The Map is not the Territory - The Kashmir Files, and Mourid Barghouti
'It's also fine...'
In terms of frequency, this newsletter is erratic. I feel the prick of guilt when I’ve not written to you for more than a couple of days, because of work, or other responsibilities. This dissolves usually when I start writing here. But sometime back, I adopted the word errata rather than erratic, as a way of thinking about this writing. Errata (singular, eratum) is a list of errors in a printed work discovered after printing and shown with corrections. Editors print erratas in editions of famous publications. This is also a kind of form, like an appendix, an essay, or even a poem.
It occurred to me that even a text could be seen as illustrating a perceived inconsistency, something that unsettles, perhaps with great beauty, a pattern of presumed reality. This is not very different from the conception of a ‘beautiful mistake’, an idea that I have discussed here in the past, in the context of music. Any inventor or artist will tell you about the value of making mistakes, of regarding them, merely as temporary aberrations, that open up a different perspective. So, perhaps, Poetly is that, a way of looking at mistakes, or making mistakes so as to learn, but doing even that, with some attention, giving momentary context and meaning to things that are broken.
***
Like you, I have been reading about The Kashmir Files, and seeing liberal commentators lambast it. I have been watching, with horror the startling mobilisations of hatred that have surfaced around this media product. I watched the film, and it left me seething, for reasons other than the ones which led some audiences to scream Jai Sri Ram and call for rape and Muslim genocide in cinema halls.
I remembered the 20th Century Polish Semantics scientist and philosopher, Alfred Korzybski, who developed the field of general semantics and famously proposed the idea that ‘the map is not the territory’. A simple enough metaphor to describe the limits of our grasp of reality, our doomed efforts to ‘know’ things, I find it fascinating, because of its starting point of conscious abstraction. That the map is only an approximation is a kind of paradox that has implications for the transient nature of objects in the world. It interrogates subjectivity, and the limited perception of the human animal. This approach weaves into its view of reality the assumption of our inabilities, and thus trains us in creating more nuanced methods of abstraction. A map of social relationships, say, that an artist creates with a painting, is made with the assumption of inaccuracy, but its sophistication of fiction and craft allows it to penetrate into some deeper abstractions that circumvent established modes of thinking about the subject. For instance, a Vijay Tendulkar play might teach a viewer something about caste, that they may never get from a scholarly article, or even real experience. I invoke this idea, because the clearly outlined project of The Kashmir Files is to create a map, a compelling fictional narrative, of the truth of the plight of Kashmiri Pandits. Fiction, not documentary. Ipsita Chakravarty talks about this as well:
After three decades of bitterness and recrimination, many facts from that turbulent time have become unknowable. Recorded histories are incomplete. Memory is not always reliable. Agnihotri makes use of this epistemic haze to repeat distortions and manipulations of the past that have long cropped up in WhatsApp forwards.
The simplistic, surface-level portrayal, the selective use of ‘evidence’, and the deliberate distortions have been talked about. Of course, this is propaganda - one might make the comparison with Leni Riefenstahl and her posturing of Nazism, but that would be elevating the film-maker Vivek Agnihotri too much. Modi, and BJP governments in many states, have sponsored screenings, and touted it as a great act of storytelling, catapulting this crass, deliberate manipulation to the stature of canon. The film insults the memories of those who survived through those times, exaggerating and decontextualising it into a weapon in the arsenal of a ‘clash of civilisations’ (quoted from the dialogue of an IAS officer in the film), a parry in the great battle of narratives, and information,. In its manipulation of emotion, it provides new language for the methodology of hatred that is being employed by the ruling dispensation in its surge for popularity. It is no wonder that there are videos circulating where people are calling for rape and murder to bring back Ram Rajya. I could feel the irony of an exchange on utopias in the film - where the romantic metaphor of Kashmir as Jannat, was shadowed by the unsaid popular imagination of Ram Rajya. How we sanitise our murderous intents.
