The Kashmir Files (2022) is not really about Kashmir or the Pandits
It is not easy to watch or discuss slaughter, especially if it is a representation of what actually happened, and more so if it happened in a past not too distant. Fortunately for Indian cinema and unfortunately for Indian democracy, slaughter and its prolonged aftermath have always gone largely undepicted. History has rarely been a burning question or a difficult puzzle in Hindi cinema for the greater part of the last century. Globalization-era Bollywood, however, is a different story. Bollywood has deployed history as frequently as Indian politicians have weaponized it. The Kashmir Files is a particularly successful and disturbing example of art boosting such weaponization.
Here is how the film unfolds:
After the mujahedeen victory over Soviets in Afghanistan in 1989, young Muslim gun-toting men in Kashmir are terrorizing the Hindu population, calling for them to convert to Islam, die, or leave. The narrative’s focus is on Pushkar Pandit, a widower brahmin schoolteacher whose son is killed in their home, and he becomes the guardian of his daughter-in-law Sharda and his two grandsons Shiva and Krishna. Indian federal government ignores the threat as Hindu families are hunted and killed, and the traumatized survivors flee. As the narrative jumps ahead, the narrative shifts its focus to the younger grandchild Krishna. Raised by his grandfather Pushkar in refugee camps in Delhi, Krishna Pandit is a young man, student of a left-leaning university in present-day India. The university is named ANU, reminiscent of JNU, or Jawaharlal Nehru University. Like most of his peers, Krishna is brainwashed by the university’s secular curriculum, especially by a progressive professor Radhika Menon (an amalgam of Professor Nivedita Menon of JNU and writer-activist Arundhati Roy) who supports Kashmir’s demands for secession from India. As Radhika’s trained parrot and as a champion of the cause of Kashmiri freedom/azadi, Krishna is poised to be elected as the university student body’s president, when his grandfather Pushkar dies. As Krishna visits Kashmir to spread his ashes, he meets three old friends of Pushkar, who narrate to him the traumatic story of his father, mother, and elder brother’s brutal murder in the hands of Muslim terrorists. We as viewers have already been shown the violent killing of Krishna’s father in 1991, the jihadist terror, and his family’s destitution; Krishna the protagonist was the only ignorant one, having lived his life so far thinking his parents died in a car accident. However, on his return to Kashmir with his grandfather’s remains, Brahma Dutt, his grandfather’s friend and a retired civil servant, hands him a bundle of documents — these are the ‘Kashmir files’ that the title refers to — attesting to the reign of terror that the Muslim terrorists unleashed. Krishna returns to Delhi and his university a transformed man, and to the complete shock of his professor/handler, delivers an impassioned speech on the lost Hindu glory of Kashmir and how the Muslims were responsible for the destruction or subjugation of the population over centuries, that loss exacerbated by India’s postcolonial secular government that continued to destroy the history and the memory of that past. As Krishna’s peers break out into thunderous applause, the scene shifts back to a final horrifying set of flashbacks from the past: Krishna’s mother sawed alive by terrorists, while Krishna’s elder brother Shiva, barely a child, is forced to watch. And then the final sequence: men, women, and children lined up in front of a ditch and shot in the forehead. Shiva is the last one to be shot. After a brief close-up of the boy’s face as he lay dead in the ditch, credits start rolling.
Thus went The Kashmir Files (2022), directed by Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri. An Indian film without songs or big stars that can flood the theater with emotions and top the national box-office? The Kashmir Files was that film, purporting to be based on ‘reality,’ and spawning, within a few weeks of its release, several hundred YouTube videos of viewers’ reactions and annotations attesting to the historical references in the film. With claims of being the hardest-hitting depiction of the massacre and exodus of Kashmiri Hindu Pandits in the wake of Islamic terrorism in the 1990s, the film had unexpected box-office success (it was made with a meager budget of $2 million) in the early months of 2022, competing with such big-budget films as RRR (in Telugu, directed by S. S. Rajamouli) and KGF: Chapter 2 (in Kannada, directed by Prashanth Neel), among others. For the director Vivek Agnihotri and his signature politics, it was the first commercial success, achieved through a targeted use of propaganda, advertisement, and a social media campaign. The film itself delivered a polished package through skillful cinematography, Hollywood-style continuity editing, and a honed storyline. The content of the package, however, is not introspection but hatred. That hatred draws from the hatred of the terrorists towards their victims in Kashmir, and is then transformed through cinematic art into the Indian nationalist viewers’ hatred towards the dissenters — any dissenter — against the nation-state. More than 3 decades ago, Muslim extremists killed an undetermined number of Kashmiri Hindus and drove their families away from their homes. The Kashmir Files turns that into casus belli for all Indian Hindus against not just all Indian Muslims and all secular Indians, but against anyone who does not believe in the current ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s vision of India.
