How Culture Became A Casualty In Afghanistan

Filmmaker Sahraa Karimi was waiting in line at the bank when news of the Taliban entering Kabul spread like wildfire. It was August 15, and the crowd started to run home to safety.

- Himanshi Dhawan

Unable to get a taxi, Karimi started running too — first for home, and then to the airport. She switched on her phone camera and documented the 40-hour ordeal to escape her country. “I want to show the world how everything around us collapsed,” says the 36-year-old who plans to adapt the footage into a film.

Her previous under-production film had to be abandoned along with her home and belongings. Karimi, who is also the first female chairperson of state-run Afghan Film, is worried about fellow filmmakers who have been left behind. “The Taliban is anti-culture. They hate cinema, music, and art,” says the filmmaker who is now living in Ukraine.

Like Karimi, the country’s cultural fraternity is agonising over the books left behind in libraries, abandoned films, unfinished paintings and the priceless collection of more than 80,000 artifacts in Afghanistan’s National Museum. Not without reason, considering the rampage in 2001 and the events of recent months. In July, the Taliban killed a much-loved comic Nazar Mohammad, popularly known as Khasha Zwan, and in August folk singer Fawad Andarabi from Baghlan province was murdered. This week, musical instruments kept at the National Music Institute were found vandalised while Reuters reported how members of the country’s first all-female orchestra smashed their own instruments and burnt performance photos out of fear.