Searching For Humanism In 'The Kashmir Files' (2022)

To be honest, I know close to nothing about Kashmir. I’ve of course heard about it all my life – from my parents, from the media, from uncles at the dinner table and on WhatsApp. I’ve seen films about it, both those that treat it with grave sensitivity and those that use it as a backdrop for Shakespearean romances. Still, I cannot claim with any confidence to be a source for great knowledge on the subject – it’s too intricate a matter for any casual newsreader to comprehend. This isn’t necessarily for lack of trying. In preparation for this review, I did plenty of research on the film and its background and somehow came out more confused than I was before. Perhaps I didn’t do enough research. Perhaps it is by design.

Kashmir, in addition to being the most impenetrable of issues affecting real people in frighteningly real ways, is a mythic space. It holds a prestigious place in India’s cultural consciousness, one of both reverence and fear. There are countless narratives woven out of it, many of which have been lost in the tides of war and strife. Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files, released on March 11 in India, tells one of these stories. Don’t be mistaken – despite the film’s rhetoric, it is in fact a story, a narrative film only based in reality, not a documentation of it. It is the story of Krishna Pandit, played by Darshan Kumaar, a student in search of the truth about his family and the genocide of Kashmiri Pandits in the early 1990s. Depicted through two interspliced narratives, it is both a harrowing depiction of these horrific events and an examination of how we remember and discuss them today.

While not a documentary by any means, the events of January 1991 are represented in a documentary-like, yet subjective form. The footage is almost entirely handheld, heightening the frenetic energy and confusion of Krishna’s persecuted family. We see the events as they did, through darkness and gritty, grimy realism. Cinematographer Udaysingh Mohite creates a murky world, surrounding the protagonists in the harshest of natural environments, devoid of the vibrancy of their culture. The film’s color palate is muted and grim, emotionally draining the audience. Only the harsh light of fire, in mob torches and in burning homes, stands out from the bleakness, a motif of destructive hate and dangerous zeal. Horrific, violent imagery is used for far more than shock value. At multiple times, gruesome images agitate and upset the audience, and we expect a cut away, and then we beg for one, but the film refuses, it refuses to let us off the hook. The shot holds, forcing us, challenging us to consider the real human cost of hate.

In contrast, much of the other half of the film is more subdued. The camera is anchored, watching the characters from a distance as they try to decipher their own past and debate its truth. Characters in this world are visually given more agency than their atmosphere, yet they feel constrained. They debate and reexamine the contradictory webs of information. The primary protagonist of the story feels like an audience projection, searching an answer in the snowy landscape. The bridge between the present and the past is held together carefully by editor Shankh Rajadhyaksha. The film’s non-linear structure allows it to present ideas and information like a puzzle as we put together the truth along with Krishna. The present seems to ask questions that are answered in the past, the ethos of which allows the film to come to a poignant conclusion.

Krishna is influenced by both old and new – those that lived the past and those that try to describe it. At first, like me, he’s confused. There are too many Truths to pursue, too many contradicting numbers to fact-check. There’s something to be said about how the film portrays its debates. Much like many early reviews of the film, characters simply label facts and lies without much explanation. They throw around numbers like they’re arbitrary – was the total toll 1,500, 100,000, or 500,000? Both sides have different counts – who counted? However, the film is quite convinced of its own facts. It has a clear goal that it unabashedly pursues, with no interest in nuance. Lazily cartoonish villains along with a climax that aims to educate the audience and dismiss opposing arguments reveal the film’s bias. It portrays media and academia in a particularly critical light, without stopping to consider its own role in the information cascade. The film’s attempts to expose the truth about this tragedy, along with the ruling political party’s full-throated support of it, have been met with equal backlash and accusations of disinformation and fearmongering. Again, I don’t know the full truth about Kashmir, but I remain skeptical of those that claim to.

However much we debate the accuracy of the film’s political messaging, its core lies elsewhere. Anupam Kher delivers a heartbreaking performance of a man in love with his home, wishing nothing but to go back. His longing reveals the real story here, of a people driven from their motherland, torn from their heritage, and starved of their culture. Their sounds mournfully echo through the film. Characters discuss the rarity of Kashmiri food. Their language and accents build specificity. Kashmiri folk songs and chants seem to transcend time and place. These cultural symbols, genuine evidences of the humanity the film searches for, are impactful but sparse. Agnihotri misses out on a wealth of pathos in his objective puzzle-solving, for although can debate the intricacies of Kashmir and the specifics of political maneuvering, we won’t get much closer to any truth we all believe in. The truth of Kashmir doesn’t lie in our definition of it. It lies, in its truest form, in the Kashmiri people.