On memories, return and healing

A conversation with Anirban Dutta and Kirti Kaul

interview by Kateryna Babych

katya: First of all I want to thank you for your movie. It was a very meaningful experience for me. I have lived through displacement myself and there are a lot of moments that I can relate to.  

The first thing that resonated with me in this movie was that moment where you said “we had the impression that in two or three months we would come back” and it turned out that you stayed away from your home for more than twenty years. I guess a lot of migrants, refugees, and displaced people could relate to this experience. I want to ask you about your perception of time, how it was changing and also the ability to plan things in advance? 

Kirti: At first we were hoping that the situation would get better, because we didn’t have a place to go to. We had these conversations about that decision with my family, that lasted for about two weeks. But we finally left at very short notice: the curfew was lifted for about half an hour or forty-five minutes and we took our chances. We thought we would be away for about a few  weeks or months at most, but months turned into years and I was able to return only after twenty years had passed and only for a short visit. I’ve been there a few times since then and only for a short visit, and after thirty years finally came to terms with the fact that I will not be able to return. I think I am still very deeply connected to that place – it lives in my memory and my identity is still Kashmiri, I belong to that place. It is now very easy for me to say that, but if you had asked me the same question a few years back – the pain, the agony of having to be uprooted, to be asked to leave your home, was very traumatizing. I think I was able to heal over the years and permitted myself to look forward, because otherwise one will continue to live in the past. And many people did so, because for them Kashmir was their only home.  We consider Delhi and Jammu to be places that gave us refuge, but home is always Kashmir.

katya: You actually answered one of my next questions about perceiving the concept of home. How do different generations of your family define home for themselves?

Kirti: For me, my parents – and even my grandfather for that matter, who passed away when we were in Delhi – home is always Kashmir. I remember very distinctly just a few years before his death he kept making references to his room there, in that house, on the second floor. He kept saying  “Take me up to my room.” For my children, Delhi is home. They know that I can identify with Kashmir. Anirban has a strong connection with West Bengal or Calcutta, but being brought up in Delhi, they haven’t had a chance to engage with the culture, with the language in the same way as if they had lived in Kashmir for some time. Your connection to the place becomes more diluted in this way, you don’t have the sense of broader community as does a person who was brought up there. You have to experience it as a whole physical, emotional, mental, political, cultural space to build your identity around it.

katya: Talking about memory and emotional space – when you first came to Kashmir after being away for a long time, how did you feel? Were you able to recognize the place, had it changed much after years of absence? 

Kirti: My first return visit to Kashmir was in 1997 as part of a small film crew that was going there to shoot a documentary. Politically it was still very volatile at that point in time, but I was very excited about going back. But the moment I stepped off the plane, I wanted to go back to Delhi, because I could feel the tension in the air. Nothing was said or done, nothing happened, but the heaviness and stillness in the air was so  palpable that I just wanted to return. But I stayed after all and it was pleasant to speak with people in our language. I kept remembering the Kashmir of my childhood – very scenic and beautiful, I spent a lot of time just sitting by Lake Dal, and the sense of calm I felt in my early days by that lake I have never been able to experience in my life again.

The trips that I made after, and there haven’t been too many, were a process of partly forgetting and partly forgiving myself, as well as others. Sometimes you hold people responsible for what has happened to you and that too has to be a sort of process, to be able to make peace with your past and continue to live – there is no other way. One important tool that helped me was to write down everything that happened just before we left. I managed to do so only after twenty-five years and it helps you to have closure, to finish it like a book and put it aside. The book is there, you have access to it, you could read it any time, but it needs to be closed to move on to the next book – you can’t read the same book over and over again.

Holding on to your memories can make you feel down, but it can also become a strength: you have the choice to keep pleasant and beautiful memories of your childhood or hold onto the memories of displacement. All those are your personal experiences with the place, but you decide what stays and what has to go for the sake of your own wellbeing. And this is the choice I’ve made. I found this balance, where I’m not erasing those intense memories of my childhood, but I am also trying to look around me in the here and now and hold these two elements simultaneously. This helped me to survive and stay calm, and also not pass the trauma to my children, I think. What stories are we telling our children? How do we, without prejudice, talk about reality or what has happened to you (and what happened to us was not pleasant)? And those questions are difficult to answer. But violence manifests itself in different ways, it is not only physical violence with killing or injuring, it is also what people carry in their hearts and minds.

katya: Was the movie for you also like a way to let everything out, not to hold on to it anymore? Or was it more a love letter to this house, these streets, these spaces? How do you feel about that movie? 

Kirti: The movie was entirely Anirban’s idea. And I think it emerged from the fact that he felt the need for our children to have a sense of their ancestry. Both of them were very small, I think our son was about ten and our daughter was about seven at the time. I don’t think that for me it was a way of letting go: once we started filming I relived certain connections. When we first met with our neighbors after so many years it was very emotional. And those moments made me believe that there is still hope. And people are able somehow to transcend the boundaries of race, religion, etc. But in the background you have the conflict and the difficulties that result from it. I think I came back quite sad after the trip, because it was the first time I was able to go back to that house and it sort of dawned on me that my life there is over. Somewhere in your head you keep hoping that maybe we could go back to that house (and it was still there, when we came back to film it). I even told my family that I could apply for a job at my old school. But this was certainly unrealistic and no one could assure me my safety. One of my dreams as a young girl was to have a lily pond in the large garden that my house had. And this lilly pond is still somewhere in the back of my head. I keep thinking maybe someday I will be able to leave the city and find a place that looks somewhat like Kashmir and finally create this lily pond. I hope and I would like to believe that I’ll have it.

