When he was not even big enough to understand the term “collateral damage”, Arfat Sheikh’s father became that in Kashmir.
A renowned singer and cultural figure, Ghulam Nabi Sheikh was killed in the 1990s by “unidentified gunmen”, a term used in newspapers through the decades when the anti-India insurgency was at its peak in the Himalayan valley and identifying the perpetrators of violence a risky proposition.
The grief of losing his father and then never knowing where his remains lay left Sheikh with scars that would not heal. As he grew up in the conflict-torn valley — controlled in part but claimed in whole by India and Pakistan — he kept searching for answers that never came even as the “collateral damage” piled ever higher.
Sheikh found solace in stories. And then, aged 39, he decided to tell his own story of Kashmir. While learning the ropes of filmmaking, Sheikh says the narratives of Kashmir he found in mainstream Indian cinema rankled him because of the absence of Kashmiri voices.
After 2019, when the Indian government repealed an article of the constitution to take away the last remnants of the majority Muslim region’s autonomy, Sheikh says the suppression and erasure of the Kashmiri voice in Bollywood films in particular became severe.
He criticises films such as The Kashmir Files and Pathaan for perpetuating negative stereotypes of Kashmir by focusing solely on violence.
“Our voices are being suppressed and trampled upon. And we aren’t given a platform. We have not been given the agency to tell our stories,” Sheikh tells The Independent. “What’s happening since 2019 with a lot of these Bollywood films, the entire premise starts with ‘terrorism of Kashmir’.”
The revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy was accompanied by a months-long curfew, a communications blackout and a crackdown on all political activity.
The portrayal of Kashmir in Indian popular culture, and especially since 2019, is reductive, either romanticising the scenic beauty of the place or painting its people as villains in a story that wasn’t theirs, Sheikh complains.
This realisation, the filmmaker says, made him feel an urgency to reclaim his heritage and to give voice to his silenced people. Out of this was born Saffron Kingdom, his first feature film.
The film, he says, is a response to the erasure of Kashmiri history and culture in mainstream Indian media.
The film, shot mainly in Atlanta in the US, explores the intergenerational scars left by the violent upheaval of the 1990s in Kashmir. It follows a Kashmiri-American family as its multiple generations grapple with the lasting impact of the conflict and the loss of their identity.
The protagonist is a Kashmiri woman named Masrat, who escapes the valley with her son Rizwan after her husband is abducted by the Indian army. The mother and son rebuild their lives in Atlanta while coming to grips with the trauma of the insurgency back home, displacement and then the revocation of Kashmir’s autonomy.
Saffron Kingdom, produced by Daffodil Studios, is slated for release in 2025. It was screened at the the Rome International Film Festival 2024 in October and received the best feature award at the LA Film & Documentary Awards. The film is also competing at the Chicago Filmmakers Awards 2025.
After Kashmiri rebels launched an insurgency against Indian rule in 1989, and New Delhi responded with a sweeping military crackdown, the Himalayan region was plunged into a prolonged conflict that left an estimated 100,000 people dead and many thousands consumed by “forced disappearance”.
Sheikh says that through his film he wants to shed light on the resilience of the Kashmiri people. “They are erasing us,” he says, referring to the Indian mainstream narratives. “They are erasing our history.”
Sheikh tells The Independent he chose actors for his film whose personal stories could enable them to resonate with the story of Kashmir.
“I wanted to break Hollywood’s hegemony,” Sheikh says. “My film [employs] 55 per cent women as cast and crew.”
The actors come from diverse ethnic backgrounds but none speak Kashmiri, the local language. As a result the Kashmiri sprinkled throughout the film can feel a little jarring to the local ear – although large parts of the film are in English.
Sheikh realised that it would be difficult to cast Kashmiri actors, so he decided to seek actors from other minority backgrounds, those who could empathise with the themes of displacement and struggle that are central to the story.
“Art is persecuted in Kashmir,” he says. “We do not have our own film industry. And even if I wanted to get some people from Kashmir and fly them here, they would have never been able to go back to Kashmir because once this film is out, they would be persecuted.
“I made sure that to tell my casting director, can you please make a disclaimer that if you have strong connections with India, you might not be able to go back to India without giving much information about the script initially.”
The lead actress is an Assyrian descendant of genocide survivors. The male lead is an Arab who, Sheikh says, carries the weight of his family’s displacement during the Nakba, the forced eviction and permanent displacement of Palestinians to create the state of Israel in the late 1940s.
Another prominent cast member, from Venezuela, brings her own narrative of struggle from South America.
“If you don’t speak up, don’t expect change. That is exactly what I am doing with this film,” the filmmaker says. “I am going out there, knowing it will have repercussions.”