The Ghosts of Cinematic Past
Incidentally, 30 years ago, Roja (1992, directed by Mani Ratnam), a Tamil film dubbed in Hindi had channelized the Hindutva-laced politics of Indian Kashmir successfully, becoming a rare Tamil film to be dubbed in Hindi and distributed nationally, raising bloody nationalistic fervor in the viewers across India. Roja was, in its day, a ‘realistic’ depiction of a real-life political situation: the abduction of government officials by terrorists in exchange for ransom or prisoners. Roja too had sophisticated cinematography, considerable amount of continuity editing, and its own set of stereotypes: the law-abiding, innocent, progress-loving-but-religious Tamil Brahmins who just want to study, work, and pursue life, liberty, and happiness vs. the cold-blooded Kashmiri Muslims who just pray and kill, who could kill their own brother or mother for the sake of jihad. Roja incited similar feelings of jingoistic religious nationalism in the viewers, who would shout slogans and slurs in the theater much like the viewers of The Kashmir Files have been reported as doing, 3 decades later. In short, the wine is old, but it never fails to intoxicate. And in the context of modern South Asian history, thanks to the blood-soaked legacy of the 1947 Partition that created India and Pakistan out of the British Indian empire, hate never fails to infuriate. Vivek Agnihotri has finally found his perfect brew that Mani Ratnam had found in 1992. Except, Mani Ratnam’s film had a hero (a heroine, actually), Roja, who put up a fight to get her husband rescued from the terrorists. In Vivek Agnihotri’s film, there are no heroes, just villains and victims. This is the cleverest trick that Agnihotri pulls, and we will circle back to it, after we lay out the context of the film and its success.
The Hype and the Product
The hype about The Kashmir Files preceded it. Since the beginning of 2022, YouTube has been flooded with trailers, copies of trailers, and videos referring to the trailers of the film, each video declaring the film to be the ultimate exposé on the massacre and exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, when mujahedeen groups succeeded in fomenting an Islamic terrorist uprising in the Kashmir valley. The film was released on March 11 2022, and soon afterwards, at least 6 states that are ruled by BJP declared it tax-free (which would mean paying less for tickets) and offered other incentives. On March 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi publicly defended the film based on its veracity, condemning its critics. The film, a work of art, was therefore transformed into a political program almost instantly. Interestingly, the film’s planned theatrical release was January 26, India’s Republic Day, which, had it not been waylaid by pandemic-related cancellations, may have incited more organized and poetic speeches by Modi and other BJP leaders. A quick aside: Roja (1992), the ideological precursor of this film, was released on August 15, India’s Independence Day.
After the tax-breaks, the outpouring of discourses from politicians-suddenly-turned-historians-and-critics, and a relentless ad campaign by the lead actor Anupam Kher (who plays Pushkar Pandit, and in real life is a Kashmiri Pandit by his own admission, and the spouse of a BJP Member of the Parliament by universal knowledge), the director Vivek Agnihotri, and Agnihotri’s wife and the lead female actress Pallavi Joshi (who plays Professor Radhika Menon, the villain of the story), the film rose to the top of the Indian Box Office, and earned a revenue of Rs. 300 crore (3 billion) in the first 6 weeks.
