ABSTRACT
How is time experienced within Indian-occupied Kashmir, and can this experience be harnessed by creative producers to articulate a project of resistance and the hope for autonomy on all levels – political, cultural, and individual? This chapter examines the film Haider, directed by Vishal Bhardwaj in 2014, as a response to this question. Bhardwaj’s collaboration with Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer rejects stereotypical Bollywood depictions of Kashmir by tapping into the deep cultural investment of Kashmiris in the Persianate trope of a garden in springtime. Peer and Bhardwaj turn this trope into a hortus interruptus, a garden where spring’s advent is indefinitely stalled, to comment on the conflict’s repercussions on female sexuality. They nevertheless cannot break through those constraints to present for Kashmir an adequate “alegropolitics,” or the politics of resistance through embodied joy. In contrast, Kashmiri poet and filmmaker Asiya Zahoor draws on the hortus interruptus to foreground women’s pleasure without capitulating to heteronormativity. What remains a tragic problem in Haider emerges in her work as the non-negotiable precondition within a blueprint for resistance. By making time for an alegropolitics in Kashmir that renders palpable women’s creativity and care of the self, Zahoor manifests an agency responsive to the ever-present Kashmiri call for azaadi (freedom).
