'They are erasing us. They are erasing our history'

Indie filmmaker Arfat Sheikh was increasingly frustrated by mainstream cinema’s depiction of Kashmir and its people so he decided to make his own. Maroosha Muzaffar reports

- MAROOSHA MUZAFFAR

When he was not even big enough to understand the term “collateral damage”, Arfat Sheikh’s father became that in Kashmir.

A renowned singer and cultural figure, Ghulam Nabi Sheikh was allegedly “disappeared” by police in the northern Indian state of Punjab in 2003.

The grief of losing his father and then never knowing where his remains lay left Sheikh with scars that would not heal. As he grew up in the conflict-torn valley – controlled in part but claimed in whole by India and Pakistan – he kept searching for answers that never came even as the “collateral damage” piled ever higher.

Sheikh found solace in stories. And then, aged 39, he decided to tell his own story of Kashmir. While learning the ropes of filmmaking, Sheikh says the narratives of Kashmir he found in mainstream Indian cinema rankled him because of the absence of Kashmiri voices.

After 2019, when the Indian government repealed an article of the constitution to take away the last remnants of the majority Muslim region’s autonomy, Sheikh says the suppression and erasure of the Kashmiri voice in Bollywood films in particular became severe.

He criticises films such as The Kashmir Files and Pathaan for perpetuating negative stereotypes of Kashmir by focusing solely on violence.

“Our voices are being suppressed and trampled upon. And we aren’t given a platform. We have not been given the agency to tell our stories,” Sheikh tells The Independent. “What’s happening since 2019 with a lot of these Bollywood films, the entire premise starts with ‘terrorism of Kashmir’.”