CAST: Mithun chakraborty, Anupam Kher, Pallavi Joshi, Darshan Kumar, Amaan iqbal
DIRECTOR : Vivek Agnihotri
BLUF: 32 years later, the emotions & the pain remain the same. Witness the brutally honest story of the Kashmir Genocide
REVIEW
Penned by M.Kaul
There was a time in the history of Indian filmmaking when a movie was not complete unless filmed in the beautiful locales of Kashmir, and the lead couple romanced the valleys enough. But that is not the case today. Since the late 1980s, Kashmir ceased seeing the actors hanging out at its trendiest restaurants or resorts. The Kashmir insurgency has been documented plenty by Bollywood filmmakers, whether in its glossy versions or marginally by barely touching the surface of the actual situation.
Whether it was Mani Ratnam’s Roja loosely based on the 1991 kidnapping of K. Doraiswamy, an executive of the Indian Oil Corporation, abducted by Kashmiri militants and put in captivity for two months and his wife’s attempts to find her husband.
Or Haider, Vishal Bharadwaj’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet altered to fit the narrative of the insurgency-hit conflicts of 1995 and civilian disappearances in Kashmir.
Then there was Mission Kashmir in 2000, directed and produced by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, who grew up in the valley and had emotional stakes in the narrative of the insurgency there. He presented another angle to the same story in his movie Shikara in 2020, through a love story of a pandit couple forced to leave Kashmir.
Notebook, produced by Salman Khan in 2019, was an adaptation of the 2014 Thai movie, The Teachers Diary, also re-written for the valley. It told the story of the conflict, a Kashmiri pandit making his way home and finding closure for his family there.
Rasika Duggal starrer Hamid is another heartbreaking story from the valley of a father who goes missing.
It is a story of a seven-year-old Hamid who learns that 786 is God’s number and decides to try and reach out to God, by dialing this number. He wants to talk to his father, who his classmate tells him has gone to Allah.
There is never the absence of storytelling about Kashmir if someone would have a moment to look for the human loss and pathos embodied in Kashmiris’ everyday lives.
These are the stories of our families, neighbors, friends, and loved ones. Each of these stories tells us aspects of the underlying story, and yet, as a community, 32 years later, Kashmiri Pandits have not found closure to the story of their lives.
Will telling their story as they experienced it help them get some relief from the desolation this community has faced? Maybe not. But documentation of the story of their lives is what is the least owed to them.
Vivek Agnihotri makes an honest attempt at this. The story is told through the lens of Krishna Pandit ( Darshan Kumar), who believes in alternative narratives about his family’s flight from Kashmir.
His grandfather has kept the truth of the massacre of his parents and sibling from him to protect him.
Agnihotri takes you into the lives of the family of Pushkar Nath Pandit (Anupam Kher), who lives in his house 84, Karan Nagar ( which should have been Bal Garden, Karan Nagar and no- not on a hillside) where his son, daughter in law, and two grandsons live.
The story depicts one of the most insane insurgents of our times Bitta Karate, who was arrested and tried after he surrendered to the forces.
In his lifetime, Bitta ( Farooq Ahmed Dar) joined the JKLF ( the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front) and received a month of training in the Pakistani state-sponsored camp across the Indian border in Pakistani occupied territory of Jammu and Kashmir.
Bitta Karate (named for his mastery of the martial art) was synonymous with the indiscriminate killings of Kashmiri Pandits in the valley
The people named in the movie were killed by Bitta and others like Bitta, who were indoctrinated to think that getting rid of the minority Hindus would get them freedom from India.
The Farooq Abdulla government and the Abdullahs were as spineless as depicted, changing their loyalty as they pleased. Be it the Pakistani Administration or the Indian Government, they were friends of whoever filed their coffers the most, auctioning the trust of the Kashmiri people as they deemed fit while playing roulette with their lives.
The attempt to change the narrative of this genocide was for real.
But then there were the honest journalists too, who stood up to the violence. Some had to report hiding, and some brave ones like Shujaat Bukhari, who dared the terrorists, were assassinated in broad daylight.
