An Age of Unreason: The Kashmir Files and The War on Information
Vivek Agnihotri’s controversial film The Kashmir Files is more drama than documentary, an awkward retelling of recent history that propagates more than it educates.
“The banality of evil,” a term coined by Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, has since become almost as much of a cliche as Nietzsche’s “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But it was a phrase that echoed silently through my head as my family and I sat through three hours of Vivek Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files, upon its release in March this year.
On the 0.6% chance that you’ve been meditating in a cave somewhere and haven’t heard anything of the film, try a simple Google search. A Movie That Shook the Nation, a ZEE5 ad will proudly proclaim as the first search result. The blurb under the trailer reads, “A series of interviews about the exodus of Kashmir Hindus in 1990, exploring the course of events and reasons for it.”
I have no wish to write a full-blown political piece on this movie; those are being cranked out with alarming regularity by the representative presses of one side or the other, to be filed away neatly under party lines. Or rather, what were once party lines, but are now considered something closer to full-blown identities: Congress-separatist-Mamata-JNU-liberals on the left, and BJP-nationalist-Modi-RSS-conservatives on the right. Finding both sides equally mired in social and identity politics, I see no point in adding broken bottles to a gang war. Particularly, since we are the ones who will have to sweep the streets afterwards.
The Google blurb clearly indicates the level of information that we are working on when discussing the Files. There is a total of just one actual interview during the epically long movie (runtime: 170 minutes), and it is at that a recreation of Bitta Karate’s infamous on-screen 1989 conversation. Yet, the said blurb does wonders for anyone who goes into the movie thinking they are in for a documentary. A sense of validation—indeed, of a homecoming—for all those who feel they’ve been kept in the dark too long.
The level of both writing and camerawork in a scene like this is closer to the level of on-screen advertisement than cinema. Even in those gruesome scenes, the acting is often of a shockingly low standard, with extras standing around robotically while the principal character delivers their line.
I went into the The Kashmir Files as both a movie buff and someone who doesn’t appreciate being kept in the dark too long, especially when it comes to arguments that have little to do with me. I am mostly Indian, but the rest of my identity is scattered around haphazardly, between Brazil, America, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, and Italy. I was raised a Hindu, before giving my younger self a tasting menu of other belief systems, and finally settling on nothing in particular.
Thus, I felt myself a decent choice for an impartial judge; the movie seemed to be dividing people firmly on any black and white lines it found, and I tend to stick to grey. While my family—many of whom lived through those times themselves—watched with a discerning political eye, I was preoccupied with acting, direction, cinematography, and, above all, artistic rendering and representation.
And it became evident from the first moments that this film is not a documentary, although Agnihotri has repeatedly claimed it to be one and offered substantial evidence for his claims. The distinction lies a great deal, though not entirely, on accuracy of portrayal. When I read the blurb about the interviews, I already had a particular vision of what I was about to see. For me, as both a film and history buff, this vision was something akin to Marcel Ophul’s The Sorrow and the Pity (1969); that is, an actual, remarkably long, carefully curated compilation of newsreels and interviews with citizens who were present and/or participating during the events. In the Kashmir Files, I counted a total of six newspaper clippings that served largely as cinematic devices to move between plot points; one can safely say that nobody watching the movie while under the impression that it was a documentary would be straining to read the fine print on these smudged black-and-white articles.
One might add that, for such an individual, the on-screen rendering of Karate’s 1989 interview was simply a recreation of the original, albeit in superior picture quality. Of course, this would be casually glancing over the fact that the character of ‘Malik Bitta’ is cobbled together from both Bitta Karate and Yasin Malik, transforming him into the kind of a supervillain that a proper drama production requires. Mention is additionally given to ‘Malik Bitta’s’ admitted involvement in the 2003 Nadimarg massacre, which has never even been vaguely attributed to either man.
But the devil is in the details. Cinematography is what grabs the viewer first. Karate in his original interview sits hunched in a simple grey-green shirt, suspicious, on-edge, looking as if a firecracker might stop his heart. In a corner next to a mantelpiece, then in a brick corner on a rooftop, he looked, then and now, like a bona-fide militant. ‘Malik Bitta’ of the Files meanwhile, sits opposite his journalist—relaxed yet upright—both men with neatly combed hair and cashmere scarves; Bitta appears primmer and more elegant of the two. He responds to the questions posed with an infinitely composed deliberation that was utterly absent from the original interview, with the strategically intermittent drooping eye Chinmay Mandlekar decided to tack onto his character. It makes for a spine-chilling performance, and one that elicits two primary reasons for hating the character in the moment: a) How can someone be so evil as to say these things so naturally, or indeed, almost seem to enjoy them? And b) How am I, a citizen of a democracy, so excluded from the inner workings of my government that a monster like this is being interviewed for national television from an armchair, surrounded by flowered vases, paintings and beautiful lighting, while the rest of us suffer so?
