Our cinema will have our fragrance

After premiering ‘Aks-e-Ghalib: Dast-e-Shifa’, which imagines Ghalib’s genius emerging from Kashmir, writer-director Arsh Mushtaq lays out a blueprint for a cinema rooted in Kashmir’s own stories, theatre and vision.

Days before the International Film Festival of Jammu & Kashmir drew the attention of the film world, a small invited audience gathered at a Srinagar cinema hall for a premiere that may have been the week’s more significant event.

The Kashmiri-language film Aks-e-Ghalib: Dast-e-Shifa brings Mirza Ghalib into a Kashmiri linguistic, aesthetic and intellectual universe. It explores what the great poet might have become had his imagination emerged from Kashmir.

We spoke with its writer-director, Arsh Mushtaq, about Ghalib and the making of the film, and then about the larger question his answers kept returning to: What should Kashmiri cinema be?

With Aks-e-Ghalib behind you, what does Kashmiri cinema need most right now?

It needs to find its roots.

Finding roots means understanding the intellectual, literary, theatrical and visual traditions from which our imagination has emerged, which is a different task from indulging nostalgia or reproducing the past.

Kashmir has always been a land of stories, poetry, philosophy, satire and argument. Our stories have travelled far beyond Kashmir and crossed languages, kingdoms and civilisations. Somewhere along the way, we came to believe that cinema has to imitate somebody else’s grammar to look contemporary.

I disagree with that belief.

We have to learn the grammar of cinema, certainly, and eventually speak it with our own accent. Our cinema will have our fragrance.

A young Kashmiri picks up a phone and says she wants to be a filmmaker. What do you tell her?

I would tell her first that filmmaking is the opposite of a shortcut to fame. A mobile phone, a drone and an editing application are tools, and a filmmaker is something larger.

Today, anybody can shoot something beautiful, make a reel or fly a drone over a landscape. Cinema is the ability to understand why an image needs to exist, which goes beyond the ability to capture it.

If you seriously want to become a filmmaker, learn the craft. Study cinematography, editing, sound, production design, acting and dramaturgy. If possible, go to film school. Work on sets, assist people, make mistakes and watch films critically.

Cinema also draws on sources far beyond cinema. You have to read. You have to know literature, and you have to understand history, mythology, philosophy, poetry and society, so that you develop a mind that can see through things.

The camera records what is in front of it, but the filmmaker must see what is underneath it.

Literature keeps coming up. Do you see it as essential to filmmaking?

Absolutely. Before there were cameras, there were storytellers. Our storytelling traditions are enormous. Our tradition gave us Gunadhya, whose Brihatkatha became the source material that, translated into Pali and Sanskrit, became the Kathasaritsagara, the Panchatantra and the Jataka traditions. It also reached the Persian Kalila wa Dimna and the Arab Hazaar Dastaan.

These stories travelled among nations and languages and were translated, transformed and retold in different cultures.

What is remarkable about them is that they were far more than children’s entertainment. A simple animal story could contain an entire philosophy of human behaviour.

That is the storytelling inheritance we have.

So when a young filmmaker tells me, “I want to make films,” my next question is: What do you read?

A shallow intellectual world eventually reveals itself in the cinema.

Should Kashmiri cinema, then, stay with Kashmiri stories?

Far from it. That would be another type of limitation. We should adapt world literature and engage with Shakespeare, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Tagore, Ghalib and countless other writers and traditions. Borrowing a story is entirely legitimate.

The question is: What happens to that story when it passes through us?

A character can come from Russia, England, Persia or Delhi. When that character begins to speak our language, inhabit our aesthetic world and experience the emotional reality of our society, something new happens.

The source may be universal, and the experience becomes ours. That is where adaptation becomes meaningful.

Is that the path you took with Ghalib?

Precisely.

My aim was to ask, and claiming that Ghalib was historically Kashmiri would be absurd. I was asking an imaginative question: What if Ghalib’s intellectual and poetic universe had emerged from Kashmir? What would his temperament be? How would he inhabit space? How would he experience grief? How would his silences sound? How would his poetry acquire the colour of Kashmiri life?

The film goes beyond bringing Ghalib to Kashmir. It asks what Kashmir might have done to Ghalib.

The Kashmiri translation of his poetry must be central to that idea.

Very important. Showkat Shifa’s translations were conceived as poetry, with literal word-for-word substitution far from the goal. Replacing every word of an Urdu or Persian poem with its Kashmiri equivalent produces something short of a translation of poetry. Poetry holds music, cadence, temperament, cultural memory and thought.

The Kashmiri Ghalib therefore had to sound like poetry in Kashmiri while retaining the philosophical and emotional core of Ghalib. That is where translation becomes transformation. Ghalib remains Ghalib and begins to breathe differently.

The film also invokes Ghani Kashmiri. Why bring him in?

Literary traditions are rarely isolated. Ghani Kashmiri belongs to the enormous Persian poetic heritage of Kashmir, and his reputation goes far beyond the valley. The reference to Ghani creates an interesting literary bridge. It allows us to imagine that poetic traditions often spread without formal declarations, and sometimes they spread through admiration, memory, influence and echoes.

