The movie, "The Kashmir Files" has been taking India by storm since its release last weekend. It is a historical drama that presents the genocide of Kashmiri Hindus in 1990 when Islamic Terrorists had ethnically cleansed a vast majority of the Hindu population (~ 500,000)  from the Kashmir Valley in India. The terrorists gave the Kashmiri Hindus the following ultimatum

  • "Raliv, Galiv, ya Chaliv" (Convert, Die or Flee). Thus was unleashed a reign of terror on a peace-loving community, and thousands are said to have died. Only a few remained, and the rest fled to the neighboring Jammu, and then to other parts of India. They became refugees in their own country.

I was in 10th grade when this tragedy occurred, and at that time there was mild-to-middling coverage of the event, for a few days, and then the occurrence fell out of favor of the media, which comprised of the state-run TV station

  • Doordarshan, State-run Radio (All India Radio), and numerous newspapers and magazines. Over the next three decades, the plight of the Kashmiri Hindus was given lip service by many political parties, but nothing was actually done for their rehabilitation. And the world mostly didn't know (or didn't care to know) about what had happened. There were a few documentaries that tried to tell the world what had happened, but there was no major impact. Things changed when the Parliament of India abrogated Article 370 and 35A, on August 5th,
  1. This was a welcome move cheered by the vast majority of Indian citizens and symbolized the full integration of the troubled region into India. Though, the displaced population has not yet been rehabilitated. Article 370 and 35A had been put in place provisionally in the Indian Constitution after the accession of The kingdom of Kashmir into India in 1948, following India's independence from under the rule of British Colonizers.  It granted special autonomy to the newly formed state of Jammu and Kashmir, which allowed the state's constituent assembly to selectively apply the Indian Constitution in the state.

Now to the movie review itself --

This movie is not something one can watch without some degree of trauma. Today we are inundated with gore and violence in various formats — tv series, movies, violent sporting events and so on. Seeing violent stuff is not usually difficult for me — watching two people duke it out in a ring or cage, often with the floor becoming slick with blood, watching war movies, westerns with gunfights, or even the shock and gore of the likes of Game of Thrones…one would think I’d be immune to it all by now.

But TKF hit me so hard, and so suddenly, that I didn’t know what happened — I was crying like a baby in the theater — a grown man, almost 50, alternating between suppressing sobs and wiping his eyes! Feeling anger, rage, feeling the impotence of watching innocent people being subjected to such absolute inhumanity, decades after it happened. All I could do was cry, wipe my tears, and cry some more. I’ve felt something like this after 9/11 — but the media frenzy that followed seemed to turn the suffering of all those people into statistics very quickly.

I’ve felt this way watching Holocaust movies too (a big reason why I avoid WWII movies entirely as a genre) — but somehow this felt more real to me, closer to home, though I’m sitting far separated from what had happened, in both space and time. It was like nothing I’d experienced before.

I know loss and sorrow very well, starting with the death of my father when I was 20 years old, and slowly losing my loved grandparents to old age, and an aunt to Covid. It was painful, and yet I was able to come to terms with that, because death is inevitable.

But the level of absolute horror I lived through the movie, not because I was going through it myself, but because somehow I became those poor souls who had undergone such suffering instigated by religious fanaticism and politics — the mind is unable to compute.

The movie is unlike any other I’ve seen, and I’ve seen many. It was like a red hot rod searing through my heart and mind, and the stunned silence, the sharp intake of breaths, as horror after horror unfolding on the screen before us became an ominous shroud that seemed to slowly wrap around us in the darkness of the theater. I’m thrown into a deep, stunned silence every time I think of it, more than 24 hours after the movie ended.

Maybe I’m over-reacting, maybe I’m a sop, maybe I’m weak minded, maybe this, or that…I don’t know. You watch, and then you tell me, if you feel up to it. Feel for those hapless souls who actually faced such terrible fates, those who succumbed, and those who survived.