An Indie filmmaker seeks to challenge Bollywood narrative on Kashmir
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Arfat Sheikh became increasingly frustrated by mainstream movies’ representation of Kashmir and its people – so he decided to make his own. Maroosha Muzaffar reports. When he was not even big enough to understand the term “collateral damage”, Arfat Sheikh’s father became that in Kashmir.
![[‘Saffron Kingdom’ shoot]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/11/26/09/Screenshot-2024-11-26-at-2.58.36-PM.jpg)
A renowned singer and cultural figure, Ghulam Nabi Sheikh was killed in the 1990s by “unidentified gunmen”, a term used in newspapers through the decades when the anti-India insurgency was at its peak in the Himalayan valley and identifying the perpetrators of violence a risky proposition.
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After 2019, when the Indian government repealed an article of the constitution to take away the last remnants of the majority Muslim region’s autonomy, Sheikh says the suppression and erasure of the Kashmiri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.
