Skip to main content

The Kashmir Files



Even propaganda deserves a better standard than Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files. The last half an hour of the movie is pathetically propagandist with sermons of all sorts. The concluding frames left me nauseated. No, there was absolutely no need to show every single one of those murders. Especially that little child’s. Not so unaesthetically, at least. Cinema is an art, Agnihotri bhai, not an insipid ad for your pet ideology.

The first half had some good drama. I thought I made the right decision to watch the movie though none of the reviews I had read gave me any reason to make the decision. Soon drama gave way to blood-curdling scenes. Violence of all sorts. Terrorist violence on the one hand and violence on art on the other. If the Muslim terrorists in Kashmir committed the former, Agnihotri’s direction did the latter.

The word ‘narrative’ is mentioned again and again in the movie especially toward the end. The Kashmir Files is a narrative and little more. It is a narrative created by a right-wing Hindu propagandist. Everyone who is not a right-wing Hindu is a villain in the movie – as well as outside, by insinuation. All Muslims are murderers or crooks. All liberals are caricatures who have devious and dubious faces. Secularism is filthy. In fact, Agnihotri goes to the extent of hammering down the narrative that the terrorists in Kashmir and the liberals in ANU (JNU?) work hand in glove with each other.

The protagonist is a mere puppet in Agnihotri’s hands. Krishna Pandit (Darshan Kumar) was born in Kashmir but was brought up outside as his parents and brother were among the numerous Pandits killed by terrorists. Everyone except Krishna knows the truth about him. Krishna appears to be too innocent – to the extent of appearing naïve if not foolish – until he learns too much in too little time. He blindly trusts Prof Radhika Menon, the liberal caricature of ANU, and then the leader of the terrorists with whom Radhika is seen in a photograph. Then when the character of Mithun Chakraborty delivers another narrative, he laps up that. And after all that, this masoon ladka suddenly comes up with encyclopaedic knowledge about India’s great heritage and the monstrous Muslim villainy that had swallowed up all that heritage for a long time. In that moment of the protagonist’s epiphany, we get a long sermon from him, a moral science class that can beat PM Modi’s Mann ki Baat.

“Some facts, some half-truths, and plenty of distortions.” That’s what The Kashmir Files is in the end. The verdict belongs to Anuj Kumar of The Hindu. Shailesh Kapoor, founder-CEO of Ormax Media says that the movie caters “to a right-wing sensibility in sync with the current mood of the nation.”

The current mood of the nation has made the movie tax-free in the BJP-ruled states. The BJP will reap political dividends from this movie which promotes hatred without limits. Hatred, aversion, revulsion… such are the tastes that linger in your sensibility as you walk out of the movie hall having watched The Kashmir Files.

PM Modi with the movie's crew

Art should produce the opposite kind of feelings. Art is a purification of our negative feelings and reinforcement of positive ones. The Kashmir Files achieves just the opposite. 

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    The great trouble with films is that not many are going along to watch with a critical mindset such as we may do - though having read up a bit on this one, it does seem that a fair number of folk are recognising the revisionst nature of it. One wonders if a film about the earlier Jammu massacres of Hindus and Sikhs upon Muslims would have even got licensed under current regime? The tit-for-tat business there leaves no one shining... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This tit-for-tat is what I'm worried about too. They are out to take revenge for all history's mistakes! Any good leader would work on the present for a better future. Our man is concerned about the past and that too about its blunders and crimes. So we'll get more such films and more hatred.

      Delete
  2. I don't think, I will ever get a chance to watch this 'kashmir saga' now getting acclaim for its propaganda mission. 🤔

    ReplyDelete
  3. A shrewd businessman who deals in such kind of things knows very well that bad publicity is, after all, a kind of (beneficial) publicity only. Hence the best thing to do with such propaganda movies is to ignore them and do not discuss much about them. By doing that we do nothing but play into the hands of the filmmaker and the man behind him (no prizes for guessing his name). It is also not the first film made on this issue (as wrongly claimed and propagated in loud voice). The first movie made on this theme was Sheen (2004) which I had not only seen but also reviewed. It was also made by a Kashmiri Pandit only. It's by no means a great movie but a sensitive one and it does not invoke hate against any community.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is absolutely true. I feel like someone who stepped on shit after watching this movie. I stink.

      Delete

  4. The movie has given rise to a massive divisive debate in every social media which in its formidability and enormity is incomparable and all encompassing. If this goes on forever the outcome will be disastrous. How can we thrive as a civilization on so much hatred and distrust.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The ultimate tragedy of contemporary India is the quantum of hate being peddled day in and day out.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...