Often, we don’t see things that are right under our nose — maybe because we don’t want to. Ever since terror spread its first tentacles back in the 1980s — Punjab was all afire, Kashmir had begun burning and the North-East was on the edge — Bollywood has either totally zoomed out of troubled zones or been shifty in its take on the war within.
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As India moves through its sixties, it is a good time to explore how the freest of our creative zones –– our cinematic imagination –– is evolving. There have been recent changes in Hindi films wrought by the phenomenon of ‘terror’ which has impacted stories, settings and characters, re-shaping the very meaning of this cinema. The changes that have been sewn have been remarkable and quiet. ‘Mainstream’ Hindi cinema has traditionally been known for escapist fare. The industry held political beliefs but kept these understated, making films as elastic as a vinyl record, as light as a gossamer dream. Post-Independence, countless Hindi films were located in ‘paradise’ itself. Kashmir was the backdrop for movies set in manicured Mughal gardens, dainty shikaras wobbling on the Dal Lake, girls in colourful firans with long silver earrings waving cheerfully as Shammi Kapoor drove past. Even as the region’s political ambience darkened through the 1960s, Hindi film heroes ignored storm clouds on the horizon, singing their way across Kashmir’s meadows, heroines in tight trousers smiling indulgently astride bored-looking ponies.
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Accepting this reality was not easy for Hindi filmmakers. Kashmir, after all, was the ultimate escape, a place of crystalline freshness where the soul breathed freely, untied from the worries of the metropolis and the exigencies of the town. In Kashmir’s ‘vaadiyan’, the plains-based Indian enjoyed a little laugh, a little love, a liberty or two. However, this Kashmir, presented tenderly in Technicolour as ‘ours’, suddenly vanished from life and film. Its evaporation was a significant disappearing act. “The Kashmir narrative was increasingly marked by nationalism which invokes violence,†comments sociologist Shiv Viswanathan. Perhaps depicting such violence, where once pools of lilies and chinars watched over lovers, was too much for Hindi filmmakers. Tellingly, it was Mani Ratnam from the South who took cinema back to a dark, dangerous Kashmir, not a Hindi filmmaker whose memories were embedded with houseboats and poetry.
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Bollywood bites the bullet - Times of India
