Amsterdam BANGS Festival : For the Love of a Kashmiri & Vanishing Acts

Amsterdam BANGS festival is a politically charged joyride. Check out the website and instagram for more.

For the Love of a Kashmiri

Storytelling

August 5th, 2025 marked six years since Kashmir’s autonomous status was unilaterally revoked by India. To commemorate, the Indian government released a list of 25 books to be banned in Kashmir. Books about Kashmiri struggle for freedom. Over the next days, police officers raided bookstores in Srinagar, demanding to annex copies of the banned books. Kashmiris laughed. Try as it might, the state cannot ban the yearning for freedom. Can it chain the wind? They say that freedom, azadi, travels through the hearts of lovers, dreamers. It seeps through walls and widens the cracks in them. This is a story of hearts caught in a mesh of unfreedoms – asking: Can love be chained?

Vanishing Acts

by Sruti Bala

This talk uses extracts from books on Kashmir recently banned by the Indian government to reflect on disappearance and erasure as modes of governance on the one hand, and as tools of theatrical performance on the other. The talk concludes with an invitation to write postcards to incarcerated activists.

Before these shows, we will be gifted with poetry by @cglr_ksgl on Palestine, to create a movement extending the solidarity many of us have learned to have toward Palestine to include Kashmir.

This year, half of the money we are raising is going to support a project in Kashmir documenting land grabs.