Inspiration: ‘the Moral Imagination’ by John Paul Lederach

In September of 2014, Kashmir made headlines worldwide, not for the conflict that had long dominated the region, but for the devastating floods that had struck. It was during the aftermath of these floods that I found myself immersed in post-rehabilitation work with several humanitarian organizations. My work took me deep into the heart of Kashmir, where I met with its people and listened to their stories of loss and destruction. During one particularly poignant conversation with a 65-year-old man, whose name I never learned, he imparted upon me a new perspective on my homeland. His words still resonate with me today: “The floods have washed away our grief. The mud has buried our spaces. The foul smell has infused us with new spirit. We will wash it all away with water again to retell our stories. But we lack a space to tell, retell, and memorialize them.”

These words had a profound impact on me. They made me think deeply about the idea of spaces that connect, bridge, and network people, providing them with a platform to tell their own stories. In a region where journalists, storytellers, and media are in no short supply, I was struck by the question of who was telling our stories. Couldn’t we tell our own stories? It was then that I realized that the art of “know-who” was a vital lens through which to approach social change. By connecting the right people in the right way, we could foster processes and solutions that would allow our stories to be told and heard.

As a storyteller and human rights activist, I have always believed that the existing social networks in communities hold the potential to offer solutions. It was clear to me that finding strategic ways to engage and build spaces for documentation and dialogue was necessary for people to express, heal, and reconcile through sharing their stories. Along with a few friends and the support of Video Volunteers India, I launched the Kashmir Unheard community journalism project aimed at keeping alive the memory of Kashmir’s topography dotted with conflict and engaging with the daily stories of people.

The project trains community members to document their lives and the lives of their communities. As Lederach describes, this process can be like a journey into the unknown. However, we saw KU as an opportunity to understand people, their stories, and their lives through a unique lens. With a team of eight untrained individuals, we came up with this innovative response to create a landscape where stories work as a catalyst to help people share their everyday stories of trauma and hope and further develop collaborations to expose and hold perpetrators of violence accountable.

We soon realized that the stories we identified needed to be told, starting with our own and then our community’s stories. We found that every story and experience seemed to be connected through an invisible thread, following a pattern in Kashmir. These traumatic stories of pain, violence, and disappearances did not seek a permanent solution, but rather a window to vent out feelings and share experiences – to be heard is a healing process.

As Lederach states, “Community people in the settings of protracted conflict have no greater daily wish than to silence the guns.” It is at the heart of each conflict where people interact and connect, and harnessing this element is critical to social change and overcoming daily trauma. Lederach, metaphorically explains the role of yeast in baking bread, comparing it to social change that requires care and provides a safe space to bring together what has not been done earlier. For us, KU was the yeast that brought our community together and provided a safe space for us to share our stories, find commonalities, and work towards a change.

Building on the metaphor, Kashmir Unheard as a platform has been offering the role of yeast for the critical mass to nurture, heal and find solutions. Story sharing brings forward the emotion and opens room for empathy from those listening or watching on their screens. It invites towards vulnerability to engage with difficult knowledge. It is the affect in the shape of this emotional response experienced by groups of people invoked by the issue or the content. KU tells people’s story; it invokes responses and investigates their feelings. Story is the core character in itself here. We engage with people’s memories where unresolved pain from the ongoing conflict and trauma dwell. Speaking gives them hope, it works as a therapeutic mechanism. It helps transfer a certain experience to listeners brain, it helps an individual to make sense of his or her experience. 

Another important dimension of Kashmir Unheard’s work is impacts journalism. KU is intentional to mobilize people’s participation in finding solutions to the daily issues they face. Watch, Act and Change are the three principles on which the network operates. The Community Correspondents (CCs) associated with it do not merely document a story instead involve other community members as well to find solutions. These are the stories that affect people in day-to-day life. Community gatherings are convened to discuss in order to gather community support. It is to make sure that communities have understood the message they want to send to the world. It functions as a participatory network, where community members identify an issue, discuss it, highlight it, and design a response to achieve solutions. It empowers them to ask questions ultimately making them feel heard. Living in a conflict is filled with insecurities, vulnerabilities, dangers and unpredictability. In the setting of conflict and violence people suspend trust, there develops a feeling of mistrust leading to internal uncertainty and a lack of clear sense of self. The involvement and participation of common people in making some aspects of life in a conflict better is the motto of solutions journalism of KU’s work. With the failure of civic institutions in Kashmir due to the conflict, it is the responsibility of communities to shape their lives, they have to take over the space and tell people’s story which is missing. 

