Film review of "The Kashmir Files"

Film review of The Kashmir Files

The film is based on the testimonies of people who have been scarred by the insurgency in the State for generations and depicts the tragic exodus as a full-scale genocide, comparable to the Holocaust, that was kept hidden from the rest of India by the media, the 'intellectual' lobby, and the government of the day for their own vested interests.

The Tashkent Files, in which Agnihotri expressed his perspective on former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri's death through memories and flashbacks, with the storey changing back and forth in time, has been expanded on.

Krishna (Darshan Kumar), a Kashmiri Pandit and student at a famous university modelled after Jawaharlal Nehru University, is persuaded by Radhika Menon (Pallavi Joshi), his 'liberal' teacher, that the secessionist movement in Kashmir is analogous to India's Freedom Movement.

When Krishna's grandfather Pushkar Nath (Anupam Kher) dies, his ashes are sent to Kashmir, where four of his grandfather's friends tell Krishna and the viewer the "real" storey of Kashmir. According to their storey, Kashmir was at the crossroads of civilisations, and the state and federal governments permitted the Pandits to die to appease one society. Bitta, the film's villain, looks to be a blend of real-life Ghulam Mohammad Dar alias Bitta Karate and Yasin Malik, the terror group's faces.

In the Valley, Agnihotri has no time for romance, unlike in Vidhu Vinod Chopra's films. It's more of a counterpoint to Vishal Bhardwaj's Haider, which seeks to claim that Kashmiri Muslims deserved to suffer for what they did to Pandits and other minorities.

It's a strange viewpoint that grips and irritates at different times. Pandits have been represented in terrible detail in terms of bloodshed, torture, and otherization. The performances are gripping, and the camerawork captures the Valley's gloomy, dismal tones.

As the film's conscience keeper, Kher is at his most theatrical. Darshan is a revelation, and Pallavi's comeback is wonderful. Mithun Chakraborty, Prakash Belawadi, Puneet Issar, and Atul Shrivastava sound credible as Pushkar Nath's pals.

The film eventually succumbs to the same alleged manipulative techniques to reach out to tear ducts and engender enmity that it accuses the world press of using planned disruption and clickbait headlines. Almost no effort is made to understand what happens when a majority becomes a minority, and vice versa. The voice of the moderate Muslim is conspicuous by its absence. The depiction of the educated elite is shallow, bordering on character assassination by the end.

Film review of The Kashmir Files

Some of Agnihotri's presentations suggest that he will handle the subject's complexity in a novel way, but once he begins pushing an anti-religious agenda, The Kashmir Files loses its objective, humanistic perspective.

It criticises the players of the 1990s and treats the period with the same selective attitude.

Agnihotri, like most people in the digital age, sees the past through the prism of the present, and a lot of what happens at dinner tables makes it to the screenplay. Because he cherry-picks events from the past to match his storey, there is no middle ground for him. He cites Sheikh Abdullah but ignores Raja Hari Singh's role in India's entry to Kashmir. He also avoids describing how a rigged poll in Kashmir in the late 1980s paved the way for a bullet culture.

Instead of blaming the conflict on local Muslims, the film downplays the Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship. According to Agnihotri's data, terrorism has a religion, and it appears that every Muslim in Kashmir has been a separatist anxious to convert Hindus to Islam. This course does not cover the Dogra Kings' dominance of the state until 1947.

Although religious slogans were chanted and Kashmiri Pandits were caught in the crossfire between India and Pakistan, history is not as black and white as Agnihotri would have us think.

The names of Kashmiri legends and their accomplishments, which Krishna invokes in the climactic speech, are well-known in history books and oral tradition. It would be unjust to argue that the filmmakers were not taught about the mystic Lalleshwari, Shankaracharya's voyage to Kashmir, or the state's intellectual capital if they encountered them while conducting research for the film.

When it comes to selective facts, the film directly attacks Farooq Abdullah and Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, and indirectly blames Congress for the exodus, but conveniently forgets to mention that the National Front government was in power in January 1990, when the alleged genocide occurred, and that its survival depended on outside support from the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Left parties.

He easily forgets that the party whose agenda he is supporting, whether intentionally or unconsciously, formed the government with one of the regional parties depicted in the film as nationalist in Delhi and communalist in Srinagar.

Surprisingly, the film references justice but ignores the judiciary's participation, the Pandit legal battle, and the fact that the real Bitta spent more than two decades in prison before being released on bail.

The attempt to pervert even Faiz Ahmed Faiz's lovely old poetry is not spared. Hum Dekhenge, written in 1979, uses traditional Islamic imagery as a metaphor to subvert and resist the hardline interpretation of Pakistani General Zia Ul Haq. When he says "An-al-Haq," he comes close to Hinduism's Advaita doctrine (I am truth). Former Prime Ministers, such as Atal Bihari Vajpayee, are criticised in the film for striving to win the hearts of the people. It's possible that the founders believe that only the landmass should be governed.

The film's clips may soon appear on social media, stoking further animosity against one group, in the spirit of street justice.

Film review of The Kashmir Files

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Film review of "The Kashmir Files"

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