Intense, dense, disquieting, absorbing, overwhelming.
That was the experience of watching The Kashmir Files in a packed Bengaluru theatre, with the family. My daughter was crying profusely when I saw her during the intermission. I could see tears in quite a few eyes in our row. It appeared that the film had moved the hearts of many in the audience.
The screenplay and the narrative are gripping, and the pace of the movie is perfect, not one dull moment in the 3-hour film. The non-linear storytelling style interleaving the past and the present comes out powerful. The brutality of the Kashmiri Hindu genocide and Islam being the sole motivator of its perpetrators and not economics, politics or Kashmiriyat as is normally made out, this has been brought out bluntly in the movie. The chilling incidents of the early 1990s that we have heard and read involving multiple Kashmiri Hindu families and persons have been mixed to weave a compelling story that centers around one family. Still it highlights the enormity and the scale of it, both through visuals, and through dialogues. Sexual violence unleashed on Hindu women is not shown graphically, but well recorded — Islamists are shown shouting slogans like “Run away Hindu men, and leave your women” openly. The treachery of Muslims on their Hindu neighbors of decades, rather centuries is also depicted, as a glimpse of how Islamic religious zeal blinds all human tendencies of ordinary humans.
The Hindu exodus from Kashmir in the 1990s was triggered by the genocidal attacks on them. So it is both, an exodus as well as a genocide in that sense.
Some reviewers felt that the track of “ANU” Left Liberal professor brainwashing the students is an unwanted digression, but I think it very much gels in the film. It provides a good context for today’s youngsters watching the film. The sheer frustration that one feels while watching those professor scenes is intentional, I think, to make the viewer feel the contrast between the brutality of the truth and its falsification through cosmetic means. Also, the characterization of each character is not brought out fully only because the main focus of the story is to bring out the truth through the collective grief of the whole Kashmiri Hindu community. This is not really a flaw in the movie but is quite deliberate.
Background music is deep, resonant and haunting. The many Kashmiri, Dogri language dialogues and short Kashmiri song tracks make the movie well-grounded in its geographical and cultural landscape. Great performances by all the actors. Anupam Kher is astounding. Pallavi Joshi and Mithun Chakraborty, both seasoned actors shine in their roles. Darshan Kumar and Bhasha Sumbli have given impressive performances at the very start of their acting careers. Salutations and admiration for the director Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri and everyone involved in this great venture.
Artistically, one can find some rough edges in the movie — like, quite a few lengthy dialogues could have been avoided and made crisper, the whole track of Krishna Pandit meeting the terrorist chief Farooq Ahmed Dar is labored and unnecessary, etc. There are logical and timeline goofs too — like, Krishna Pandit is shown as a born baby in 1990, so, he would be aged 31 in 2021–22, the present of the movie. Even while admitting that a PhD “student” of that age can contest student election in ANU, his very appearance and maturity place him in his early 20s. He is shown as a 2–3 year old infant in the depiction of Nadimarg massacre, which factually took place in 2003. Being a film based on history, some logical correctness could have been maintained. This is just for some critical remarks and I am not at all going to harp on this while assessing the real value of the movie, which is much greater. As a filmmaker, Vivek Agnihotri has come multiple notches above and ahead of his recent political-historical movies like The Tashkent Files or The Accidental Prime Minister in this movie. Perhaps his whole conserved creative energy burst out in full force, waiting to make such an important, historic film.
This is not just a movie, not just a piece of art, but a harsh jolt, an illuminating flame that would shake and awaken the Hindu society and all patriotic Indians. The awakening is towards knowing and recording the pains and the wounds of our past. Not just of the recent past, also the of distant past as it is all connected, and learning important lessons from that history.
Let us hope The Kashmir Files would herald a wave of such narratives in cinema, not just in Hindi but also in the other prominent Indian languages.
