The gruesome Jallianwala Bagh massacre comes alive in films like Omprakash Mehra's Rang De Basanti and Shoojit Sircars' Sardar Udham besides Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. However, their brilliant and ingenious portrayal evokes no hard feelings against the British despite making viewers furious about the perpetrators.
Like Tamas, or any other remarkable film on the partition, could The Kashmir Files truly portray the most terrifying time of the late ninety's Kashmir when in the event of Pakistan-sponsored genocide and not to forget, amid the baffling apathy of both State and Central Government, the Kashmiri Pandits had to leave their homeland frantically? Before looking out for answers, one must be clear that this film is not about the larger picture of the tragic exodus of the Kashmiri people but it is a concise, tapered portrayal of a few ghastly murders of those days in the backdrop of the ill-fated exodus, in which even the setting remains sketchy. Neither is this film an objective account of the politics of the time in its larger perspective. For the film, the director Vivek Agnihotri, creates an imaginary but unconvincing plot that often switches between the contemporary period set in the year 2020 and the tumultuous period of 1989-1990's Kashmir.
It unfolds with the tense and vitriolic situation of 19th January 1990, when the Kashmiri militants stormed and banished Kashmiri Hindu Pandits from the Kashmir valley using slogans like Raliv Galiv ya Chaliv (convert (to Islam), leave or die) and Mustafa Batte Safa (with god's grace Kashmiri Pandit should leave the valley). The narrative develops in the right pace until it got absorbed by horrific violence when militant commander Farooq Malik Bitta, breaks into his former teacher Pushkar Nath Pandit's house to kill his son, Karan, an RSS worker. Bitta found him hiding in a rice container and pumped bullets despite the pleas of his wife and Pushkar Pandit. However, when the extremities of the scene stretched to the furthest (as Bitta compels Karan's wife Sharda to eat blood-soaked rice in an extended scene), one can sense that the director has a purpose beyond the obvious.
Interestingly, many Kashmiri Pandits now claim that the scene reminds them of the murder of the engineer BK Gunju, then employed with MTNL. While talking to Dainik Bhaskar recently, BK Ganju's brother Shiban Krishna Ganju recalls that BK Ganju was getting ready to go to the office when 4 terrorists barged into their house. "When they did not find my brother, the neighbours told the terrorists that he was hiding on the top floor. The terrorists found him hiding in a rice drum and fired 8 bullets into his chest. After killing him the terrorists came down and left unhurt BK Gunju's wife and child by saying that there should be someone to cry too". However, Shiban claims, he knew nothing about his sister-in-law being fed blood-stained rice by the militants; neither has she ever told him anything like that or to anyone. Apparently, the film has gone too far concerning the scene albeit with a motive. Amidst the breathtaking narrative, however, a lighter moment emerges, when a scene of dead bodies nailed on tree trunks at an improbable height could clearly be perceived as 'cut outs' of cardboard!
In the film the surviving character from the family is Krishna, whom his grandfather Pushkar Pandit had raised. Krishna is now a university student and although it sounds flimsy, he believes his parents had died in an accident. While contesting in the student body election of ANU (JNU?) under the influence of a separatist-sympathiser Professor Radhika Menon, Krishna's grandfather dies amidst his campaign. Krishna travels to Kashmir to disperse the ashes in their ancestral home as per Pushkar's last wish. Upon his arrival, Krishna meets Pushkar's friends Brahma Dutta, a retired IAS officer, Vishnu Ram, a journalist, Dr Mahesh Kumar, a physician, and retired DGP Hari Narain, all of whom had served in Kashmir when his father Karan was killed.
While they recall the events of Kashmir from their memory, the skeletons are out of the closet. The misconception fed by Professor Menon milled into thin air when he comes to know about the assassination of his father and much later, how brutally the militants had killed his mother and elder brother Shiva. Director Agnihotri again in his unrestrained best, when, he prefers to unfold the dreadful events as graphically as possible. He seems totally oblivious about the fact that cinema is essentially a suggestive art.
Therefore, the scenes of militants coming in disguise of the Indian Army and outraging the modesty of Sharda Pandit before butchering her on a woodcutter saw appear too agonizing for the weak hearted. A little later the terrorists lined up young Shiva along with many elders to shoot them on their heads, one by one. These scenes were so gory, horrific, spine-chilling and unbearable that at least it gives me a feeling that the last bullet which pierced Shiva's head could have been hit by none but by the director himself. It appears that the basic intention of this film has been to shock, horrify and indeed to ignite hatred and anger in the minds of viewers against a particular community. If this is what the director claims to be a 'true' portrayal of immeasurable, indescribable horror, killings, exodus and displacement of the Kashmiri Pandits during the late nineties, I believe it is not.
At best this film can be summed up as a pale portrayal of the true events with a diabolical narrative having an underlying intent. Because it could not become one such film in which the inexplicable woes and miseries of the displaced Kashmiris are reflected in right earnest lest chronicle the most terrible occurrence of Kashmir after India attained independence.
Bitopan Borborah
The views expressed through this article are the writer's.
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