- Srilagna Majumdar
Kashmir through the lens of Bollywood
Updated: Aug 12, 2022

Cinema is a diverse cultural practice that reflects a plethora of social, economic, and cultural phenomena in modern societies. Bollywood is a global face of Indian cinema, and it shares a unique relationship with Kashmir. Kashmir has been the leading filming destination for the Bombay cinema industry. Bollywood filmmakers have found different ways of telling stories about Kashmir and its people that have become part of the national experience. Though Kashmir is omnipresent in political discourse, very little is truly known of Kashmiri culture or the effects of territorial conflict on the Kashmiri way of life. Voyeuristic representations of Kashmir in popular cinema help us partially understand mainland India's surreal and violent disconnect.
During the 1960s, Bollywood used the scenic beauty of Kashmir for its location to portray it as heaven on earth. Pre-insurgency, Kashmir was used as a location of romance and escapism, the perfect setting for the Bollywood hero to romance his love. Key scenes featured verdant rolling hills and lush meadows, gently flowing streams, and nature in to all its glory. It was a land of escapism, removed from the conflict and curiously depoliticized. However, with the political changes, the image of the valley in mainstream movies also underwent dramatic change. Representation of Kashmiris has thus oscillated from overly passive and generalized to overly aggressive, mirroring India’s political discourse of the disputed valley as dangerous. The films of pre-conflict era include Kashmir Ki Kali (Bud of Kashmir, 1964), Jab Jab Phool Khile (Whenever the Flowers Bloomed, 1965), and Junglee (Crazy, 1961), while the post-conflict days, when war and terrorism became the prominent aspect of the state, produced such timely films as Roja (Red, 1992), Mission Kashmir (2000), Maa Tujhe Salaam [Mother, I Salute You, 2002), and LOC Kargil (2003).