You would think that this was inevitable. After all, if you were to believe all the YouTube videos, this seems to be such a great film, presenting raw truths about India’s national history, and is championed by the elected leaders of the nation. If you think of this film’s success as inevitable, you do not know Vivek Agnihotri or his work, and you just do not have any idea of the amount of sweat and tears it takes to make it in Indian cinema (for someone not tethered to a dynasty, that is). This is Vivek Agnihotri’s 8th and the first commercially successful film. The film that resembles The Kashmir Files in name is The Tashkent Files (2019), and the film that resembles The Kashmir Files in ideology is Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2016). The Tashkent Files received a national film award; Buddha in a Traffic Jam received an award in Jakarta Film Festival and spawned two books. None of these two films were commercially successful. The Tashkent Files, based on the questionable circumstances surrounding the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in the Soviet Union in 1967 was too insipid for both the left and the right, and Buddha in a Traffic Jam was infuriating to the left (for example, students at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and Jadavpur University in Kolkata earned their ‘anti-national’ creds from BJP by voicing their protest against such artistic propagandas) but was incomprehensible to the right. I will elaborate on the left/right dichotomy in the Indian intellectual sphere later, but first we should take a closer look at the creative agency driving these films, the director himself, here.
The Director: An Artist and a Trained Propagandist
The Kashmir Files is directed by a right-wing ideologue, who is thoroughly pro-system, given that the system is maintained by strong governance. Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri graduated from the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC). IIMC is a later and peripheral extension of the Indian Administrative Services (which was inherited from British India), set up to train communicators for the system, with unquestioning allegiance to the status quo. It should not come as a surprise that the Indian Information Services were initiated by Indira Gandhi, when she was the minister of Information and Broadcasting. After all, it would be during her tenure as the Prime Minister that an organized national media policy would take shape, involving film, television, and radio.
The graduates of IIMC, therefore, are products of an official program, created for communicating to the masses. Look up the IIMC page on Wikipedia and you will find, among the alumni of IIMC, recognizable television anchors and journalists, such as Ravish Kumar, Nidhi Razdan, and Sudhir Chaudhary, whose work represent the political slants of their respective channels/employers. They are all successful mouthpieces: Sudhir Chaudhary of the pro-Modi camp, Ravish Kumar of the more centrist color, etc. Given Vivek Agnihotri’s obvious interest in contemporary politics, it is not difficult to imagine him as a successful journalist/anchor like any of the above, if he had chosen that path. He would have been a pro-Hindutva, pro-corporate, pro-army, neoliberal, pro-Modi super hawk, perhaps a worthy competitor to the noxious Arnab Goswami.
However, instead of firing up the airwaves with ideas, Vivek Agnihotri decided to make films. Apart from his debut Chocolate (2005, based on The Usual Suspects), Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal (2007, not based on, but clearly inspired by Bend It Like Beckham), and three other typical Bollywood fare, he has made 3 political films so far: Buddha in a Traffic Jam (2016), The Tashkent Files (2019), and The Kashmir Files (2022). The last two films are purported to be part of a trilogy, to be concluded by The Delhi Files. In all three films, you can see Agnihotri’s ideological universe in cinematic action.
What is Agnihotri’s ideological universe like? Here are a few sample iterations:
1. Nationalism = nation-statism. If you love India, you must love the Indian nation-state.
2. Secularism is suspect.
3. Dissent = betrayal.
4. Naxals/Terrorists/Professors are evil, as they are dissenters, and cloud the minds of naïve subalterns and students/youth with the wrong ideology.
5. Most elected Indian governments have been soft/conceited on crime/terrorism, and all media have been blind followers of the system.
I would not bore you with examples from Indian politics for each of the iterations but would point out that this is the stuff that all right-wing and neoliberal ideology is made of, in today’s world. Agnihotri’s political films are filled with angst and suffering caused by a weak/gullible/corrupt democracy that has created a prison for its citizens.
Why is this yearning for a strong neoliberal government problematic? Let us first unpack the question at the center of each of these political films. Isn’t it true that Naxalites have unleashed violence in the name of Maoism and social justice? Was not Lal Bahadur Shastri’s death in Tashkent suspicious? Was not the massacre of Kashmiri Pandits a reality in 1990s India? The answer to all three questions is ‘yes.’ What then is the problem with Agnihotri’s foregrounding of these issues in Buddha in a Traffic Jam, The Tashkent Files, and The Kashmir Files, respectively? Since our focus is on the last film, let us first connect the reality of 1990s’ Kashmir to Agnihotri’s film.
