Analysis | Bollywood teaches more about Kashmir than India’s schools

Three major films – Haider, Fanaa and Mission Kashmir – offer a more nuanced look at the most militarised zone in the world than Indian history books

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‘Haider’ (2014) is a reworking of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, set in the ‘rotten state’ of Kashmir. Image: YouTube

Published: 4:02pm, 15 Aug 2019Updated: 6:05pm, 15 Aug 2019

In school, the New Delhi board-designed syllabus of the Indian Council of School Examinations did not mention the special status of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the only Muslim-majority state in India.

There are separate Indian state boards as well. I studied under a central board. We did not learn about the circumstances under which the state joined the Indian Union, nor that Kashmir is the most militarised zone in the world in terms of the number of armed forces personnel per square km of territory. Through my school years in the 1990s, there were news stories from the state about blasts and killings and terrorists, seemingly always about violence. Did they delve into the background of the anger? I don’t know because I did not go beyond the headlines. There was a sameness and one-sidedness to them – invariably images of fire and guns and empty streets – that never invoked interest.

When the television news business arrived in a big way in India, this impression was amplified – Hollywood action movie-style visuals of gunfire and explosions and people running for cover, or reporters reporting amid the silence of empty streets patrolled by army men with enormous guns strapped to their bodies. Bombast with no context. This is unsurprising, because journalists’ access to the Valley is mediated through the army, making them structurally dependent on the armed forces and predisposing them to be favourable to their perspective.

When Narendra Modi ran for prime minister in 2014, his Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto promised that Article 370, which spelt out the special conditions under which the province joined the Indian Union at the time of Independence, would be removed. For a populace that was, like me, mostly unaware of its content, it was easy to latch on to simplified nuggets such as the fact that Kashmir does not allow land to be sold to Indians from other states. It sounds like a concession made to a Muslim-majority state but this land restriction exists in several states in India, and is important to prevent heedless development in ecologically sensitive areas.

Strange as it may sound, it is the Hindi film industry that has taught me the little I understand about the anger in Kashmir, about the “special” powers of the armed forces stationed there and the “special” consequences they inflicted. Three Bollywood films in particular have left an impact – Haider (2014), Fanaa (2006) and Mission Kashmir (2000). There have been several indie films, extremely well-regarded, but I choose to focus on the big-budget, big star projects of the film industry because these arguably had the widest release and reach.