of those scenes would address the various dimensions to balance those that were described earlier.
Civil Society
Through Cages and MKMZ I discovered that one dominant narrative, when speaking of civilian experiences in Kashmir, concerns accounts of acts of violence that are committed against civilians by government Armed Forces and by militant groups. Work from Cages suggested that it would be imperative to include the perspective of women’s experiences in Kashmir’s conflicts; work from MKMZ suggested that the dominant narrative of enforced disappearances would also be an issue that needed to be included in IFF Kashmir. With these two dominant civilian narratives in mind, two scenes from Gambaro’s play seemed to contain possibilities for adaptation. The first of these scenes involves a conversation between an unidentified man and woman. An ambiguous text with many subtextual references to torture and misogyny, this scene was used as the prologue and final scene of IFF Kashmir; videos of these episodes can be found on the next page. The second of these dominant narratives, that of enforced disappearances, also took inspiration from Gambaro’s existing script, in which the mother and the father of the same family are ‘taken’ by forces wielding weapons. Our adaptation of this scene vis-à-vis Kashmir’s specific context can be found in the video of scene 5 on the next page.
In terms of the grey zones within Civil Society, my own observations in Kashmir led me to consider the ways in which some civilians become implicit with the very structures of violence, discipline, and punishment that they attribute to the violations of the Armed Forces and militant groups. Therefore, I decided to keep the scene in Gambaro’s play that functions as a dramatic adaptation of the Milgram experiment, underscoring the ways in which even the most ‘banal’ of circumstances and people could become mechanisms for torture (see scene 1 on the next page). In addition to this scene, which looks to address the grey zones of Civil Society, IFF Kashmir also incorporates a prologue in which a video was played to audience members as they arrived. In this video, the ‘victimised’ woman in scene 7 and her male perpetrator reverse their roles – that is, the man is the one being victimised by the woman. Using this role reversal in addition to non-specific costumes – in neither scene was the ‘perpetrator’ dressed in clothes that implied an association with a particular armed group or the government – choices around the prologue and scene 7 were made so as to perform the grey zones within Kashmir Civil Society, that is, relational/lateral acts of violence that have a strong basis in gender.
The choices described above sought to calibrate narratives from the grey zones between and within each identity grouping, not to mention the dominant and less dominant narratives from each of these groupings. Furthermore, the choices for the scenes in IFF Kashmir were influenced by the concepts of fragmentation, affect, and target audience – each of which manifested in different ways. While fragmentation was inherent to Gambaro’s text and the importance of target audience choices emerged when IFF Kashmir was workshopped on the ground (more on this later), the affective component was highlighted through the posing of questions, rather than answers or solutions, in each of the above-mentioned scenes.
A role reversal of scene 7: the (non-specific) man as ‘victim’; the (non-specific) woman as ‘perpetrator’. Question posed by the scene: How do we interpret the gender-based acts of oppression and violence that occur in Kashmir, often obscured under the master narratives of war?
A scene based on Gambaro’s dramatic adaptation of the Milgram experiment. Question posed by the scene: How does the ‘common person’ become complicit with acts of violence?
A scene that speaks to the migration of Kashmiri Pandits from the region. Question posed by the scene: How can we begin to understand the identity-related-baggage that is carried by Kashmiri Pandits?
A scene that speaks to the experiences of Kashmiri artists during the militancy. Question posed by the scene: Where is the space for creative expression when the ‘powers that be’ suffocate artists with different kinds of censorship?
A scene that speaks to the experiences of different Ex-militants. Question posed by the scene: How do we (mis)trust those who have decided to put down their arms?
A scene that speaks to the enforced disappearances of civilians who are suspected (as Militants) by government Armed Forces. Question posed by the scene: What is ‘justice’ for those who will never know what has become of their loved ones?
A scene that speaks to fratricide among soldiers in the Indian Armed Forces. Question posed by the scene: How do we educate soldiers differently, to make them more conscious of their own tipping points?
The (non-specific) woman as ‘victim’; the (non-specific) man as ‘perpetrator’. Question posed by the scene: How do we interpret the gender-based acts of oppression and violence that occur in Kashmir, which are often obscured under the master narratives of war?
Militants/Ex-militants
When speaking about Kashmiris who have been or are involved in the militancy, one of the dominant narratives to include is the ways in which the militancy has ‘failed’ – the ways in which these groups and individuals have been penetrated by various forms of corruption and been insidiously taken over by various stakeholders toward different ends. To address this particular narrative I decided to create a scene that would take place in a prison (this element stayed true to a strategy employed by Gambaro in one of her scenes); however, by using the texts that were generated in MKMZ, Gambaro’s scene functions in IFF Kashmir only as a point of departure. This scene showcases four different kinds of Militants/Ex-militants: one has joined the militancy for ‘pragmatic’ reasons; one maintains his passion for his cause despite being imprisoned and tortured; one speaks about the discrimination he faces from his family/community when he returns from Pakistan with a wife from there; one speaks to how he has been framed by the government. These monologues are witnessed by a woman who is searching for a husband she has not seen in many years – a husband she is not sure she will recognise (video of scene 4 on the next page).
