Weathering all-round criticism and discouragement, Sheikh Neelofar, 27, has become the first Kashmiri woman actor to have performed in an international film, Valley of Saints, and has managed to stand out as one of the best actors the Valley has seen in recent years.

Born in a middle-class family, Neelofar began her acting career in 2000 when she was studying in the fifth standard.

In school, she was famous for taking part in Rouf (a traditional Kashmiri dance) drama and stood out for melodious voice.

In 2000, Neelofer was busy playing with her friends in school when a team of Doordarshan Urdu in Srinagar visited the school in search of a young actor for a TV serial ‘Mapping Kashmiriyat’.
The team was headed by Maharaj Krishna Raina, popularly known as M. K. Raina, one of India’s best-known theatre actors and directors.

Along with many other students, little Neelofar auditioned for the serial and was selected. Raina was impressed with her performance and asked her to join the sets as soon as possible.
“I was happy after getting selected, but my next challenge was to convince my family, which was next to impossible,” said Neelofar. 

Once home, in Aloocha Bagh, an area of Jammu and Kashmir’s summer capital Srinagar, Neelofar decided to talk to her mother Sheikh Misra, 47, who was busy in kitchen.  She hugged her mother from behind and said “bea gayas darmahas kheatre select” (I got selected to perform in a drama). But her mother flatly refused permission, saying it would be a “social stigma” as they were living in a predominantly Muslim society.

After pleading with her mother for a week, Neelofar finally got her permission. Due to her pink cheeks, she was named Pinky in the serial. For next two years, she was the lead actor in the serial.

Soon she became popular as Pinky in her locality. However, there were many who were critical of Neelofar for being an actor. But, she left all her worries and critics aside, with her mother, Misra, emerging as her main support.

“I was young, and people kept taunting me. My mother stood by me all the time,” said Neelofar with smile on her face.

People around her didn’t leave a single stone unturned to discourage her. But, an undeterred Neelofar had faith in herself and in the artist in her and continued performing.

In 2003, her talent brought her another offer. This time it was harder to convince her family, as due to continuous discouragement from others, it became tougher for Neelofar to convince her mother.

Eventually, her passion and dedication to acting melted Misra’s heart and she allowed Neelofar to continue acting. In the Dayariyan serial, Neelofar again played the lead role. Realistic acting and dialogue delivery made her famous and everyone in DD became her fan.

She continued to act in Dayariyan for a year. In the same year, an employee at DD asked her to join classes to learn Hafiz Nagma (a Kashmir Sufi dance) at the Directorate of Information, Kashmir.

“People who were teaching there were impressed by my performance and asked me to teach other students,” she said.

For the next three years, Neelofar taught students Hafiz Nagma, and continued to participate in many stage and theatre programmes.

In 2006, Neelofar decided to enhance her skills. She attended multiple workshops in the National School of Drama in New Delhi. During these years, she continued to get roles as a lead actor. In 2006 and 2007, she received offers for many serials, such as Aalam Kariyaad Azad Azad, Meiale Kheaish Waatei Zaroor.

With back-to-back performances, Neelofar decided to take a break from acting and spend some time with her family. Besides her mother, her small family has a sister and her father, Sheikh Abdul Hamid, 50, who is a painter by profession.

In 2009, Neelofar’s sister, Dilafrooz, now 31, got married. The family’s responsibility fell on Neelofar.

Then, in 2010, a big opportunity knocked at her door.

It was an offer by international independent filmmaker, Musa Syeed, for movie called, Valley of Saints.

Musa Syeed, a Kashmiri-origin filmmaker, became the first Muslim to write a Yiddish movie, Menashe. Syeed, 32, co-wrote  Joshua Z Weinstein’s Menashe along with Alex Lipschultz and Weinstein.

Menashe, which recently held its international premiere in Berlin, is a film in Yiddish, a language used by Jews in central and Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

Syeed, a prominent Kashmiri-origin US filmmaker and writer, has made politically acclaimed films, such as, The Big House (Al Bayt Al Kabeer), Bronx Princess, A Son’s Sacrifice. Valley of Saints is one among them.