The Harsh Truth: Plight of the Kashmiri Pandits
A yet to be determined number of members of the Kashmiri (Hindu) Pandit community left Kashmir between 1989 and 1991. They were threatened, harassed, and in some cases attacked by local Muslim gangs, who were emboldened by the infiltration of arms and ideas from the western front. The mujahedeen who had helped end the Cold War by defeating the Soviet army in Afghanistan, found Kashmir a fertile ground for sowing ideas of anti-government protests and activism, and since the mujahedeen were neither intellectuals of the highest order nor were they nation-builders, that activism could only spring from the barrels of their guns. Besides the Kashmiri Pandits, other Kashmiris, including Muslims, had their lives turned upside down by rampant violence.
Neither the state authorities of Jammu and Kashmir nor India’s federal government took any significant step to help the Kashmiris. Kashmir had inherited its contentious geopolitical status in South Asia from the time of the Partition of British India. It was an independent kingdom, a Muslim-majority region ruled by a Hindu king when India and Pakistan were created in 1947. Shortly after the Partition, the Hindu king ceded his territory to India to prevent Pakistan from staking its claim on the region based on the demographics. The two nascent nation-states India and Pakistan had their first war in 1948 and an unstable equilibrium, punctuated by periodic wars, has since existed in Kashmir. Geopolitically, Kashmir is where India, China, and Pakistan have borders with each other, putting it in the crossroads of constant international conflict.
From the perspective of the Kashmiri Pandits, they were betrayed both by the Kashmiri state and the Indian federal governments. It is easy to understand their anguish; their plight was similar to that of the Indians and Pakistanis who lost their homes during the 1947 Partition, when Hindus from territory designated as Pakistan and Muslims from territory designated as India were subjected to a chaotic and forced migration, amidst riots and killings. And much like the survivors of the 1947 Partition, the Kashmiri Pandits have been left to fend for themselves, with just nominal support from the government in the form of refugee settlements in various northern Indian states. The violence against them was both a political problem and a human disaster. While Indian government did all but ignore the human disaster, it took the political problem most seriously. The eventual response of Indian government to terrorism in Kashmir was to hold the region under siege, by placing an alleged 400,000+ soldiers on the ground, thus seriously curbing the civil liberties of all Kashmiris, to this day. The cost of ‘keeping’ the Kashmiri territory — from either declaring independence or from joining Pakistan — has been constant military engagement on the part of India. Despite the high value of Kashmir to India in terms of political currency, the Kashmiri Pandits’ destitution has remained without redress. The sufferings and quotidian misery of the Pandits as refugees have thus been portrayed rightly in The Kashmir Files, with artistic license as expected in a feature film. It is the narrative voiced by the characters in the film that is partisan, brazenly aligned with Hindutva, and is full of fallacies. It is this narrative that we turn to, in the next section.
Hindu Nationalism’s Gambit: Kashmiri Pandits as Pawns
From 1989 onward, while the Kashmiri Pandits fell victims to mujahedeen-inspired terrorism and continued their broken existence as refugees, their narrative was recast by the Hindu fundamentalists as a chapter in the perpetual history of Islamic subjugation and oppression of Hindus. In this narrative, the Kashmiri Pandits belonged to the majority population in a Hindu-majority India, and to a minority population in Muslim-majority Kashmir, and deserved protection from one or both authorities, which they never received. Incidentally, violence against minorities has been a political reality in India and South Asia. Kashmir, for example, was not the only violence-ridden Indian state; Punjab and Assam had a history of communal violence, and the role of the federal government in countering those were not much better than that in Kashmir. Hindu fundamentalist myopia rendered all other violence invisible, while extracting serious political mileage out of India’s claim upon Kashmir. Hindu fundamentalism in India that culminated in the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 and the subsequent riots played out as a counterpoint to terrorism in Kashmir. The rise of BJP (the party currently in its second term of elected rule in India) in parliamentary politics was always premised upon the creation of a macho Hindu state that would refuse to make compromise with any non-Hindu-hegemonic authority. Ceding Kashmir for them was tantamount to an amputation of India’s body politic.