However, MKMZ taught me that such narratives of complexity within the militant experience cannot be isolated from the acts of violence that some Militants/Ex-Militants have committed against civilians. Therefore, while scene 5 speaks to a dominant narrative about Civil Society (i.e., enforced disappearances), this scene also features perpetrators that represent the Ikhwans – militants who have ‘sold out’ to the Indian government. Similarly, scene 3 places militants as perpetrators in relation to the narratives of Kashmiri Pandits in the region. These communities are (contentiously) said to have been persecuted when there was an upsurge in the militancy in the early 1990s.
The dominant yet contentious narrative of Kashmiri Pandits’ victimisation at the hands of militant groups (a subsection of civilian experience)
The dominant narrative of Militants who persecuted Kashmiri Pandits
The grey zones of power politics within militant outfits
The grey zones between civilian and militant narratives vis-à-vis Kashmiri Pandits – that is, the members of civil society who either agreed with militant groups threatening the Hindus and/or provided in-kind support to Militants
The dominant narrative of Kashmiri artists’ victimisation at the hands of government forces (a subsection of civilian experience)
The dominant narrative of government officials who crack down on civilians with whom they disagree
The dominant narratives of the framed militant and the idealistic militant
The grey-zones militants who joined the militancy for reasons other than idealism
The grey zone that includes perspectives of Ex-Militants’ wives/families
The grey zone between civil society and the government forces: the Kashmiri who guards the prison who has his own set of biases and prejudices
The dominant narratives of controversies surrounding the disappeared in Kashmir
The dominant narrative of government forces and Ikhwans who perpetrate these disappearances
The grey zone between Militants and the Armed Forces that is occupied by the Ikhwans – militants turned government agents
The grey zones of soldiers in the Armed Forces who find themselves ‘lost’ in a conflict in which many see them as ‘occupiers’
The grey zones of a military/government structure that has no place for the voice of the individual soldier
The grey zones of gender-based violence within Civil Society
The dominant narrative of civilians’ (particularly women’s) victimisation by various parties who have power – mostly the government forces
Indian Armed Forces
When speaking about the Armed Forces in Kashmir, the dominant narrative that emerged through Cages and MKMZ as needing to be included in any theatrical performance about the region concerned the various human rights violations against civilians that are said/documented to have been committed by soldiers. Therefore, Scene 3 – by using a scene from Gambaro as a point of departure – implicates the government authorities that persecuted artists. Scene 4 implicates a Kashmiri security officer who occupies a position as both ‘oppressor’ (in working for the state) and ‘oppressed’ (in being Kashmiri). Scene 5 also implicates state officers who are involved in buying off militants and enforcing the disappearances of anyone who might be considered a potential threat.
While there were many possible ways to incorporate the narratives in which Armed Forces’ soldiers could be represented as perpetrators, speaking to ways in which we might consider that the ‘grey zone’ of the solider experience was far more complex. As an Indian national myself, I had to be extremely cautious in how I approached any potential ‘victimisation’ of government soldiers – since these attempts could easily have been misinterpreted by Kashmiri audiences as being evidence of my own propaganda. In thinking about this, I found potential in a particular scene in Gambaro’s play in which she creates the character of the Child Monster who plays a child’s game with his peers, only to end the game by shooting his peers and himself with a fake gun. While Gambaro uses this scene to speak about intergenerational trauma, I asked myself whether the grey zones of the soldier experience might be conveyed through this strategy of child’s play and deviation from sanity. Since ‘fratricides’ – phenomena in which soldiers in the Indian Army shoot themselves and their counterparts in occurrences that are attributed to post-traumatic stress disorder – are said to be growing in number in Kashmir, Gambaro’s scene is adapted in IFF Kashmir to centre on soldiers engaged in ‘play’ – ‘play’ that culminates in devastating consequences. The video of scene 6 can be found on the next page.
Next: Workshopping IFF Kashmir
Grey zones within civilian experience:
Prologue & Scene 7 (similar perspectives)
Scene 1
Grey zones within Militant/Ex-militant experience:
Scene 2
Scene 4 (2 dimensions)
Grey zones within Armed Forces’ Experience:
Scene 6 (2 dimensions)
Dominant narratives of civilian experience:
Scene 7 (similar perspectives)
Scene 2 (victimisation of Kashmiri Hindus by Militants)
Scene 3 & Scene 5 (Civil Society victimisation by government forces)
Dominant narratives of Militant/Ex-Militant experience:
Scene 2
Scene 4 (2 dimensions)
Dominant narratives of government forces’ experience:
Scene 3
Scene 5
Scene 7
Grey zones between Civil Society and Militants/Ex-militants:
Scene 2
Grey zones between Civil Society and government forces:
Scene 4
Grey zones between Militants/Ex-militants and the Armed Forces:
Scene 5