Zafran

To build a homeland in exile, you need art, stories, and the nerve to show it. Saffron Kingdom does it well.

In The Trial, Josef K. is arrested yet permitted to live as if free, working and moving about, while always under invisible custody. He is a prisoner walking outside the prison walls. In Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” a man asks for entry and is told, “It is possible, but not now.”

Kashmir often resembles this Kafkaesque suspension. People move through their routines, permitted small protests that mimic resistance, but the restraints are never lifted. For example, you will have Phiren Day, but it is rarely mentioned why the day was created in the first place.

The moment their words stretch beyond what is tolerated, the chain pulls them back to the prescribed order of things. Even when imagination presses toward the possible, through art or expression, the response is always the same: possible, but not now.

In a Kafkaesque world, telling true stories carries its own trap. Audiences consume them, but often in a sanitised form. The cost is collaboration or silence, as one waits for the moment when the true expression becomes possible.

Even this suspension extends beyond Kashmir itself. For many who have left, the deferral follows them into exile. What cannot be said at home must find another form abroad.

In Exile

Kashmiri-American writer and musician Mubashir Mohiuddin of ZeroBridge, in his song In Exile, captures this predicament: “So what kind of idea are you? The possibilities are endless in exile.”

Edward Said once described exile as “the unhealable rift between a human being and a native place,” however, he also argues that this distance obliges artists and intellectuals to create, to turn memory into art, literature, and media that can extend the political struggle and speak for those silenced at home.

Agha Shahid Ali did exactly that, transforming the grief of separation into verse, where longing itself became a form of survival. Together, these voices show that exile, though defined by absence, can also be a space of imagination: a geography where what is denied, “possible, but not now,” as Kafka put it, is kept alive through art and turned into a claim for justice.

This is where Arfat Sheikh’s feature debut Saffron Kingdom falls in place: an exilic filmmaker placing his homeland at the centre of his work. A first-of-its-kind exilic film, it positions the life of a small but increasingly outspoken Kashmiri diaspora at its heart. The film follows Masrat, a woman whose father was killed in the Gaw Kadal massacre, where over fifty Kashmiris were gunned down by state forces.

Later, her husband is subjected to forced disappearance into custody for his political activism, witnessed by their son Rizwan, named after a character in Agha Shahid Ali’s I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight. Masrat moves to the United States, works at a university, and begins writing a book on Kashmir. After August 5, 2019, she gathers testimonies from relatives who had long tried to live beside the past, only to reopen their wounds as they recall their own memories of Gaw Kadal.

Throughout the film, trauma lingers like a shadow in the lungs. Masrat’s stories choke the breath, and when the breath is gone, there are breakdowns. Perhaps the weight of Kashmiri history prevents us from distancing ourselves from the film; instead, we become witnesses, even participants.

Sheikh achieves the remarkable feat of transforming an American city into Srinagar, staging a winter wedding near Gaw Kadal, blending American settings with grainy Kashmiri footage and sudden darkness. He resists the postcard Kashmir of mountains and lakes, daring instead to imagine it within four walls or a small garden.

Another striking choice is the cast. Arameans, Iranians, Egyptians, Afghans, Italians, Kurds, Venezuelans, Filipinos, Jewish-Americans, and others play Kashmiris. Sheikh chooses them because in exile, appearances carry risks. Their broken Kashmiri accents matter less than the gravity of the subject. The world tells these stories in a language it does not fully understand, yet it manages to do justice. The production’s flaws and rough edges become part of its meaning, and they mark the exile of the film itself.

Exilic Achievement

Exilic filmmaking has a long and storied lineage. Under Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, directors like Miguel Littín, Raúl Ruiz, and Patricio Guzmán were forced into exile after the coup of 1973. From Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and France, they made more than two hundred films, often with the help of transnational networks of solidarity.

These works preserved Chilean memory when the regime sought to erase it, keeping alive a sense of cultural identity that could not be stamped out by censorship or prison walls.

Hamid Naficy calls this an “accented cinema,” one born of displacement, whose very form carries the scars of exile. These films are intensely place-bound, haunted by the desire to recapture or return to a homeland. Their narratives are suffused with sadness, loneliness, and alienation, but also with improvisation and invention. Budgets are small, resources are patchworked, and crews like the Saffron Kingdom are assembled from diaspora communities.

A living room becomes a stand-in for a city square; non-native actors play roles with unfamiliar accents. The flaws could be seen as defects, but they carry signatures of exile itself. As Edward Said observed, exile’s sadness “can never be surmounted,” yet the homeland is too powerfully real to be erased. In this tension, exilic art emerges, bearing witness to a place while existing outside of it. Sheikh’s Saffron Kingdom belongs squarely in this tradition.

Kashmir has produced remarkable works in exile before. Allama Iqbal, who first romanticised the valley in verse, turned political after visiting his ancestral homeland, later invoking Kashmiri saints in his Javidnama. Mirwaiz Maulvi Yusuf Shah, exiled in 1947, completed a Quranic commentary in Kashmiri, while his son Mirwaiz Moulvi Muhammad Ahmad Shah’s recitations crossed borders through the radio.

And Agha Shahid Ali, who began in nostalgia, became a war poet. His Country Without a Post Office became a standard bearer of Kashmiri poetry in English, and an introduction to the possibilities of exile for writers such as Basharat Peer, Mirza Waheed, Ather Zia, Feroz Rather, and Zahid Rafiq.

Saffron Kingdom traces how trauma moves across generations and borders. A Palestinian friend, whose family fled Safad to Gaza during the Nakba and then into exile in the Gulf, once put it this way in a conversation, “We Palestinians have three homes. One where we are born, one where we live, and one that lives in us.”

The Possibilities of Exile

The film has already received critical recognition and accolades, yet it will likely never be screened in Kashmir. Here Said’s reflections feel especially true: the achievements of exile are “permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever.” Exilic works may travel the world, win awards, and reach audiences, but they carry with them the ache of absence, the knowledge that the homeland they reimagine is the one place they cannot fully return to.

As Masrat finds a resolution in writing her book, it doesn’t really feel like a payoff. Maybe we are looking for how it will all end, as we are immersed in the stories as participants. Maybe that chapter is yet to be written. Because, as Kashmiris, we are looking for the ultimate healing for our maladies and the ultimate answer to our question. For those removed from this inheritance of loss, it will allow them to look into our world and lives through Sheikh’s lens.

This movie is a moment in our history - maybe it will inspire more people to create art that doesn’t reduce Kashmir to nostalgia or a picnic-friendly fairytale, but to a homeland of people with agency. Our stories will be told. And filmmakers like Sheikh will not need to wait for permission to tell them.