Kashmir and the Indian cinema

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Film shot in Kashmir

History, 1948-1972, 1990s

Avijit Ghosh, Oct 1, 2022: The Times of India

For decades, Srinagar’s cinemas were dead, remembered only in the laments of a lost yesterday. Now, a silver jubilee of years since the first multiplex arrived in Delhi in 1997, Kashmir’s city of beauty and anguish too is home to one. The development – two cinemas also opened in south Kashmir’s Shopian and Pulwama districts recently – is a constructive move even though it comes with its share of security challenges. 
Kashmiris were forced out of cinema theatres in 1990. Extremists enforcing a conservative version of Islam ordered them shut. In 1999, three cinemas – Broadway, Neelam and Regal – dared to reopen. But on the first day of Regal’s reopening, grenades were tossed at viewers coming out of the hall. One person died. The message had been delivered. The theatres morphed into paramilitary barracks, malls, hospitals and ruins.


In Kashmir, cinema has always been intertwined with politics. In July 1948, when India and Pakistan were locked in a war of ownership over the north Indian state, a group of Bombay film stars and musicians travelled to Jammu and Kashmir to entertain the fighting jawans. The idea, described in The Times of India as “a fine example of patriotic responsibility,” was initiated by Motilal, a major star of the time. 


Cinema and conflict


The war was over by 1949. But cinema became an avenue to continue the conflict by other means, even in other lands. Both sides seemed convinced that propaganda was vital in establishing the rightness of their cause. In 1951, a Pakistani documentary, “Kashmir Conflict,” became the object of heated controversy in England. The film representing the Pakistani view on Kashmir was initially banned from public screening there. The ban was later lifted. Around the same time, Naval Gandhi’s 1948 documentary, Kashmir Ki Kahani (The story of Kashmir), putting out the Indian point of view, was granted permission to maintain diplomatic balance. In its February 1949 issue, filmindia magazine wrote about another Indian documentary on Kashmir made by noted filmmaker MD Bhavnani, then working for the newly formed Films Division. It is unlikely that these documentaries would have created any mass impact. But they do indicate that even after the first war between the two toddler nations was over, an edginess over Kashmir endured. 
The 1951 feature film, producer-director Rajinder Nath Jolly’s Kashmir (1951), also reflected similar sentiments. “Purporting to tell the story of Kashmir and its pitiful rape by invading hordes,” is how The Times of India described the film, indirectly referring to the 1948 savagery by tribesmen from the other side of the border. 


Mesmerising audiences


Pamposh (1954) sought to change the celluloid narrative on Kashmir. In writer-director Ezra Mir’s film, Kashmir was the subject, not the object, of attention. His was the first feature film to arrest the province’s beauty in colour. The cast consisted mostly of rookies picked “on the spot”. The film, dubbed in several languages, was about an old man and a child who cannot speak; the Dal Lake being a central character. “Pamposh came to be presented at the famous Cannes Film Festival in 1954 where it won considerable acclaim,” writes NJ Kamath in “The World of Ezra Mir. ” Sadly, few recall the movie. Mir was a Kolkataborn Jew who later became a prominent documentary filmmaker.


But it takes a blockbuster to kickstart a trend. Director Subodh Mukherji’s Junglee (1961) did that. The movie, shot in Eastman Color, shaped the nation’s popular imagination of Kashmir. As Shammi Kapoor frolicked with Saira Banu and let out that primeval yell, Yahoo, snow became seductive and Kashmir became the film industry’s outdoor hotspot for filming songs and romance for the next two decades. They were fundamental in making the average Indian fall in love with Kashmir and internalise the place as a non-negotiable part of his patriotic consciousness.


 But not their story? 


In their gaze, however, Kashmir was a beguiling physical beauty but bereft of politics, society and agency. Films such as Shayar-e-Kashmir Mahjoor (1972), which told the life story of the great Kashmiri poet, were rare. Conversely, the shooting units injected money into the local economy. Films became the finest free tourism promoter for the north Indian state.


The rise of violent separatism in the 1990s changed the picture. Since then, Kashmir has morphed from a state to a point of view, so fragile and polarising that feature filmmakers, barring a few, have treaded on it with utmost caution. The new multiplex leaves us with the complex question: Will the common people return to the movie theatre, a habit lost to passage of time and fear of violence?