​The limitations of KU’s work, if its conflict documentation is analyzed shows that there are higher chances of provocation of anger, anxiety, judgements and disgust. They can at times prove to be provocative to the extent that they generate further anger and resentment. Images and videos can give birth to shock and result in political consequences, for example. The question however remains what is gained and lost. 

Kashmir Unheard title is just not an idea to have a space for sharing stories, instead it is an archive of collective memories. An archive of the past and present that offers inclusivity – Kashmiri population as one. The ‘Unheard’ in its title refers to voices not being heard. “Voice as metaphor has association with terms like, inclusion, power and meaningfulness”. The space of KU offers to develop resiliency, it forges solidarity amid an ongoing conflict. By harnessing benefits of the cheap camera tools and internet, the KUs ‘museum of memories’ can be accessed anywhere in the world, it is an attempt to critically engage with the past that is despairing.  Practices of remembrance rooted in conflict and violence often challenges audiences to rethink their existing perspectives on issues. 

The narrative questions not only the expectations of audiences but also often results in refusals, anxiety and disappointment from a wide range of people who believe in certain mainstream narratives. However, it encourages audiences to rethink their assumptions when challenged. When the existing systems become redundant, fails to cater to the needs of a community an alternative is required to replace or counter. “In reference to social change, it means we must develop a capacity to recognize and the locus of potential change. 

Reach out to those you fear.

Touch the heart of complexity.

Imagine beyond what is seen.

Risk vulnerability one step at a time. 

Lederach, 2005

Social healing is possible amid an ongoing conflict if avenues to voice, speak, and express are created. Storytelling and the aim of KUs work is act as a small brick in the wall of healing, memorizing, remembrance and recovering in Kashmir. This intentional work is a seed, as Lederach exemplifies moral imagination as a dormant seed within us, the challenge is how creatively we are able to use it for breaking the cycle of violence.  The documentation of testimonies from past and present is an attempt to get closer to generate education. Kashmir Unheard through its work has been engaging in collecting testimonies and narratives from the ground, amplifying the voices of communities and offering them a sense of empowerment. In the past seven years of its work, KU has tapped in around 1000 video testimonies of conflict affected people and communities. Its volunteers and community members have documented cases of disappearances, killings, torture, mass uprising and implications of militarization. It is narrowing distance between communities and the world by making it possible for their narratives to reach far and wide. Dominant narratives usually destroy the people’s story as there is power at play. “A people’s story is marginalized or, worse, destroyed by the dominant culture, and by this act, meaning, identity, and a place in history are lost. This is the deeper challenge of peacebuilding: How to reconstitute, or restory, the narrative and thereby restore the people’s place in history”. To put together these broken, and muzzled narratives helps understand a protracted conflict. 

As Lederach says, “the struggle for justice and beauty are worth the pain even when we lose and more than anything above all else, we have the joy of our hopes.” The work of KU is based in the idea of hope that our small contribution to work as a brick in the construction of a bridge towards a better tomorrow. I believe the wider use of such practice in conflict or underrepresented spaces by the practitioners will enhance them to meet certain important needs of their communities.

KU is a response and a process of engagement in intractable conflict of Kashmir. It’s a radical departure from traditional storytelling and media that centers around the communities and their needs. As John Paul Lederach puts it, “the struggle for justice and beauty are worth the pain even when we lose and more than anything above all else, we have the joy of our hopes.” Hope is the cornerstone of KU’s work, and it believes that every small contribution can act as a brick in constructing a bridge towards a better tomorrow. By employing such practices in conflict or underrepresented spaces, practitioners can meet the critical needs of their communities and bring about a positive change, forge paths for justice, equality and an end to oppression that’s long overdue.