Kashmir and Bollywood: Hindu nationalism, Islamophobia & obfuscation of the military occupation: LFK

ISLAMABAD, August 04 (SABAH): The Legal Forum for Kashmir has said that the occupied region of Kashmir and India’s Mumbai-based Hindi cinema, popularly known as Bollywood, share a long history of relationship. The beginning of this relationship can be traced, at least, to the late 1940s when India took control of the Muslim-majority region. Historically Hindi cinema has represented Kashmir through a particular imaginative lens, consistent with the official narrative of the Indian state.

The LFK said that in the Indian official imagination, Kashmir remains an integral part of the India for various contradictory reason, reflecting the very contradictions of the Indian nationalism itself. For the country’s liberals Kashmir as a part of the Indian nation testifies to the post-colonial nation’s secularist ethos and pluralism; yet the Hindu identity remains at the center of this imagination.

LFK said that this narrative was deployed by the country’s founding fathers, most prominently by M.K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. For the Hindu nationalist or Hindutva ideology, India primarily is a Hindu nation, and Kashmir is the crown to this Hindu nation for the latter’s Hindu Brahmanic past. Current Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) represents the core of this imagination. Hindi cinema has been vehicle to carry these imaginaries through multiple forms and themes. The forms of the films have constantly changed over the years depending on the social and political context and currents of the country, yet the central narrative has remained unaltered. Even today, in the Hindutva dominated nation, Bollywood continues to work as a conduit to transmit the fantasies of Hindu nationalism.

LFK said that while Kashmir is an internationally recognized disputed territory between India and Pakistan, Hindi cinema’s engagement with the region, however, has been simplistic, privileging “culture” over “history”. It is through this obfuscation of the historical context that the armed insurgency of Kashmir, which began in 1989, is seen as a disruption. This studies delineates different stages of Hindi cinema’s filmography on Kashmir, and outline the thematic and contextual relevance of the films to the disputed territory of Kashmir.