New Delhi: About a year after the release of his debut novel The Collaborator in 2011, Mirza Waheed, a Kashmiri award-winning author, was doing a reading at an event, when a producer heard him. This producer was the late Gopi Sait. Founder of an independent film company Mulberry Films. Gopi Sait knew almost immediately that he wanted to adapt the book into a film.
More than a decade later, the book, shaped by the haunting spectres of Waheed’s youth, set during Kashmir’s tumultuous years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, has been turned into a film and is now awaiting an official release.
The team behind the film has, till now, reached out to 22 film festivals. An official worldwide release will be announced after the film gets premiered at a festival.
Though it was Sait that took on the project to adapt The Collaborator, his sudden death in 2019, cast a shadow of uncertainty over the project.
A few months following Sait’s death, however, his close friend and business partner, Rashaana Shah took over the project. “We wanted to make a middle path movie and have dialogue on both sides of the war, like two sides of a coin. Mirzaji’s story has been the rarest approach to any conflict,” 47-year-old Shah told ThePrint. “It’s not just for Kashmiris who know the reality. It will help take the conversation to a global platform.”
The Collaborator is set in an imaginary village on the India side of the Line of Control (LoC). The novel follows the journey of a Kashmiri 19-year-old who witnesses his friends leaving to join the insurgency. The teenager, referred to as “the boy”, decides to stay back with his family, watching his village slowly fall into ruins.
His life, however, takes a dramatic turn when an Indian Army captain recruits him to assist him in identifying the bodies of those who have died in the violence.
Through the boy’s internal struggles — juggling between his loyalty to his community and the complexities of his job, the anxiety of coming across the body of a friend — The Collaborator presents the brutality of the situation.
“The dusk here does not arrive on the shoulders of golden sunsets any more, but on the heels of long, encroaching shadows of untraceable trees in the distance, gloomy parallel patterns that cascade over the undulating landscape of unevenly dispersed corpses and other things,” Waheed writes in one of the chapters of the novel.
Waheed had carried the kernel of the story with him for many years before finally deciding to write the book in 2007. The story stemmed from an incident during his teenage years when, during a crackdown in his neighbourhood in Kashmir, he saw some bodies on the ground. “I must have been 16 at the time. In those days, abnormal had become normal and it was all so banal. This image just stayed with me,” he said.
“I created a fictional village set after the 1947 violence when two countries came into existence through a violent birth but, in that, Kashmir had its own violence,” he said, adding that his goal was to understand what happens on the margins and to illuminate the darkness of the conflict.
The Collaborator became an international bestseller and garnered accolades including being a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize, and shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. In 2011, publisher Waterstones highlighted it as part of their major literary debut promotion, ‘Waterstones 11’. It was also named book of the year by The Telegraph, New Statesman, Financial Times, Business Standard, and Telegraph India, among others.
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The film
Shah has had to navigate several challenges, such as not being able to find an Indian cast and not being able to shoot the film in Kashmir. The production team, after several rounds of reconnaissance across the US, found a picturesque substitute in the valleys of Georgia, in the Caucasus Mountains.
The cast includes British actor Rudi Dharmalingam who takes on the role of Captain Kadian, while newcomer Nikhil Singh Rai plays ‘the boy’. The film also features actors like Nitin Ganatra, Vikram Kapadia, and Meera Ganatra.
The film has been funded by Chaitra Vedullapalli, founder of Women in Cloud, a global network of women associated with the tech world, and CnR films headed by Swetha Pakala.
Central to the film’s ethos is its refusal to glamourise or simplify the complexities of conflict. Shah calls the film an open dialogue about “what is the intent of a war?” The inspiration for the team to make the film remains simple — that the boy understands that both sides remain inconsequential.
“So many years have passed since 9/11 but it still affects the day-to-day lives of people, no matter which religion you belong to. Similarly, the consequences of what happens on the India-Pakistan border affects the lives of common people,” said Shah.
Throughout the film, the makers have made sure that the war or blood is not shown. “You will hear it, feel it, you will see the consequences and collateral damages of it,” she said.
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