Anirban: The idea for the film came to me because I was in Kashmir to do a workshop with young people at the university there. And at that time Kirti’s family had not been back to that house in twenty years. For the first time in twenty years I took the keys from the neighbor, I opened the door and entered the house, before any of Kirti’s family members were able to do so. I felt the strange sense of emptiness and the strong connections her family and our kids have to this place. The kids were interested in their Kashmiri heritage, so I thought it would be important for them to see this place. For me it was a letter that I wanted to write to my kids about their ancestral roots, and I also wanted to create historical documentation of stories of a certain community that were not being told at that time.

My film is a personal story told in a very simple way. It wasn’t initially planned as a film and I didn’t have the resources to make it a big project – we filmed it in the course of a few days during our holidays. I wanted to return to the house and film more, but it was too expensive and now it’s been sold off and the place has changed completely . But the film remains in the form of a “family album”. I always had a strong connection to my roots and I wanted the kids to have that connection and thankfully they speak both the languages that we do. Also they appreciate their mixed cultural heritage. Not to address it in terms of superiority or inferiority, but to understand that we have certain roots and that it is very important in this so-called ‘globalized’ world that we connect to the local.

katya: You said it was a letter to your children about their roots, their heritage, and you want them to have a connection with these spaces and the story. But I wanted to ask you about the wider context. We know that Great Britain contributed to the conflict in a bad way; how do you discuss this colonial past, its impact on your generation and your children, in such a way as to teach them about that, but at the same time to not pass on this intergenerational trauma?

Anirban: The whole of the Indian subcontinent has to deal with the history of partition that happened in 1947, when India was divided into India and Pakistan. And lots of the issues South Asia faces today are the aftermath of the partition. And what I’m trying to do is to be aware of these multiple narratives, that are always present when there is conflict. And I’m trying to listen to different points of view and understand the complexity of things. No one story is more valid than other stories. As a filmmaker and a person I respect various stories from various points of view and each of them is valid in their own way. So I think that is the only way as artists to create a space where multiple narratives can be put forward. With my children the approach is not very different – I’m trying to tell them about these multiple stories and they have to form their own opinion and understanding of the context from which they are coming.

Kirti has very strong associations with home because she lived in one house for a long time. I was brought up in a family where my father was transferred every three years from one part of India to another. So I never had a home. Our home changed every two or three years. So for me my home was my language, the food that we ate, the comfort of the bed that we slept on – but it was not a physical structure. What I want to pass on to my children is the idea that you can be anywhere in the world, but your home is where your roots are, where you are coming from. And this is also relevant for any artistic work, especially filmmaking – the work has to have a certain sense of the roots it is coming from. It cannot be a kind of American three-act structure of filmmaking.

How do we create cinematic forms, stories or non-stories which challenge this one-way storytelling? It is important to have multiple voices in there. It is important to have films from India, Ukraine, North Africa, and the Arab world with multiple voices and perspectives. And this filmmaking shouldn’t be an extractive filmmaking, where you go, take the story and then forget the people about whom you made the story. Political animosity always creates a binary – this is the biggest problem in the world. When we make one community fight another and it seems that this is the way to go. I always felt that the only way to address this is to create platforms for face-to-face contact. We have seen in South Asia how hate becomes a political currency. And the strategy to oppose that is to create a dialogue, where this kind of hatred is not generational and we don’t pass it on from one generation to another. If there is so much hatred the chances of peace are very small. 

Kirti: I want to add one thing here. At the end of the day I think all humans experience emotions that are similar at one level, be they love, hate, anger or trauma. Of course the situation may be different, but if I had experienced trauma of a certain kind, then I would understand the feelings of a person from another part of the globe going through the same experience. But if you hold onto the angst and anger for too long, what does it do to you as a human being? Easier said than done, of course, and I understand when people are going through a very traumatic experience it is not easy to let go of your anger, because their anger and the sense of loss they have experienced  is absolutely valid. But if you think a little more it doesn’t make sense to hold on to that anger and pass it onto the next generation. Because an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind. And that certainly is not the way to move forward.

We are very careful talking with our children about any topic that has any political confrontation in it, because speaking without care and context about any event or situation (political or social) makes it easy to twist information and give only one side of the picture. And in the context of Kashmir it is important for them to have a sense of where they come from, but we are not going to shape their vision by telling them that it all has been terrible, because that will influence their forming of fresh associations and friendships. It is a very delicate question in all conflict zones. These stories have to be treated with a lot of care. I need to tell the truth, but at the same time I should not pass a value judgment that covers their thinking to the extent that they cannot think for themselves.  And that is how you can use a difficult experience to build strength and hope, when you allow yourself not to forget, but forgive; and only then you can move on.