Filmmaker Ashvin Kumar woos millennials with love story set in Kashmir

Through 'No Fathers in Kashmir', he hopes to move audiences into becoming citizens who vote sensibly

It is unusual to hear a fashionable term like “millennial” used in relation to Kashmir. Yet, filmmaker Ashvin Kumar is pinning his hopes on an audience of millennials to embrace his new film, No Fathers in Kashmir, with an open-mindedness he suspects others lack.

I meet him on his recent whirlwind visit to Delhi. After he texts busily on his phone, he apologises before looking up with drooping eyes. They light up when he talks about children. “I like to see the world from a child’s eyes because I think they can help us understand more and disarm the audience,” says the 46-year-old filmmaker.

His 2004 film, Little Terrorist, which received an Oscar nomination for best short film, was, in fact, about a child — a 10-year-old Pakistani boy who strays into Indian territory while playing cricket on the border.

Stories about Kashmir and life on the border draw him for personal reasons as well. Kumar’s maternal grandfather was a native of Kashmir, which he revisited in 2009 after two decades. His visits had dried up after the insurgency began in 1989. “I felt that loss very deeply as a teenager.” Kumar couldn’t reconcile what he saw with his idyllic childhood holidays in places like Srinagar, Pahalgam and Gulmarg. 

Much like people elsewhere in India, individuals of Kashmiri descent like him, too, have little idea what happens in the Valley, believes Kumar. He responded to the outrage and indignation that the return to Kashmir evoked in him by making two documentaries.

The first, Inshallah Football (2010), sought to convey the “difficulty of dreaming” in Kashmir. It gave an account of a teenaged footballer, who is coached by a South American couple and chosen to play in Brazil. But the Indian government denies him a passport, because his father was a militant who laid down arms and spent years in jail.

Two years later, he took a broad view in Inshallah Kashmir, which combined multiple testimonies that highlighted the everyday realities of the past two decades such as crackdowns, curfews, rapes, enforced disappearances, mass graves, tortures, the Armed Forces Special Powers Act and “half-widows” whose husbands go missing but aren’t declared dead.

The two documentaries elicited angry responses. “It was difficult for people in India to accept the truth. I realised simply serving up the truth isn’t enough, because the media propaganda focused on creating demonic figures of Kashmiris has been too strong in the last 30 years,” he says.

He had five years to script a full-length feature before he began shooting for No Fathers in Kashmir. “I wanted to talk to the emotions of people, particularly the young who are more open-minded and don’t come with the baggage of India-Pakistan, Hindu-Muslim. Older generations are burdened by the history of Partition and the trauma of Hindu-Muslim divide. They are more entrenched in their own narratives.”

An important lesson he learnt from the two documentaries, both of which were given “Adult” certification and went on to win National Awards, was that it is pointless making a movie if the audience it is targeted at do not watch it.

So he decided to make a feature film about two millennials. In No Fathers in Kashmir, the central characters are Noor, a British teenager with Kashmiri roots who visits her paternal grandparents, and a Kashmiri boy, Majid. Their fathers are among those who “disappeared”, a 1990s’ phenomenon when civilians were picked up, allegedly by the army, and never returned. Their families continue to await them at the threshold of life and death. Noor teams up with Majid to trace her father’s past, and finds out that he didn’t abandon the family but was taken away by the army and is dead. In their coming-of-age story involving love, separation, the unravelling of secrets and confronting army brutality, Kumar weaves a realistic tale of how millennials in Kashmir are inevitably dragged into the conflict. He also acts in a key role, that of a traitorous friend of the two teens’ fathers whose desire for azadi (political freedom) is tinged with fundamentalism.

No Fathers in Kashmir skilfully presents a nuanced narrative. Kumar says it was an exercise in restraint as he did not try to heighten dramatic elements, which is evident from a partly documentary-style direction. He admits that it is difficult to encapsulate the political situation and its several aspects affecting Kashmir. Unlike Haider (2014), a Bollywood adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that cast a broad, emotional gaze on Kashmir, he tried to focus on “one story that stands for all”. Kumar says: “It is a film about relationships, about loss and not having somebody in your family.”

Filmmaker Ashvin Kumar

He says young people ought to ask politicians what their policy on Kashmir is, as he believes they can be duplicitous. Through his movie, he hopes to be able to move his audience into becoming thinking citizens who vote sensibly.

The film also shows the plight of parents and the wives of disappeared men. Kumar points out that the character of Majid’s mother was named after Parveena Ahanger, founder of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons whose story was among the several featured in Inshallah Kashmir.

Kumar comes from a privileged background. The son of well-known designer Ritu Kumar, he received his education from institutions such as The Doon School in Dehradun and St Stephen’s College in Delhi. He also received a bachelor’s degree in media and communication from Goldsmiths, University of London.

Despite the privilege, Kumar hasn’t shied away from making uncomfortable and often unpopular choices. He briefly studied at the London Film School, but dropped out as he didn’t buy into institutionalised filmmaking. Kumar began his filmmaking career with Road to Ladakh (2003), a short drama starring Irrfan Khan and Koel Purie. His filmography includes eight feature and documentary films.

He made a short drama titled Dazed in Doon (2010) on the invitation of his alma mater, The Doon School, but school authorities later attempted to stop its distribution saying it portrayed the school in a bad light. He has had run-ins with the Central Board of Film Certification over the two documentaries on Kashmir, and struggled for months for his latest movie.

“There’s no room for the Board in today’s democracy. In No Fathers in Kashmir, I had to take out quite a few scenes which I didn’t want to,” says Kumar, who recently released a video on YouTube containing original uncut scenes from the movie.

He firmly believes that it is censorship and not films that creates fear. There is a direct link, he says, between censorship and the aftermath of the Pulwama terrorist attack that claimed the lives of CRPF jawans in February, when Kashmiri students were hounded and forced to return home from places like Dehradun in the wake of mob hysteria across India. “What has happened is that you have heard only one side of the narrative on your TV screens night after night, vilifying the ordinary Kashmiri. It’s a narrative filled with prejudice and bigotry.”

With his attempt to address millennials outside Kashmir, Kumar holds out a message of hope — even as many from their generation in the Valley live out days in the absence of fathers and without knowledge of their fates.