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While appreciating the success of The Kashmir Files, one must keep in mind that audiences inherently have an inability to fully comprehend the experience of others and there is a long way to go. The greatest success of The Kashmir Files lies in the fact that it undermines the validity of existing norms of storytelling on Kashmir. The tales told through The Kashmir Files will become ever-lasting questions for our society that chose to settle into willful ignorance. The Indian society must question what prevented the Indian film industry from giving a chance to the Kashmiri Hindu survivors to perform this solemn duty. For those who survived the bullets of terrorists, mobs, and the heat of refugee camps, telling the stories of their seen and lived experiences carried the weight of a solemn duty. Since the Second World War, many film industries around the world dedicated thousands of man-hours and billions of dollars to produce multiple movies on the depiction of the Holocaust. Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon has Blood Clots bravely stood out through these decades. The story of Kashmiri Hindus suffered from early repression by popular media and perennial attempts at marginalisation of their voices during the last three decades. The volume of articles, papers, tweets and Instagram posts on COVID-19 that have been put forth over the last two years won’t be matched in the coming years, because of the sheer chronological distance from the event. Most of the historical events are most talked about in their immediate aftermath. The way popular media and film industry tampered with history and stories of the suffering of people to make it more acceptable to their own world-view had to be challenged and the successful acceptance of The Kashmir Files by the audience has done that. The ease with which a major part of mainstream media normalises murder and terrorism by using terms like rebels, gunmen and militants for killers of innocent people is a product of this prevailing narrative. The Kashmir Files represents a challenge to the existing narratives on Kashmir. The Indian film industry that produces 1500-2000 movies every year did not feel compelled to listen and bring to the audiences these stories in the last 30 years. The survivors of great human tragedies feel compelled to speak about their experiences and to tell the tales on behalf of those who got killed.
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The Kashmir Files makes one witness the lived experiences of that generation of Kashmiri Hindus. Most people find it difficult to perceive the experience of others. In this background of long denial of space to their stories, Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files is a brave step in the right direction. And at the same time, the voices of those whose stories were to be heard were silenced.Īlso Read: The Kashmir Files Has Left Genocide Deniers Nowhere to Run and Hide But the Indian viewer was long denied even a chance to witness the stories of Kashmiri Pandits. A movie-goer can only witness but not experience the real diabolical activity- the murder, the rape, the arson, the sheer wastage of lives. Indian viewers never got a chance to either witness the stories of the vanquished or listen to the survivors of Kashmir through movies.įilms have a great impact on the creation of empathy, knowledge and understanding by directly engaging the memory and consciousness of the viewer as an individual and society as a whole. The answer is simple, stories were never told by the popular media and Indian film industry. Like most movie-goers this author witnessed stories of the Holocaust through movies ranging from Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, Schindler’s List, The Counterfeiters to Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds and countless more. How on earth does one recall more movies on the Holocaust that took place eight decades ago in another continent than one does on what happened in our own country three decades ago to Kashmiri Hindus? Still, try again. Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream.