Bollywood’s return to the Valley – and now followed by a multiplex – however, portrays more than peace. The film industry is instrumental in shaping and reinforcing Kashmir’s pastoral image around the globe. It was Raj Kapoor who brought to the world the Valley’s fabled scenic beauty when he shot Barsaat here in 1949. As Nimmi sang ‘Hawa main udta jaye mera lal dupatta malmal ka’, Kashmir’s lush meadows formed the backdrop. Similarly, long before the dotcom revolution made it familiar to millions around the world, the snowscapes of Kashmir resonated to Shammi Kapoor’s ‘yahoo’ call in Junglee.
But unlike in the past, Bollywood and Kashmir relationship is no longer spontaneous and natural. Like everything else in the Valley, it has also become political. Movie-making in Kashmir is about peace, about reinforcing Kashmir’s image as a paradise on earth but in the current context this inference of Bollywood re-entry will struggle to sound innocent. It will, in fact, appear politically motivated. True, Bollywood shoots and the reopening of cinema are the biggest advertisement so far for peace in Kashmir. It will certainly help bring more tourists to the region. Both of these are desirable ends. But actually, this is not how these things are understood in Kashmir. Many people tend to look at these developments as a callous effort to negate the tragedy of the past three decades.
There is a reason for this. Tension in Kashmir is between a simmering, dormant political conflict and elaborately contrived imagery of peace. Imagery is often deliberately played up as normalcy or sometimes even genuinely mistaken for peace. And this imagery is about the arrival of tourists, a peaceful Amarnath yatra, Bollywood shoots and of course, the unnaturally high turnout in polls, sometimes well-attended public meetings of the mainstream politicians, and now the re-opening of cinemas. All these events together make Kashmir appear as an eminently normal place but cumulatively they forge no genuine peace, a fact not acknowledged by the promoters of this normalcy.