What pained me, more than anything, was the opportunity lost. The plight of the Kashmiri Pandits is not something to be made light of. I have heard first-hand accounts from at least two families, one of them stressing on the love they still received from their neighbours in the valley who were besotted with guilt and sadness for not being able to help them better. Numbers may not be a marker of the trauma that this conflict has caused, but the film is hell-bent on tarring an entire community for the flaws of extremist elements. This was the moment to seize the gauntlet of compassion, to create something that would give meaning to the pain that has been felt by the survivors, and the victims. This was the vacuum in which a sensitive story could be told, but instead it felt as if the film was not even made for the people whose history it claims to right. Convoluted with multiple opinions that have little to do with truth, and more to do with an agenda of purification, the film is propped up with ridiculously melodramatic stereotypes, and villainous oversimplifications that seem to be drawn from the most warped imaginations of Hindutva warriors.
Is this what it has come to? A nation of shopkeepers is selling hate cheap, and the buyers are lining up. There is little empathy in this transaction. Melodrama is commodity, and the victims are real people, the ones who are at the very margins. Should we not, rather, teach compassion? The responsibility of administrations is to provide support and care, not weaponise pain. Of course, this government, and even previous governments, have done next to nothing for the displaced Pandits. But it is the responsibility of the artist to use artifice to heal, and free, rather than to recalibrate sensibilities to incitement.
I have been reading the Palestinian poet, Mourid Barghouti’s, I was Born There, I Was Born Here. It is a narrative by the poet that translates, in simple terms, the lived reality of war. In one passage, Barghouti talks about how he and his fellow passengers have been forced to travel across a few metres of trench by crane (!), because the Israeli armed forces have bombed a bridge, and they continue surveillance in the area from a checkpost.
“The suspended bubble of air in which we seven are swinging is now our place of exile from this earth. It is our disabled will and our attempt, in a mixture of courage and fear, to impose our will through wit and cunning. This bubble of air is the unyielding Occupation itself. It is the rootless roaming of the Palestinians through the air of others’ countries. In the world’s air we seek refuge from our earth. We sink into the upper spaces. We sink upward. God rest the soul of Salvador Dali, who (being dead) will never be able to picture this scene. This absurd bubble of air is Mahmoud’s way of letting no obstacle defeat him and force him to take us back in failure. Now the wish of those who, like us at this moment, have risen high, is to become low. I absolve my grandmother from any blame; she would call down blessings on me, boy and young man, and say, “Go, Mourid, son of Sakina my daughter, may God elevate your rank!” or “God raise high your standing among men!” The only high place I’ve achieved among men, Grandmother, and the only high rank I’ve risen to in my country is thanks to this deaf metal monster. Did you pray to the heavens so often for my ‘elevation’ that they decided to answer your prayers like this and mock us both? I want my high standing to be brought low, Grandmother. I want to descend from this regal elevation and touch the mud and dust “once more so that I can be an ordinary traveler again. The Occupation is these moments of loneliness between man’s earth and the sky.”
(Italics mine)
Darwish talks about the Palestinians as a people who are not even allowed laughter, and Barghouti shares, with a primordial relentlessness, many jokes that are actually transformative processes. The absurdity of everyday existence in occupied Palestine opens up an attitude of humour that carves out a space for comfort, and even intelligent critique. I started to think of strategies of resilience, and how this is almost impossible without the presence of community. Storytelling is a way of coming to terms with the many forms of violence visited upon us by a multitude of forces, and in one part of the book, Barghouti shares a hard hitting poem that drives home the pain of the conflict. This is how he prefaces it:
“We have been subjected to massacres at intervals throughout our lives. Thus we find ourselves competing in a race between quickly realized mass death and the ordinary life that we dream of every day. One day, I will write a poem called “It’s Also Fine”:”
Imagine a people who feel guilt even in death, that it was ordinary and quick. Imagine finding hope even in the midst of this. Imagine love, after this, and kindness.
I have shared Barghouti’s brilliant poem, ‘Interpretations’ on Poetly before, as part of a tribute.
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