It is reasonable to argue that the agency that could have prevented — or at least could seriously try to prevent — the massacre and subsequent exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits is the Indian federal government. But it didn’t or couldn’t, like it couldn’t prevent the demolition of the Babri mosque in 1992 by armed Hindu militants, and the subsequent violence that took place. From the perspective of The Kashmir Files, Agnihotri’s ideological universe, and the Hindutva-tinged political history of Kashmir, it failed because it was secular and corrupt and was afraid or unwilling to counter Islamic terrorism. The architect of India’s secular national polity was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister (who inherited the leadership of the Indian National Congress from M. K. Gandhi), whose insightful nation-building enterprise had an unfortunate Achilles heel — his inability to create a democratic distribution of power within his political party — which eventually produced a political dynasty: his daughter Indira Gandhi, her son Rajiv Gandhi and so on. For an Indian filmmaker or a Hindu nationalist author/speaker, any critique of secularism carries within it a secret code: a rejection of the dynastic structure of the Congress Party, and a parallel rejection of all secular left-liberal discourses. Neither Nehru nor his descendants was a socialist, but Nehru had designed India’s polity as regulatory and quasi-socialist to prevent a foreign appropriation akin to colonialism. While the globalization of India’s economy from 1991 onward led to economic growth, it also coincided with the growth of illiberal religious fundamentalisms and regressive identity-based politics. BJP, the Hindu nationalist party, rode that paradoxical wave of changes to political power with extraordinary alacrity.
The gross human rights violation of the Kashmiri Pandits fell through the cracks of India’s shift to globalization. They were not protected by the regulatory pre-global state, and their cause was picked up by the Hindu fundamentalists only to fuel their own political rhetoric. This is precisely what makes Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files a piece of cinematic propaganda. The final speech that a transformed Krishna, the hero of the film, delivers to his left-leaning peers at ANU, is filled with stock statements from the Hindu fundamentalist arsenal: Hindus had a glorious past, filled with marvels in literature, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, which was destroyed by Muslim invaders who either converted the Hindus or killed them and destroyed the temples and universities leading to complete subordination and subjugation. Muslims are violent, arrogant, and ignorant, and India’s future lies in Hindus reclaiming their past, by dominating over Muslims.
The Kashmir Files History Problem#1: History is Never that Simple
History is never simple, especially South Asian history. Islam in South Asia arrived in many forms, and only one form was invasion. There were conversions, both voluntary and forced, and some of the mosques were built on the foundations of destroyed temples. That is the nature of religions, and in particular, proselytizing religions such as Christianity and Islam. But South Asian history has witnessed enough ebbs and flows of faith, and there have been enough conversions and inter-religious conflicts even without counting Christianity and Islam. As the birthplace of four major world religions — Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism — South Asia has seen more religious conflicts, compromises, and syntheses than the entire continent of Europe in the last two and a half millennia of history. Picking a solitary binary conflict — between the Hindus and the Muslims — in South Asia is ingenuous unless it serves a political cause. And it has been picked by the British and the Indians in the last two hundred years. Drawing an adversarial line between Hindus and Muslims was greatly advantageous for the British in their various strategic of ‘divide and rule’ moments, and it has been greatly advantageous for the Hindu nationalists in India. While the British could deflect attention from their own position as conquerors by focusing on the Muslims, the postcolonial Hindu nationalists use the same logic to define a common enemy — the Muslims — to unite their constituency. ‘Muslims as invaders in the past and aggressors in the present times’ offers the Hindu nationalists a perennial political argument in current day India; all problems can somehow be attributed to either secular polity of the past, or the secularists of the present, or the neighboring state Pakistan. In both colonialist and Hindu nationalist interpretations of Indian history, the colonial devastation and transformation of South Asia is completely obfuscated, as is the role of the colonizers in solidifying identities of communities in South Asia based on their own limited understanding and political interest.
