‘Art is something subversive’, Picasso had once said. Picasso couldn’t have foreseen what would happen to India decades later. ‘The Kashmir Files’ is one of the much-talked movies in recent times. The movie has received a mixed reaction throughout the country. Trisha Sengupta writes.
And also on the international platform, the movie is known too. India’s ongoing tryst with hyper-nationalism under the present government has managed to achieve just- an era of ‘approved’ art.
The film is about the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the state after terrorists began targeting the community after militancy broke out in 1989. Thousands of them left their homes and dispersed to other parts of India. The film to some extent has shown the facts in check but also has dispersed the ideology of the government very correctly. As said art is the reflection of society, but the film provides no historical context.
The director has blamed the past government for this massacre.
Facts have been distorted, and the historical context has been ignored that hundreds of Muslims were also killed by the terrorists. In between, the film also sneaks in a suggestion that had Article 370 been removed the exodus and the killing wouldn’t have happened. Everything is in hyperbole and exaggeration because presumably, Agnihotri thinks the word ‘genocide’ is only about numbers.
This clearly syncs with the ideology of the government. The film is exploitative in the extreme, made to rouse emotions and build up a particular mood against Indian Muslims. The director has merely done his job to pin down his ideology to the public which he apparently holds. And also succeeded in doing so.
The film is ‘art in celluloid’ and art has an impeccable effect on the minds of the audience. The ideology has been dispersed and seeded in the heads of the people. “The Kashmir Files’ becomes the movie of propaganda and of utmost extremism.
As Karl Marx said, “religion is the opium of people, a sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless condition”. So, religion here becomes the sole vehicle and theme which leads to a saturation point in Indian society. This ideology has to be liberated from religion.
