From Shammi Kapoor’s dance moves to militancy in the Valley—how Bollywood has shaped public perception of Kashmir and its people over the years
On 22 April tragedy struck South Kashmir’s Baisaran meadow as 26 Indian holidaymakers were shot down by a handful of terrorists. The incident sent shock waves through the country. The terror attack was brutal, to say the least, and firsthand accounts, broadcast on repeat on 24/7 news channels, have made sure that the spaces that were once popularised by Shammi Kapoor’s inimitable dance moves will now be re-imagined through blood-stained glasses.
The aftermath of the attack has seen a carefully choreographed chant of hatemongering and vilification of Kashmir and its people through a network of news channels and several social media accounts, with both feeding into each other. Discriminatory content against Kashmiris, by way of running misleading tickers and hashtags like #boycottkashmir or public discussions on how “every Kashmiri was involved in the attack”, has since become commonplace.
It is evident that the fallout of the Baisaran incident has set into motion a dangerous narrative that has misrepresented and isolated the Kashmiris further. The immediacy, scale and intensity of the resounding anti-Kashmir rhetoric make it pertinent to explore how the Kashmir Valley and its people have been understood by mainland India through the ages. Among the various sites that participate in the process of shaping and normalising meanings, pop cultural media such as mainstream Hindi films hold a special place thanks to their widespread scope and appeal.
Over the years, Bollywood has produced several films set in the Kashmir Valley, albeit in different contexts and perspectives. Films like Junglee (1961), Kashmir Ki Kali (1964) and Jab Jab Phool Khile (1965) conveyed the paradisical landscape through prolonged camera pans, panoramic and aerial shots of expansive lush green grasslands, lofty peaks and the flowing Jhelum waters. These films painted Kashmir as a metropolitan, spiritual and romantic escape for the modern, plains-dwelling Indians.
In the box-office hit Kashmir Ki Kali, Shammi Kapoor plays Rajeev Lal, a young business tycoon who, unsurprisingly, is being pressured by his mother to get married. Kapoor runs off to Kashmir in his white Studebaker Champion while singing Mohammed Rafi’s foot-tapping “Kahin Na Kahin Dil Lagana Padega.”
The song sequence cuts back and forth between the supercharged Kapoor doing callisthenics as he drives, sings, twists, plays the harmonica and admires the beauty around, all at the same time, and the inviting greenery, the snow-capped mountains and the cascading Lidder river running alongside the male lead’s car. Kashmiri girls including Sharmila Tagore—the female lead who plays Champa, a local flower seller—are spotted every now and then dancing on trucks and along the roadside in their pherans and bright headscarves. A sharp contrast is visible between the confident, citified hero and Champa, a countrified “other”.
This contrast is also visible in Jab Jab Phool Khile, which pairs Raja (played by Shashi Kapoor), a poor Kashmiri boatman, with Rita (played by Nanda), a rich metropolitan girl, who goes to the Valley to get away from the humdrum of city life and ends up falling in love with both its beauty and the boatman. Evidently, the romantic pairings reflect Bollywood’s assimilative and neo-orientalist leanings.
