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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. Yamini MacLeanMarch 20, 2022 at 5:52 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 20, 2022 at 7:43 PM

      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. Prasanna RaghavanMarch 22, 2022 at 10:02 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. जितेन्द्र माथुरMarch 23, 2022 at 10:04 AM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 23, 2022 at 10:07 PM

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

      Delete
  4. vanderloostMarch 25, 2022 at 10:04 AM


    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. Tomichan MatheikalMarch 25, 2022 at 12:31 PM

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

      Delete

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