But The Kashmir Files goes above and beyond the Hindu fundamentalist projection of Muslims as invaders. In an intelligent bid to counter the secular defense of Islamic mysticism and benign existence, Krishna Pandit in his speech at his university picks a Persian Sufi preacher, Araqi (1460–1515), as the prime instigator of violence against Kashmiri Pandits. Krishna presents his family’s tragedy — the brutal killings in the hands of mujahedeen-inspired terrorists — as part of a long-drawn effect of the zealous efforts of a medieval Sufi leader to Islamize the entire Kashmir valley. That is tantamount to blaming the Atlantic slave trade on the Crusades. After Araqi arrived in Kashmir, converted many Kashmiris, and died (and was buried in Kashmir), life continued in the Kashmir valley like it did in every other part of South Asia. Kashmir was ruled by Hindus for a century before India’s independence, and before that, it was part of the Sikh empire.
The Kashmir Files History Problem#2: An Uneducated View of Education
One of the enduring legacies of Nehru’s nation-building project has been the nurture of education and culture in the spirit of a pluralistic democracy. As a result, critical thinking, particularly of the secular left-liberal kind, has flourished in Indian institutions of higher education. The most visible onslaught of Hindu fundamentalism on India’s public sphere has been its attacks on the intellectual life of the nation. Universities like JNU in Delhi and JU in Kolkata have been targeted repeatedly by fundamentalists in the name of nationalism. In The Kashmir Files, ANU (a stand-in for JNU) is shown as a cavernous building with murals of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao decorating its hallways, and the university seemed to function only as a political brainwashing apparatus. The primary function of the faculty seemed to be brainwashing the students into becoming anti-national terror-supporting automata. In reality, left-leaning scholars trained in Indian institutions have had significant contributions in their disciplines on a global scale; postcolonial theory, for example, stands on the shoulders of giants who have emerged from that institutional tradition. In contrast, right-wing scholars in India have little or no new knowledge to contribute. All Indian right-wing revisions of history, politics, and culture are imitative, repetitive, spurious, or simply silly. The idea of considering the Taj Mahal as an adaptation of a temple for Shiva, in vogue in current-day Hindu fundamentalist circles in India, is an example of the right-wing spurious and silly worldview.
The way ANU/JNU has been portrayed in the film is reminiscent of the portrayal of the lives of wealthy in Hindi films of the 1960s and 1970s. The Kashmir Files presents an uneducated view of education just like Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) presented a slum’s view of wealth (white shoes, diamonds, and glittering objects all over). Krishna recites a list of names from India’s mythological and historic past: Kashyapa, Shankara, Kalhana, etc., and claims that they are absent from curricula in India. No one in the audience objects, though the names that have historical documentation related to their lives and work are very much part of Indian curricula. Most students in India, at some point in their school or college life, read about Kalhana’s monumental volume Rajatarangini and Shankara’s philosophical corpus. Kashyapa is remembered by practicing Hindus, and his lineage in the form of a gotra is accepted without historical proof. If Agnihotri’s fictional ANU were honestly modeled on JNU, such names would never have impressed the student body as unknown/forgotten. But Agnihotri is not catering to the informed and reasonable Indian psyche, but to the emotive nationalism of Indians who have been leaning to the right in their political thinking and in their voting, over the last three decades. Hindu nationalist forces have been surprisingly efficient in manipulating both public and social media, thus gradually robbing the electorate of their faculty to distinguish between disciplinary knowledge and WhatsApp messages. There is lot of rage in BJP’s electorate against higher education and critical thinking, and Agnihotri makes the most of that rage in his portrayal of ANU/JNU.