The academic support for the insurgency through specific vested individuals (Pallavi Joshi as Radhika Menon), funds, global corporations, and think tanks affiliated with ISI( the Pakistani Intelligence Agency) furthered the internationalization of the legitimacy of the terrorists.
I remember the horror I watched Benazir Bhutto incite people to fight for freedom on television. At the same time, chants of Allah O Akbar were loud and present in our living rooms as they broadcast from every mosque in the valley.
I know this to be true because I was there.
Raliev, Galiev ya Tchaliev ( Join us, Die or Leave) were the only real and loud options provided.
Many pandit women were abducted, raped, and killed. The slogan of “Aise gache Kasheer bataw warie magar batniyav seeth” ( we want a Kashmir without the Kashmiri pandit men but with their women) echoed in the mobs.
My uncle was in his hotel in the posh Residency Road of Kashmir when a group of gun-yielding men entered to hide from the Indian Army.
Perhaps the only Kashmiri Pandit woman politician, my aunt was kidnapped with her husband, and their security was shot dead. My uncle, a doctor, was abducted to treat the injured terrorists.
Many people were shot dead like Shiv and Krishna’s father was. In a rice drum. Many kids witnessed their families slaughtered in front of their own eyes. Many of us saw the rapes of our friends and family members.
We were asked to cover our heads and, in some congested downtown areas, even stopped from going to school
No story is one-sided. And this was not too.
Like Abdul’s father, Pushkarnath’s neighbor, some neighbors directed the terrorists to their Hindu targets. Still, there were others like our neighbor Uncle Ghulam Rasool who, the moment he realized that my father was on the hit list, rushed to save his life at the peril of his own.
My mother was the eye-witness to the shooting of the four Indian Air Force officers. She still deals with that trauma.As the officers lay there soaked in blood, they asked for water. Our neighbor’s young son rushed outside to offer the water. The family had to leave their homes overnight because of this one act of humanity. We heard the same assassins threatened them.
I was bundled into a car with my uncle and aunt to escape the violence, and gun-yielding mobs attacked our vehicle on the highway leading from Srinagar to Jammu. I can still feel the cold of the gun on my temple while we were hurled accusations of being Indian spooks and “Indian Dogs” at the same time told that we were grifters for leaving the valley.
As they surrounded us, we fought to figure out how we would stay alive. But it was an older Muslim man in that unruly mob who stopped the crowd from killing us. I owe my life to him.
The movie depicts every actual incident as it happened—all of it. Nandigram also happened. Exactly the way it is depicted in the movie. Sarla Tickoo was the woman who was diced and sliced on a wood cutter in front of the entire village.
The villagers , who were all muslims conducted the last rites of all 24 dead.
The migrant camps, the squalor of the Kashmiri pandits camps, sometimes housing 20 people to a tent, living off the Government grant of Rupees 600 per month per family, the emptiness of their lives, and the need for them to go back home, all is real, even today.
When Pushkar Nath died, that was exactly how my grandmother also left us: still pining to be back home in her beloved Kashmir, incomplete in even her death.
What the movie missed out on was the plurality of the situation. Everyone suffered. When I look back at my childhood and those precious relationships we created, Rubina Lone will still be my closest buddy and someone I will always stand up for. Asif Bhai will always have my back. Mubashir will always call me if he does not hear from me for a few days. Sadaf will always be my weekend facetime gossip buddy. Bilal Bhai will always be the person who carried me in his lap to my school bus in three feet snow. And Sajjad Bhai will always be the brother who cares about my dad and adores him the way I do.
Terrorism has no religion. And the reality is that despite the pain that each one of us has undergone, when we speak with each other, the only thing we remember is our common heritage, the jokes only we will understand, our collective history, our food, our language and our kashmiriyat.
As a Kashmiri pandit, who lived January 1990 in flesh and blood, did this moviegive us the closure we wanted?
Indeed, in documenting this story, much work has been done.