I was interested in that invisible connection. It also shows that Kashmir stood in close contact with the great intellectual movements around it. Kashmir participated in them.

You describe Kashmir as a society of thinkers. How should that show up in the language of film?

It should influence the entire craft. The pace of a film is more than an editing decision, because it can emerge from a culture’s relationship with time. We have inherited a particular relationship with contemplation, observation and restraint. Our cinema can choose restraint over shouting.

There can be drama in a standstill, conflict in silence, humour in irony and tragedy in a person’s inability to speak. I am interested in a cinema that trusts the intelligence of its audience.

Does that put you at odds with popular, entertaining cinema?

I welcome entertainment. What I question is the assumption that entertainment is the only purpose of cinema. Our cinema can entertain and provoke thought as well. I would like to see more satire and less slapstick, more observation and less exhibition, more content and less noise.

We have a long tradition of satire in Kashmir. Bhaand Pather, for example, has always understood that laughter can be an extremely powerful political and social instrument. There is a difference between making people laugh and making people think through laughter.

You return often to Bhaand Pather. How important is theatre to the future of Kashmiri cinema?

Extremely important. Our theatre has survived because it holds something deeper than performance technique: a worldview. It understands space, music, satire, improvisation, collective performance and direct communication with an audience.

My task is to understand the principles behind traditional theatre forms and reinvent them for contemporary audiences, rather than revive them exactly as they were. Cinema can do the same. We can take the spirit of our traditions into a contemporary cinematic language.

You also speak about Kashmir’s visual heritage. What should filmmakers do with it?

We have to start treating Kashmir as more than a landscape. The valley is more than mountains, snow and lakes. We have architecture, woodwork, textiles, crafts, gardens, calligraphy, colour, light, interiors, windows, roofs, shrines, bridges and an extraordinary relationship between built space and nature.

These are cinematic resources, and our cinema should develop its own visual vocabulary from them.

Placing traditional objects in a frame to announce, “This is Kashmir,” becomes decorative. The deeper question is: Can our aesthetics influence the way we compose a frame? Can Kashmiri architecture influence blocking? Can our colours influence cinematography? Can our spatial traditions influence production design? Can our crafts influence texture? That is when aesthetics becomes language.

Where is the line between a film made “in Kashmir” and a “Kashmiri film”?

A film can be shot entirely in Kashmir and remain Kashmiri only in its location. A Kashmiri film must hold something of our way of seeing. It should emerge from our language, emotional landscape, humour, conflicts, memories and relationship with the world.

A Kashmiri film need not contain pherans, kangris, snow and traditional houses, because those belong to the surface. The deeper question is: Does the film think like us? Does it feel like us?

You call filmmaking a responsibility in Kashmir. Why?

Our representational responsibility is greater. When a society has limited control over its own image, others inevitably become its interpreters. Outsiders have photographed, documented, written about and represented Kashmir for generations.

Outsiders are free to tell stories, and we also need the confidence and capability to tell our own. We have to tell our stories ourselves, and we should bring our own complexity rather than reproduce somebody else’s idea of Kashmir.

That means our pain, humour, contradictions, ordinary lives, dreams, conflicts and moral dilemmas. We have to become authors of our own image.

When you say a universal story can become a Kashmiri story, what happens in that transformation?

Human emotions are universal, while their expression varies. Love, grief, betrayal, loneliness and conflict are universal. The way a Kashmiri experiences and expresses them is formed by our particular history, geography, language and culture.

Take Shakespeare. Making Shakespeare “Kashmiri” takes more than changing the names of the characters. We need to understand the human conflict within Shakespeare and ask what that conflict means in our world.

Then something extraordinary can happen: the character may belong to another literature, and his pain begins to resemble ours.

Does the same principle run through your larger body of work?

Yes. I have always been interested in the meeting point between the local and the universal. The hyperlocal can be more universal because it is specific. A generic story designed to appeal to the whole world can end up belonging to nobody.

A deeply rooted story about a particular place, person and emotional reality lets audiences elsewhere recognise themselves in it.

That is the paradox of culture: the more honestly local you become, the greater your possibility of becoming universal.

What should young Kashmiri filmmakers aspire to?

Begin by asking, “What do I have to say?” rather than “What will get views?” Begin with the story rather than the drone shot, and with the thought rather than the colour grade. Ask what Kashmir means to you rather than how to make Kashmir look beautiful.

Read deeply, watch seriously, learn the craft, understand your history and study theatre. Listen to old people, observe ordinary people, walk through your own streets, look at your architecture and listen to your language.

Most importantly, develop the courage to have your own voice.

Finally, if you could define the future of Kashmiri cinema in one thought, what would it be?

We need to move from making films in Kashmir to creating a cinema of Kashmir. That means a cinema rooted in our storytelling traditions and free to grow beyond them, and a cinema open to the world and original in voice.

It should be capable of adapting Shakespeare, Ghalib, Chekhov or any great literature while passing those stories through the sieve of our own language, aesthetics and experience.

It is a cinema that can be grand in presentation and thought, just as our theatre has always aspired to be, and above all a cinema that holds our fragrance.

Cinema is about what we show the world and, more deeply, about how we see the world. I believe Kashmir has been seeing the world for a very long time.