The Kashmir Files History Problem#3: History without Context
In the end, The Kashmir Files infuriates and inspires the non-critical mind. It succeeds at the box office by playing on the emotions of the viewers, by making them relive Krishna’s life through his family’s brutal annihilation in the hands of terrorists, and his waking up to the glorious past of the Hindus that was demolished by medieval Islamic conquerors. The infuriated and inspired viewer is left with a cause and an effect, and above all, a casus bello where Muslims are perpetual aggressors and must be countered. The incredulity of the narrative is cleverly elided. The fact that India remains a Hindu-majority country with a heterogeneous demography is a direct refutation of the ‘Muslims destroyed everything’ theory. Hinduism itself was a synthetic construct, a catch-all name given by outsiders for all inhabitants of India/Hind, and codified by the first census of British India (1871) for South Asians who could not be classified as belonging to Islam, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, etc., and seemed to be the inheritors of the Vedic/Brahmanic tradition. Most Indian cultural traditions have hybrid roots and expressions. Indian languages, music, cuisine, and art have Sanskritic and Persian sources inexorably mixed in.
But Agnihotri wants to make the most of the villainy of Muslims, and he does that by comparing the Sufi preacher Araqi with Hitler:
Krishna: Araqi was an Islamic Tyrant who was a lot more dreadful than Hitler. His sole intention was to destroy the temples and shrines of infidels. To put an end to their traditions and rituals. To destroy innovations made by the Pandits.
Someone just told me, “Come on dude, Nazis killed 1000 Jews every day.” “I have never heard any such thing happening in Kashmir.”
Well, hear this. Under Araqi and his PM Musa Raina’s order 1,500–2,000 infidels were captured every day. They would cut their sacred Hindu thread, they were made to read the Kalma, the declaration of faith, they were circumcised and forced to eat beef.
All this was done by their soldiers. The ones we know as Sufis and Dervishes. Hitler used concentration camps and Araqi used Qahran and Zabran. It means Force and Compulsion.
Araqi may or may not have killed and converted the exact number of Hindus reported by Krishna. The Indian viewer may even buy the comparison with Hitler. But Krishna’s history begins with Hindu glory and ends with Araqi, whose death preceded the Mughals and the East India Company. There is no colonialism, no Partition, no Cold War in Krishna’s supposedly enlightened historical consciousness. Krishna’s informed historical speech is a laughable rant that Agnihotri aimed at an already converted crowd of Hindu nationalists.
The Kashmir Files in Indian Film History: Does Hatred pay?
The comparison with Hitler is more than anything else a sign of Agnihotri’s global ambitions as a filmmaker. He wants to be recognized perhaps as a Steven Spielberg, a Louis Malle, or a Roman Polanski, who made memorable films on the Holocaust. After all, Agnihotri has been trying to make a successful political film for the last five years. His cinematography, script, and sound are all reminiscent of a Hollywood or European aesthetic, albeit of a mediocre order of films. The last scene where victims shot before a ditch is as realistic as an Indian director copying Hollywood could get. But this realism, first grade with respect to Indian cinema, is used to serve a clandestine purpose, to peddle a hateful Hindu nationalist political manifesto. Art at the service of political hatred is always problematic, and the best-made pieces of propaganda, such as Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915) and the films by Leni Riefenstahl are brought out of the trash bin of history to be screened only for scholarly research.
And Agnihotri is no Griffith or Riefenstahl. The only comparison that can be made is between him and Mani Ratnam, whose warped depictions of Islamic terrorism that made him popular with the Hindu nationalist electorate would seem to any informed viewer today as juvenile propaganda, the only memorable component of the films being A. R. Rahman’s music.
In the long history of Indian cinema, popular filmmakers have presented juvenile representations of secular and inclusive Indian nationalism. Those that endured did so because of their optimism and lack of malice. The films and the film-songs that have endured in the cultural memory of India and the Indian diaspora are those which rose above communal hatred and presented an ideal that could be cherished and dreamed about. Yes, there are films made by parallel filmmakers that brought out the fissures within the nation. Those were realistic, hard-hitting depictions of history and polity. Agnihotri’s films do not belong to the same aesthetic or intellectual grade as Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (1975) or Mrinal Sen’s Calcutta 71 (1972). Those films had a purpose, of scrutinizing society and polity to incite thought and action. In contrast, Mani Ratnam’s Roja and Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files simply have viewers driven to expressions of rage against Muslims. Hatred will bring success, as these two films have proved. Eventually, however, they will remain as data points for the history of propaganda, and not as milestones in the long cultural memory of the India and Indian cinema.
