How We Celebrate Freedom
I was reading this morning for the class I have to teach next week–Orhan Pamuk’s book Istanbul. “To see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of history: the patina of what is old and faded no longer matters to the rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire gloom, a pained submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty that must be endured like an incurable disease. It is a resignation that nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul. To see the city in black and white, to see the haze that sits over it and breathe in the melancholy its inhabitants have embraced as their common fate, you need only to fly in from a rich western city and head straight to the crowded streets; if it’s winter, every man on the Galata Bridge will be wearing the same pale, drab, shadowy clothes. The Istanbullus of my era have shunned the vibrant reds, greens, and oranges of their rich, proud ancestors; to foreign visitors, it looks as if they have done so deliberately, to make a moral point. They have not–but there is in their dense gloom a suggestion of modesty. This is how you dress in a black-and-white city, they seem to be saying; this is how you grieve for a city that has been in decline for a hundred and fifty years.”
And reading those words, I think not of Istanbul but of Srinagar. As it happened, I had flown in from “a rich western city.” Everything in that city bore a drab look, draped in a dirty brown streaked with military green. Soldiers everywhere. And then, coming to Delhi from Srinagar, I had the opportunity to watch Sanjay Kak’s documentary “Jashn-e-Azadi” (How We Celebrate Freedom). A powerful statement about the military occupation in Kashmir and the voices raised in terrible protest, the film’s richness lies in the space it creates, in the viewer’s mind, for thought and for color. Brilliantly edited, and shot with an eye that can only be described as lyrical, what the film-maker discovers again and again in the drabness of melancholy is the gleam of memory: of blood; of beauty; of the keening voices of mothers; the painted faces of the village performers; the numbers of the dead; falling snow; and always the shining faces crying for freedom.
Please read this commentary by Mukul Kesavan in the Telegraph, this interview with Sanjay Kak in Tehelka, and, most important of all, the following report from the film’s recent screening in Srinagar. Please also see Holland Cotter’s remark about indirection or obliqueness in political art, in his comment on the Lynne Stewart video made by Paul Chan. And for the search of color in a landscape of brown, take a look at the photographs taken by the writer Nadeem Aslam.