Born in Indiana, the US, Syeed lives in New York, while his father Sayyid Mohammed Syeed, a former National Director for the Office of Interfaith and Community Alliances for the Islamic Society of North America, and mother live in Washington D.C. Hailing from North Kashmir’s Sopore township, Syeed’s parents settled in the US in the 1980s.

This was Neelofar’s first chance to play a role of lead actor in an international movie. She accepted the offer and that decision changed her life.

Valley of Saints was shot in Kashmir and won the World Cinema Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival and the Special Jury Prize at the Dubai International Film Festival in 2012.
The film was one of the biggest achievements for Musa and his team and, of course, for Neelofar. The same year, she headed the audition team in Kashmir for the Hindi flick, Jab Tak Hai Jaan, by Yash Raj Films.

In 2013, she got an offer from a local director, Dilnawaz Muntazir, for the movie Partav. This film was based on the education system of Kashmir. In all these years, Neelofar faced heavy criticism from friends and family, but continued undaunted.

Fortunately, Neelofar received offers for movies which were based on real stories. In 2014, came another offer for fim, Half-Widow, based on Kashmiri women whose husbands were abducted by the government forces and never came back.

However, she was forced to take a break in 2015 when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

“I spent all my money, sold my house to pay for surgeries and therapies. By the grace of god and my hard work, I supported my mother in her fight with cancer,” said Neelofar with tears in her eyes.

Without an abode and having the responsibility of an ailing mother, Neelofar worked hard and made enough money again and purchased a new house at Baghat-e-Kanipora, an area in Budgam district. It took her mother almost three years to recover.

At present, Neelofar is playing a lead role in another film, Songs of Paradise.

“I don’t follow any actress, I want to be myself, I have seen ups and down in my life, I have met people who discouraged me, but I kept myself focused on my one aim in life,” said Neelofar, her face emitting a passion for acting.

Courtesy: Newsclick.in

February 23 is commemorated as Kashmir Women's Resistance Day, in remembrance of the brave and ardous struggle for justice against the rapes allegedly committed by the Indian Army, on the intervening night of February 23 and February 24, in 1991. The Jammu and Kashmir police officially called the case "closed as untraced", until they learnt that a PIL was going to be filed by a group of Kashmiri women. The process of filing the PIL, as well as the struggle for justice so far, has been recorded in Do You Remember Kunan Poshpora?, published by Zubaan. Souradeep Roy and Vidhya from the Indian Cultural Forum, speaks to Essar Batool, one of the co-authors of the book in a three part interview:

 
 

Shazia ran into trouble early on in her marriage. “His behaviour changed after we got married,” the mother of one who works in the Jammu and Kashmir government’s health department told the State Women’s Commission during a hearing in Srinagar on December 20.

Shazia’s husband first started harassing her for working night shifts with male colleagues, then had an affair, and eventually walked out on her and their two-year-old son in 2014. “I was still at work when he packed his bags and left,” she said. “He hasn’t even called since then.”

After he refused to abide by a court ruling directing him to pay child support, Shazia filed a case against him at the commission this month. He didn’t turn up at the hearing where she pleaded her case, but sent his younger brother, an uncle and a neighbour. The brother authoritatively pulled out a piece of paper, stating it was a “notice issued to her to resolve the matter”. What he claimed to be a legal notice was actually the diktat of a mohalla (neighbourhood) committee made up of men. Rebuking him, Nayeema Mehjoor, the head of the commission, refused to acknowledge the document.

A few kilometers from the commission, in the city’s Rambagh area, is a women’s police station. According to Station House Officer Gulshan Akhtar, they receive over 10 new cases of crimes against women, including domestic violence, every day – a claim supported by the commission.

On December 24, squatting outside the station – which, unlike its name, has more male than female personnel – was 28-year-old Tabasum, who has accused her husband and in-laws of physical abuse and mental torture. She said that two months into her marriage, her sister-in-law and mother-in-law started confining her and denying her food. The assault has left marks on her face and body. “My husband once tried to push me through a window in the attic,” she recalled.
 

