The pen writing Kashmir’s stories has never been in Kashmiri hands. That’s what filmmaker Arfat Sheikh told me on a video call from his office in the United States.
A Srinagar native and the son of Ghulam Nabi Sheikh — a legendary singer known across the valley as the Mehdi Hassan of Kashmir — Arfat says the intention behind his film, Saffron Kingdom, was to take back that pen and tell his people’s side of the story.
A rebel made, not born
Photo: Arfat Sheikh/Daffodil Studios
When I asked Arfat what led him to be a filmmaker, he told me he was a teenager in 2003 when his father was subjected to an enforced disappearance while travelling from Jammu to New Delhi.
The family was told Ghulam Nabi had died. When they went to collect his body, they were told it had been cremated. “We were given a picture of him… it was a mutilated picture, you couldn’t even tell it was him,” Arfat recalled.
With his father being a celebrity, the press was quick to pick up the story. “Nobody knew what had happened to him, but [the newspapers] kept making their own narrative. That’s when I felt they were taking that agency away from us.
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