LOC-Kagil: How `real'?
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It claims to tell "the real story", but "real life" remains outside the camera's reach in "LOC-Kargil", thus continuing Bollywood's tradition of using the Valley for escapism and romance while erasing Kashmiris from it. ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR comments.
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"BEFORE we forget," declare the posters for "LOC-Kargil". What this big-budget spectacle offers, however, is not a memorialising of war but a glamorising of the Line of Control. Through his proclaimed adherence to "the real story" of Kargil, J. P. Dutta transforms a brute arena of war into a Technicolor theatre, where a bellicose manhood becomes the active principle of nationalism. In the process, another dimension of the "real story" is forgotten: how conflict impacts everyday civilian life along the Line of Control (LOC), and indeed throughout Jammu and Kashmir.
VIVEK BENDRE
"LOC-Kargil"
The few moments when the camera's gaze strays towards the State's local inhabitants are no innocent diversions, but classic visual examples of strategies of "othering". Two pheran-clad, bearded youths attempt to bomb a bridge, triggering the stereotype of the Kashmiri as terrorist, sabotaging the arteries of India's infrastructure, even as the Pakistanis aim for National Highway One. Deserted houses in Kargil village greet the Indian army, underlining the absence of the locals from the scene of action: an absence justified by an officer's comment, "they must have run away from the shelling". Dancing Ladakhis flit inexplicably across the screen, aestheticised and fetishised through their traditional dress and music.
These glimpses work alongside the film's insistence of the nation as home, "ghar", with Kargil its foolishly neglected corner. Army officers berate themselves on slipping up in their job, which has attracted the attention of the covetous neighbour, Pakistan (ironic that this rhetoric should parallel the cooing noises being made at the current SAARC summit). Homely proverbs ("even a dog chancing upon an uncovered pot of milk would not lap it up") confirm this domestication of the military realm, which rationalises an uncomfortable question: why go repeatedly to war over an inhospitable chunk of land? That rationalisation in turn rests on the solid bedrock of collective investment in territoriality — an investment whose truth status the film capitalises on and endorses.
The visual reduction of the inhabitants of Jammu and Kashmir to absentees, terrorists, or "other-worldly" Buddhists confirms them as unreliable or ineffective housekeepers, in need of the army's constant presence. But their reductive representation also participates in a long Bollywood tradition of using the Kashmir Valley as the backdrop for escapism and romance while erasing Kashmiris from it. Even as the landscape was thus packaged for and consumed by the Indian film-viewing public, also feeding the tourism industry that generated income and employment, Kashmiris viewed themselves as non-existent within that landscape, or, even worse, portrayed as eager-to-learn, fawning country bumpkins.
The nexus between economic dependence, the cinematic appropriation of the Valley, and the unhappy political relationship between Jammu and Kashmir and the Centre cannot be unravelled here with justice. Let us note simply that the outbreak of political turmoil has necessitated the demise of the Valley's cinematic role. Instead, films now turn to the barren mountainscape of Ladakh as in "Dil Se" or insert militancy into formulaic images of the paradisal Valley as in "Mission Kashmir". The spectacular cinematography of "LOC-Kargil" confirms that lights, camera and action have indeed shifted away from the Valley to its encircling mountains.
As verdant meadows make way for jagged peaks, romance is replaced by war. The caption, "somewhere in the Kashmir Valley", that repeatedly flashes across the screen announces a new role for the Valley within the intra-national tango of self and other. Earlier the space where erotic energies were contained through song, dance and a tumble through the snow, is now criss-crossed by armies, infiltrators and dreaded militants. This crucible forges Indian men out of regional boys as Haryanvi Jat accommodates Maratha, Tamil soldier shares his Bengali counterpart's "ruti", and rural, small-town and metropolitan India meet and banter.
REUTERS
... Where are the Kashmiris in the film?
Comradeship born out of violence emerges as the new modus operandi for nation building through Bollywood's fantasy machine, but Kashmir (now expanded beyond the Valley to include the mountains as beckoning border) remains the site of desire and national identity formation.
"Real life" along the LOC, or within the Valley itself, remains unsurprisingly beyond the camera's reach. To understand that life, it is not even necessary to enter Jammu and Kashmir and sense the change in atmosphere introduced by the omnipresent army bunker and bewildering varieties of uniform. Just clicking on Kashmiri newspapers online can provide insight, for instance, into the emotional response evoked by proposals to re-introduce the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service, or the decline in civilian casualties within border villages since the Id ceasefire.
There are ordinary people struggling to live lives of dignity and safety in the very line of fire. Must memorialising "war heroes" proceed by erasing them from the narrative, as "LOC-Kargil" does? One can draw but small comfort from alternative representations that de-glamorise the LOC and its psychic impact. No less an author than Saadat Hasan Manto exposed its futility and waste in his short story, "The Dog of Teetwal". Here, Indian and Pakistani soldiers mirror each other's childish behaviour in shunting back and forth and, ultimately shooting, a stray dog. The fate of the inhabitants of a border area such as Teetwal, suggested by that of the hapless dog, is even more searingly described in a Kashmiri short story, "The Enemy", by A. G. Athar, whose narrator can neither visit his dying brother nor attend his last rites across the LOC.
For both Athar and Manto, the irrationality — which calls a brother an enemy — dehumanises the soldier, not shores up his masculinity. Sadly, such complex, compassionate and nuanced explorations of life on the edge remain underused, if not ignored, within the nation's public and pedagogic domains.
Meanwhile, the censors give a "U" certificate to a shockingly violent film, and proud parents administer through it early doses of expletive-ridden patriotism to their children: a fitting tamasha even for the likes of Manto.
The writer is with the University of Leeds, United Kingdom.
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