It’s difficult enough to make a political film in India, even more so when it is about Kashmir, whose past is as contested as its present. But two Kashmiris should be proud of having made a movie which captures its recent traumatic history with sensitivity and empathy. The seventh and most recent migration of Kashmiri Hindus is something the world forgot or chose to forget, leaving a proud community to seek their lives in “India”, the plains, whose language and culture was as alien to them as the weather.
There are stark reminders of this everywhere in Shikara, perhaps Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s finest film, written in collaboration with Rahul Pandita, who has poured his heart and soul into the screenplay. There is the old man in a pheran sitting by the shop in the refugee camp in Jammu muttering about going back to the Valley. There is the older Shanti (Shanti and Shiv are the two protagonists whose lives mirror the troubled erstwhile state) aghast at a Kashmiri wedding where there is loud Punjabi music, frenetic dancing and blinking lights–she compares it to her own wedding thirty years ago, where the “bacha” danced at the mehndi ceremony and the neighbours played the “tumbaknaar”. There is the mass of Pandits, rendered virtual beggars by the sudden move, scrambling for tomatoes delivered by a truck bearing the legend Rashtravadi Party. And there is the little boy singing “Mandir whin banayenge” being gently corrected by Master Shiv Kumar, a PhD who chooses to stay back in the camp to teach children: leader ka kaam hai jodna, he tells him.
This is a community rendered exile overnight, with neighbours turning into occupiers of their homes, the state forgetting them, and their friends turning into militants. There are gouged-out buildings which were once their homes, fading walls still bearing the marks of their loves and lives. There are waters where they want their ashes to be immersed. And there is a culture that is now in danger of being lost.
The Valley has never looked as beautiful as it does through Chopra’s eye, the green greener than I have ever seen and the blues bluer. Pandita’s skilful screenplay weaves the personal loss of Shiv and Shanti into the political landscape of rising hate and increasing polarity. The starkness of the difference between the cramped refugee camp where their gods sit alongside a stove, an electric fan, and a typewriter on which Shiv writes a letter to the President of USA–a promise to his close friend–telling him about the truth of Kashmir, and how the guns meant to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan found their way into the Valley. “Hamara wahan bada pyara ghar hai,” says Shanti to the official at the refugee camp who laughs at the Pandits for fleeing the Valley.
There is a shot of an army car carrying Shanti and Shiv speeding down the highway, with the adjoining sides dotted with graves. It’s a long shot and it moves with the car, carrying with it any vestige of hope and peace in the Valley. “Hum aise hi marte rehenge,” says the militant to his former friend, “aur leader apni jeben bharrte rehenge.” That is the continuing tragedy of the Valley. The bigger tragedy is that soon there will be no one left even to remember what the tragedy was, where the homes of the Pandits were, and what lives they led. The closing of the imagination to the pain of the Pandits will soon be reflected in the community’s own memory loss. Or will #HumWapasAayenge ever come true?