Silenced

In Kashmir, like elsewhere in the country, incidents of violence against women, especially at home, are swept under the carpet for multiple reasons. Chief among them is the fear of being ostracised by society, owing to selective interpretations of religion and traditions. But just as important a factor is the decades of conflict in the state that overshadows all other aspects of life.

Shazia Manzoor, a coordinator at the University of Kashmir’s Department of Social Works, said violence against women is not new and “can be linked both to the patriarchal set-up as well as the political scenario of the state”. Most women who suffer violence at home do not speak about it because of the indoctrination they have received since childhood that women have to “make adjustments”, she said. Even those who file complaints maintain that they would rather go back to their abusive spouses than live as single mothers.

According to Nayeema Mehjoor of the State Women’s Commission, where once marriage and family were strong institutions, today everything is “about valueless education”. She added, “We focus on everything except the basic institution, home, because we no longer feel that the home is an institution to be protected.”

Complicating matters is the absence of people’s participation in dealing with the problem, ignorance of official mechanisms of redressal, and lack of awareness. Tabasum, who had never been to a police station before, had no idea that a body like the State Women’s Commission even existed.
 

Summer violence

During the summer unrest – as the Kashmir Valley erupted in an uprising against the state and normal life was under lockdown for over four months starting July – cases of domestic violence increased as a result of men being confined to their homes and the lack of individual space, said Mehjoor. During this period, the commission remained open and heard out five to six women on average every day, she added.

As for women, the imposition of communication blockades and curfews kept them from socialising in their neighbourhoods – a practice that Mehjoor called “a sort of catharsis”.

Last year, 2,009 cases were registered under the Domestic Violence Act against 4,157 cases in the past five years combined, the state government revealed. However, according to data collated by the Crime Branch of the Jammu and Kashmir Police, 4,825 cases of crimes against women were registered in the state during 2014 and 2015. Of these, 11 were cases of dowry deaths and 868 were of “cruelty by husband” – 400 registered in 2015 and 468 the year before.
 

Illegal interference

Making matters worse, the lack of awareness among people about official grievance redressal bodies has led to rampant interference by unofficial committees. Mehjoor said the menace of mohalla committees has grown over the past two decades. Even though these hold no legal standing, “people still go to them as courts take time while they are seen as immediate relief”.

According to police officer Gulshan Akhtar, most people don’t come to the police with such complaints, preferring to reach out to these committees instead. Even the few who do approach the police “first go to the mohalla committees and then they consider approaching the courts or the police”. She added, “All cases [at the Rambagh police station] go there first and then come here.”

And instead of mediating, these neighbourhood committees often end up taking “a decision unilaterally without consulting the women”, said Shazia Manzoor of the University of Kashmir. “Women are still considered property and men their rightful custodians who have the authority to deal with it in the manner they find appropriate,” she said.

For instance, a businessman in his 30s divorced his wife through the controversial triple talaq method. The divorce papers, issued by his mohalla committee, bore his signature and those of his wife’s brothers, but not of the wife herself.

The neighbourhood committees are encouraged to meddle because despite their lack of legal authority, the police record their statements along with those of the involved parties.

Of late, Mehjoor said, there has also been a practice of muftis from seminaries such as the Dar-ul-Ulooms being brought in as complainants or respondents, and they seek settlement through religious principles. And the commission has increasingly had to rely on religious edicts while deciding cases. As a result, Mehjoor said the commission has requested the government to “authorise a single religious body to issue fatwas”. She recalled a case where the callous issuance of fatwas had compelled “a woman to remarry four times”.

Yet another problem in dealing with cases of domestic violence is the lack of women police officers, said a senior police official who did not want to be identified. Also, the police may often be discouraged from carrying out their duty towards the victim as a result of belonging to the same society. “No policeman would want to do the right thing and risk being blamed for un-Islamic acts,” he said.

Names of victims have been changed to protect their identities.

This article was first published on Scroll.in