Shikara in the time of Kashmir –

Yar, it’s a love story. Simple. Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy. Boy marries girl. Notwithstanding the trials and tribulations of life, they live together happily ever after.

The plot ends here. What is not simple though is the backdrop. The confounding backdrop persists willy nilly throughout the film. But the backdrop is not the story. The story is not about the backdrop which the story is about. Capiche?

Sometime in the course of the lives of the married lovers they leave their home in Kashmir because of muffle muffle something about the American president giving guns to Afghanistan. Then there’s something something about Army muffle muffle creating militants out of cricket playing nice Kashmiri boys called Lateef. Muffle muffle houses burning Benazir Bhutto something, government something something long line of trucks leaving, except one lone calf abandoned in a silence- of- the-lambs kind of way at a mountain road bend. The symbolism of this totally escapes me.

If the political strife in the valley was used merely as a backdrop, it was a tacky cardboard cutout backdrop , decontextualised and meaningless.

But Vidu Vinod Chopra has in no uncertain terms stated that he has not made a documentary. It’s a love story so please stick to the story.

Do not get confused by the movie dedication to his mother who allegedly fled the valley, and all the statistics and facts displayed at the beginning and end of the film. That is just backdrop of a story that is not about the backdrop.

The love story of the protagonists ends in a shikara in Agra, of all places, just as it began in a shikara in Kashmir on their wedding night, well kinda (I’m really trying to work with the filmmaker here). Girl dies in boy’s arms staring at the Taj Mahal, probably like Queen Mumtaz died in the arms of the great Mughal emperor and conqueror of India Shah Jehan?

‘Eh?’

I’m sure there’s some deep symbolism here, but it requires intellectual callisthenics I’m unsure the average viewer is capable of, and certainly not the average Kashmiri Pandit, whose story this is supposed to be.

Somewhere in the political swamp Kashmir has become, Vidu Vinod Chopra lost the plot.

What is not lost is that Vidu Vinod Chopra wanted to tell a hate transcending aman ki asha kind of film. There are of course various ways to do this. Life is Beautiful did it, Schindler ‘s List did it. The first looked at history the way a clown would, with a smile on his lips, and a tear in his eye. The second looked at history from the eyes of a historical villain with a kind heart. Both films went through the open wounds of a community’s history with a human eye, looking for that which redeems. And they did it well.

Good cinema does not deny history to redeem it.

From this perspective, given the outrage of the Kashmiri Pandit against the film, it’s clear Vidu Vinod Chopra ain’t no  Steven Spielberg, and Shikara ain’t no Schindler ‘s List .

The only evocative part of the film was when the end credits rolled. Unmistakably real images of broken abandoned clusters of Kashmiri Pandit houses captured the imagination the way the film couldn’t.

Hauntingly eerie broken hearths and homes speak of a poignant grandeur that once was, of a life and people that were brutally silenced. By whom and why is a story that still remains untold.