These artistic licenses are what ruin the film’s half-hearted attempt at documentary status, building up with uncommon regularity to shape the story into a drama. Much has been said of the level of violence in the Files; however, this will forever be seen differently by those who have diverging opinions on what is ‘right’, with one side insisting on the importance of ‘bringing out the truth’ and the other denying that the film is in fact representative of truth. Whether the level of violence that is shown is accurate or not will be debated for longer than I care to contemplate; the context in which it is shown is what truly makes it dangerous. A scene of an Air Force pilot being gunned down in broad daylight is treated to a royal sob story, as he catches the bullets while tenderly bending down to accept a rose upon from a young schoolgirl. The level of both writing and camerawork in a scene like this is closer to the level of on-screen advertisement than cinema. Even in those gruesome scenes that have naturally received so much attention, the acting is often of a shockingly low standard, with extras standing around robotically while the principal character delivers their line. The constant juxtaposition of shocking violence with sentimentality can quickly become cloying.
It was therefore not the scenes that solicit unchecked emotion from the viewer that grabbed your reporter, but the ones that backfired spectacularly. Aided by an affinity for moral grey areas, I couldn’t help but notice the handful of lines and scenes that accomplished something completely unlike what they intended—and fared the best for it. These moments lend moments of transparency to a movie that seems, to an unprecedented degree, to know exactly what it does and doesn’t want to say. A few of the most poignant cannot be refuted by any side, though room for interpretation is immense. “Fake news is not as harmful as showing the truth,” claim a roomful of drunk, mourning pandits more than once. “Cowards cannot distinguish truth from lies,” claims IAS Brahma Dutt with grave anger, as he recalls a meeting he’d witnessed in 1989 of CM Farooq Abdullah and ‘Malik Bitta’, and wishes he’d killed the latter then and there (Prime Minister V.P. Singh and related BJP affiliates of his government are oddly absolved). The character of Radhika Menon—based on JNU’s Nivedita Menon—is supposed to be delivering a key line when it comes to her portrayed communist, anti-nationalist agenda when she advises the young and confused (for 95% of the film) protagonist Krishna Pandit as he contests student elections: “You have to become their god.” An unpalatable statement from what is portrayed as an unpalatable woman, but one that rings with tragic, political truth. Nothing is more important to election of any kind—whether political or private—than image.
And herein lies the danger in the release of the Kashmir Files. The closest mainstream Western film to match Files’ aspiration could be Oliver Stone’s JFK. But what communal tension did Stone’s 1991 movie generate? Street riots in the West End of Boston? Who might get lynched because of JFK? The descendants of J. Edgar Hoover? Whenever I question Agnihotri’s approach in front of anyone who feels liberated by it, I’m immediately waved off by a variation on the same statement: “India is unique in this sense.” Reflecting the shape-shifting worlds of Hinduism, we’ve managed to shape our country in accordance with what we need it to be at any given moment; modern India is ancient and unique when we like it to be, and on the socioeconomic front-lines with the rest of the world when we need it to be.
Reflecting the shape-shifting worlds of Hinduism, we’ve managed to shape our country in accordance with what we need it to be at any given moment; modern India is ancient and unique when we like it to be, and on the socioeconomic front-lines with the rest of the world when we need it to be.
I watched the Files the night after a tiny local theatre had a special feature showing of Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein’s celebrated 1927 Soviet propaganda film. Now, politically, I found Battleship to be a pretty dumb picture. But aesthetically it was a tour de force: a real, passionate artistic statement whose underlying message was by now incidental.
The absence of this passion is utterly amiss from the Files. The most an audience can hope for in terms of interesting images are cartoonish levels of violence and wide-angle, time-lapsed mini-interludes of the Hindu Kush and Himalayas, which look as if they’ve been cut and pasted from a National Geographic or Lonely Planet documentary.
Then, there’s the final nail in the coffin of the film’s quality, symbolized unintentionally by the growing blindness of the protagonist’s grandfather, one who is scarred into what seems to be near insanity by all he has witnessed. Despite living in a refugee camp and barely being able to see, he continues to request the removal of Article 370 by personally calling the Prime Minister’s office day after day. IAS Dutt, a friend of his, comes on screen and recognizes him. But the old man doesn’t remember his friend, and instead, continues to passionately stick to his protest. It is a scene that is intended to conjure up sympathy and admiration for the single-mindedness of a man whose connection to his homeland is so strong, it’s become all he can fit inside him. But there are other, harder-to-name feelings in there too, waiting in the wings—and many of them contradictory.
A term that’s used repeatedly during the film is ‘humanism’. I’m not a humanist in the least—yet, I am Indian—so not only did I feel quite alienated by these statements, but also a touch of indignance. For this ‘humanist vs. anti-humanist’ dualism is a Western battle utterly foreign to Asiatic culture, with each of our philosophical systems having a unifying factor that integrates humans and nature. In Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita could be called an opus in this respect (and naturally many others), with Lord Krishna presiding over interminable amounts of what we might deem morally-questionable activity in order to achieve a lasting peace. So why is humanism—the belief that human beings are the starting point for all moral and philosophical research—such a pillar of the Files? Because anti-humanism would consider the events portrayed typical of intelligent animals who feel themselves to be trapped in a corner, thus reducing the sufferings of the pandits to a run-of-the mill case, one of evil in full flower of banality.
