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Illustration – Prathap Ravishankar
Gowhar Geelani
REPORTS of opening 183 liquor outlets in Jammu and Kashmir stirred up the proverbial political hornet’s nest within the Valley. Religious and political organisations alleged it was a “cultural aggression” on Kashmir, and had been solely pacified after the Jammu and Kashmir administration clarified that no such determination will likely be taken “without the participation of stakeholders”.
The subject of alcohol, identical to movies and music, has been a scorching potato within the Valley’s cultural discourse over the previous few many years, stirring controversies. This time too, spiritual our bodies like Mutahida Majlis-e-Ulema, an amalgam of various socio-spiritual organisations, protested in opposition to the proposal, accusing the federal government of “bringing ordinances and rules to change the demography of the Muslim majority of the state” and assaulting “religious sentiments”.
Interestingly, in 2018, BJP’s present Jammu and Kashmir president and former MLA Ravinder Raina too had demanded a blanket ban on alcohol and bars and the declaring of Jammu and Kashmir a dry state.
Such protests and calls for could draw a conservative image of Kashmir whereas in actuality liquor, motion pictures and music had been very a lot part of the Valley as they’re elsewhere within the 1980s.
How alcohol and cinema had been erased from Kashmir’s tradition
There is not any official ban on manufacture and sale of liquor in Jammu and Kashmir. In Kashmir, liquor is available at licensed outlets on the outskirts of Srinagar close to the Indian Army’s Badami Bagh Cantonment and high 5-star motels, whereas in Jammu, it may be present in motels, bars and liquor shops.
But it stays a non-public affair, despite the fact that the governments through the years have prevented any ban in opposition to it.
During the PDP-BJP coalition authorities, Jammu and Kashmir’s then finance minister Haseeb Drabu had within the now-defunct Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Council dominated out a ban on liquor by asserting that the difficulty must be addressed on the idea of freedom of alternative.
“As a state policy, we cannot enforce our decision on others. There is a freedom of choice and let people decide what they want to do,” he mentioned, arguing that “vegetarians can’t ban non-vegetarian food”.
In the Muslim-majority Kashmir and Hindu-dominated Jammu, alcohol consumption lacks social sanction, however nobody bothers those that drink and nobody mocks teetotallers both. Everyone is aware of that alcohol is obtainable and folks drink, however ingesting will not be an intrinsic a part of the area’s social cloth.
In the early 1970s, veteran pro-Pakistan Hurriyat chief Syed Ali Shah Geelani, who was the then a member of the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly as a Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI) politician, had vociferously demanded a ban on sale and consumption of alcohol in his speech contained in the meeting.
Afterwards, on August 18, 1989, a militant outfit known as the Allah Tigers enforced a ban on cinema halls, bars and liquor outlets within the Kashmir Valley by way of its then chief commander ‘Air Marshal’ Noor Khan. This try at implementing a sure code of conduct and thrusting a selected way of life on Kashmiris wasn’t acquired properly by the locals. The said intention of the diktat gave the impression to be to close well-liked public hangouts.
But most households in Kashmir personal a tv and members of the family watch each Hollywood and Bollywood motion pictures, well-liked tv collection and drama serials. Young girls and boys watch every kind of films on their smartphones, laptops and tablets.
That is why stereotyping Kashmiris as conservative or radical is neither a good evaluation nor useful.
Multicultural, vibrant historical past
Mir Khalid, writer of Jaffna Street: Tales of dying, betrayal and survival in Kashmir, talks in regards to the vibrancy and multiculturalism of the Srinagar metropolis within the 1980s. In his guide, Khalid has described Srinagar’s downtown of his creativeness and attracts parallels between Steward’s downtown together with his personal childhood sketch of Srinagar, replete with its personal model of ‘Brooklyn’ women.
“There were many ‘Brooklyn’ girls, whose affections were actively sought or passively fancied. Some were part of the somewhat class conscious crowd, belonging to upmarket areas and schools, many of whom adored Tom Cruise — whose Top Gun was making waves — to the extent of pasting his photos in their notebooks. They crooned the lyrics of songs belted by Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar and the recent debutant, Madonna, and wore jeans. A fluency in English, demonstrated similarity in taste in music and expensive jeans were a must to woo this class. Or so we thought, and acted upon,” Khalid wrote in a chapter titled Downtown Train.
Remembering his college days, writer Mir Khalid mentioned, “Srinagar City had the choicest blend of movies catering to its movie aficionados. Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Brooke Shields, Bo Derek, Sylvester Stallone and later Tom Cruise-starrers formed the bulk of conversations in school and college grounds.”
Since 1989, most cinema halls in Kashmir have became authorities forces’ camps or bunkers. Others are in ruins whereas just a few have been transformed into procuring centres.
