In 2020, by suggesting that Kashmiri Pandits should forgive the local Muslim population of Jammu & Kashmir for driving them out of their homes in 1990, Vinod Chopra incensed many who feel this gambit to promote his film Shikara (based on the mass exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits) was a bit thin on credibility and sincerity.
Said the director who had earlier gone cosmetically into Kashmiri militancy in the Sanjay Dutt-Hrithik Roshan starrer Mission: Kashmir, “It’s like two friends meeting together after thirty years , who want to forget and move on!”
Netizens erupted in a show of mass outrage against Chopra. They asked for a boycott of his film Shikara.
Vinod Chopra is no stranger to the theme of love during the time of war. He walked down the same road in 1942: A Love Story with the incandescent Manisha Koirala and the hammy Anil Kapoor riding the crest of romance on the wings of RD Burman’s timeless melody. But the film was as hollow at heart as Shikara and Mission: Kashmir.
In Shikara, Chopra returned to the theme of racial persecution and cultural tyranny with far less satisfying results than the enormity of the plot would suggest.
Think about it. 5 lakh Kashmiri Pandits (Chopra whittled the mass exodus down to 60,000) were rendered homeless overnight. Forced to flee from their homes, Kashmiri Hindus were left with only their memories. Some like Shiv the hero of Shikara were lucky to have their life partners with them as they struggled to come to terms with their lives as refugees in their own country.
It is an idea so immense and damning in its political and emotional scope that it would take a filmmaker of epic ineptness to mess it up. Chopra did. The narrative and its high points lacked the emotional impact and the spiritual sustenance of other similar films on a mass exodus like MS Sathyu’s Garm Hawa and Deepa Mehta’s Earth.
Chopra’s heart was in the right place. He has been through the hell that Kashmiri Hindus faced when they were bullied out of their own homes. The film simply failed to convey the same emotional heft that the director undoubtedly felt. Perhaps he preferred a mellow calm approach to a slice of history when savagery turned the local people into two polarised communities with one determined to wipe out the other.
Kashmir burnt. Politicians played their games. Vinod Chopra knows what politics did to Kashmir. But he is on his own trip. He is that child at a party who would rather bawl for the busted balloons than the adult who howls for the broken dream.
Many of the scenes showing overnight evacuation of an entire community in Shikara were theoretically ticking bombs. They ended up as fizzle-free as watered Diwali crackers. The narrative took us from the protagonists Adil and Sadia’s wedding and marital bliss to the nightmare of being chased out of their private paradise. The two newcomers tried hard to infuse genuine feelings into their characters. But as their shared journey through unmoored life proceeded, the situations in the plot got tediously unconvincing, as though once the forced migration happened there was little left to say. As the lead pair got older they get hammier. (This is a problem in Vivek Agnihotri's film The Kashmir Files as well).
Instead of taking a strong political stand condemning those elements that precipitated the displacement of Kashmiri Hindus, Chopra’s ode to the homeless preferred to take the pacific route espousing peace instead of vendetta.
There is blood on the walls of Kashmir. But Chopra, in all his wisdom chooses to look away from the writing on the wall. When he does allow the protagonist Shiv to explode it is more a poet’s lament than a man’s anguished battle cry. There is very little passion in Shikara. In a sentimental moment straight out of an RK Narayan novel, a calf is left behind by refugees.
Shooting in real locations certainly adds to the credibility of Shikara. But there are too many contrivances in the plot, like the old man at the refugee camp constantly whining about going back to his home, or a Kashmiri Muslim turning up at the camp to ask Shiv to sell his home, the visitor weavers Shiv’s assassinated brother’s coat. Small world. Coat, unquote.
Shikara means well. And passages, such as the one showing Shiv and his wife returning to Kashmir under tragic circumstances, are filmed with feeling. But on the whole, the epic scope of the theme, the full impact of such a shameful chapter from Indian history, is largely sanitised, blow-dried and hung in the sun to try for too long.
Try as I might I couldn’t bring myself to feel that intense empathy for the protagonist that director Vinod Chopra wants us to. James Cameron apparently thought Shikara is a masterpiece. Or, so the blurb on the Shikara poster claimed. Sorry, Mr Cameron, I can’t agree with you.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.
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