Hannah Arendt’s all-too-famous quote was an integral part of her commentary on one of the 20th century’s seminal events: the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a major figure of the Third Reich, in Israel, 1963. Arendt found the efforts to portray him as the personification of evil to be harmfully simplistic; to her, his crime was one of thoughtlessness. Indeed, this to her was the crime of most Nazis. Blind obedience, the failure to think, the lack of distance between oneself and one’s work and beliefs—these, to Arendt, who was herself a Holocaust survivor, were the true crimes of this wretched man. She was therefore highly critical of the manner in which the trial proceeded, feeling that Eichmann’s representations in media were not meant to educate the public, but to simply give him the face of, as The New York Times put it, “the most evil monster of humanity.” She was highly critical of the prosecutor, Israeli Attorney General Gideon Hausner, who she felt to be purposefully hyperbolic in his approach in order to pursue the interests of the state.
We, as humans, have difficulty in separating fact from fiction in on-the-ground reportage. We question the authenticity of newsreels, from the Second World War to the present-day. Yet somehow, we succeed in making ourselves believe that, through our incredible powers of enlightened discernment, we can access the basic moral fabric of history from a movie.
The string of survivors who were brought forth to give their stories to the world were dismissed as having “no apparent bearing on the case”. These were distractions from what Arendt felt to be the central point of the trial, furthered by Hausner’s repeated question “Why did you not rebel?” To Arendt, it was all too obvious that anyone in the service of such a regime would have long abandoned the mental conditions necessary for thinking—and thus, rebelling.
These are difficult statements to rationally disagree with; and, as my grandmother, a BJP supporter, likes to say “We live in an age of reason.” As far as cinema goes, we, as humans, have difficulty in separating fact from fiction in on-the-ground reportage (though even Francis Ford Coppola’s famous boast that his epic Apocalypse Now was “not about Vietnam—it is Vietnam” couldn’t transform his movie into a documentary through media attention, since the 1968 documentary In The Year Of The Pig had already given an indication of what a bona-fide war documentary looked like). We question the authenticity of newsreels, from the Second World War to the present-day. Yet somehow, we succeed in making ourselves believe that, through our incredible powers of enlightened discernment, we can access the basic moral fabric of history from a movie, a ‘documentary-drama’, a genre of film that has, until now, been the exclusive realm of the universally “agreed-upon”. Gang culture, the Holocaust, the trans-Atlantic slave trade the three principal subjects of docu-dramas that also tend to feature bloodcurdling violence are given a free pass simply because everyone enters and leaves the movie with the same view of the film’s characters. Who’s going to defend the slave trader Theophilus Freeman while watching 12 Years a Slave? Or the SS officers in Schindler’s List, or Life is Beautiful? And who ever really had any empathy for the mob? (Tony Soprano gets a pass.) Nobody’s mind or conscience has to work overtime in the viewing of these films; the moral playing field is pleasantly bare.
This is precisely what strips The Kashmir Files bare of its ‘documentary’ status: everyone knows exactly what they’re getting when they enter the theatre or press play. Again, which side of the political fence one is on is irrelevant, the tone of the movie being enough to supply people with their own black-and-white narratives to fit neatly into their personal moral systems.
Krishna Pandit’s sudden transformation into an encyclopedia of Kashmiri history during the finale is the perfect representation of how so many are goaded into feeling, when they leave the world of the film, that wonderfully human feeling of Now I understand. Sadly, a big part of what makes this feeling human is that it is created, falsified. We neglect to question why we don’t get to see Krishna’s emotional response upon first discovering his ‘truth’ (a scene which could have packed some devastating emotional impact); why we only get to watch him in a state of utter inner turmoil for more than two hours, before he finally returns to fight the ultimate political battle with Menon—his former mentor—by re-educating his peers on Muslim-perpetrated atrocities and Hindu glories of yore.
As an old, jaded Pandit journalist says in the film, “It’s a war of information”. And it’s a fight that’s getting dirtier all the time. As a proud humanist and someone who wishes only to bring out ‘the truth’, perhaps Agnihotri should take a world tour and do his best to make a film wherever he sees or hears of violent injustices. He’ll be away a very long time.
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Dhani Muniz is an Indo-Brazilian writer and musician. His writings focus on the subversive elements of human cultures and traditions, as well as the unifying elements of nature. Coming from a broad cultural background, and having lived in New York and Alaska as well as India, he strives to communicate a sense of rootlessness in his work—both in writing and music—as well as to effect a cross-pollination between his chosen disciplines. You can find him on Twitter: @suitetheexpatriate and Instagram: @suitetheexpatriate.