Obviously, in a hotly-contested place like Kashmir, there are arguments both approach. Those opposing the reopening of cinema halls aren’t essentially radicals. They see opening of film halls as the federal government’s determined try to promote misleading peace as normalcy.
Kashmir had its share of cinema halls, like Firdous Cinema, Shiraz and Khayam in downtown Srinagar; Regal, Palladium, Neelam, Naaz, Shah and Broadway within the metropolis centre Lal Chowk; and Samad Talkies in north Kashmir and several other others throughout the Valley. In the last decade of 1980s, Kashmiri cinema halls screened Hollywood and Bollywood motion pictures. More English movies had been screened in Srinagar than in New Delhi.
In the late 1990s, Neelam and Broadway had been briefly opened below fortified safety preparations, however most of those had been became paramilitary camps quickly after.
Kashmir’s lone Communist chief Mohammad Yusuf Tarigami tells The Federal that in his time within the Jammu and Kashmir Legislative Assembly, he by no means witnessed any severe debate over alcohol. “I have been in the Legislative Assembly since the 1996 elections. I don’t recall any serious debate over alcohol in the house,” Tarigami says, including, “Our rich history tells us about our vibrant culture, and social and cultural confluence. We have always been ahead of many a counterpart.”
Flawed portrayal of Kashmir in Bollywood
Both motion pictures and liquor are linked to the area’s political discourse than to leisure, income era and luxurious. But there’s extra to this than meets the attention.
Kashmir is also known as ‘Peer Waer’, that means an ‘Alcove of Sufi Saints’. This description offers an impression to outsiders as if Kashmiri Muslims abhor music, motion pictures, literature, theatre and poetry. The truth is that music could be very a lot part of Sufi syncretism. With the intention to color the Kashmiri society as conservative, radical and backward, there have been umpteen flawed propagandist makes an attempt.
Thanks to Bollywood, a Kashmiri in an outsider’s creativeness is both a person carrying a cranium cap, with wrinkled brow, rowing oars of a Shikara whereas entertaining vacationers on the famed Dal Lake or a pheran- (lengthy woolen cloak) clad lady serving kehwa (Kashmiri tea) with kesar (saffron) leaves. Or, a Kashmiri is visualised as a gun-toting and bearded indignant younger man firing a volley of bullets indiscriminately. A Kashmiri can also be portrayed as a misguided factor with no trigger and radicalised youth who must be despatched to a de-radicalisation camp for reform.
This is how Bollywood has often depicted Kashmir and Kashmiris in motion pictures.
In the romantic Bollywood flick Jab Jab Phool Khile starring the late Shashi Kapoor and Nanda, the story is of a childlike and naïve romantic village boy Raja (Shashi), who owns a houseboat in Srinagar’s Dal Lake, and Rita (Nanda), the one daughter and heiress to a wealthy Raj Bahadur Chunnilal. The lovebirds meet when Rita is holidaying alongside together with her maid Stella (Shammi) in Kashmir. She rents a houseboat owned by Raja and inside no time, each fall in love.
Kashmiris are sometimes proven as docile who get simply swayed, however are conservative sufficient to not watch motion pictures or drink alcohol. But Kashmir is approach past such tropes and banalities. Nothing might be farther from reality than this pigeonholing.
In an effort to spice up tourism, the Airport Authority of India (AAI) in 2017 had floated a young for an obligation-paid liquor store on the Srinagar Airport. The then PDP-BJP authorities rejected the proposal. According to official knowledge of the Excise Department, of 224 liquor outlets in Jammu and Kashmir, 220 outlets are in Jammu province, with Jammu district having 135 of them.
Three years in the past, the second version of Kashmir World Film Festival (KWFF) commenced at Srinagar’s Tagore Hall. It had stirred a recent debate whether or not it’s about time to reopen film halls within the Valley. During the 5-day lengthy movie pageant, no less than 19 documentaries and have movies had been screened in English, Persian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Urdu, Malayalam, Kashmiri, Dogri and Ladakhi languages.
The Jammu and Kashmir authorities’s then-spokesperson and minister for public works, Naeem Akhtar, who had inaugurated the movie pageant, nostalgically mentioned on the time that “Srinagar’s Residency Road was our Piccadilly”.
Cinema has all the time attracted some kind of controversy in Kashmir. In the mid-1980s, just a few years earlier than the eruption of militancy in 1989, the Anthony Quinn-starrer, Lion of the Desert, was screened at Regal Cinema in Srinagar. It was an motion movie based mostly on the lifetime of the Libyan revolutionary, Omar Mukhtar, a Bedouin chief who fought the colonial Italian military within the years main as much as World War-II. Its screening in Kashmir within the mid-1980s had impressed the folks to protest in opposition to New Delhi. Widespread demonstrations had been witnessed in Srinagar. As a consequence, the then authorities banned its screening.
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