Reimagining Kashmir: Cinema, History, and National Narratives in Bollywood

Abstract

Collective imaginaries of society, history, and nationhood are important products of popular culture. Popular culture is a place, according to Stuart Hall, where “collective communal understandings” are generated, negotiated and disseminated. Cinema holds a special place in the process of nation-building and the shaping of political discourses in this context. Due to its commerciality and mass appeal, the power of cinema has permeated further into the culture than just the movie theater and can be seen in film music, magazines, reviews, celebrity culture and fan communities. Hence, films are considered as cultural texts which audiences read and understand their social and political context. Historical and political films have a unique role in popular culture, both in reconstructing the past and defining new meanings for the present. Their images may be inspired by historical events or the images may be influenced by the selection of narrative, the construction of symbols and the ideological frameworks that may differ from history. This means such movies must be analysed both for the kinds of things that they have represented in the past and for the way they are involved in the construction of public memory. This article takes a look at the portrayal of Kashmir issue in some Bollywood films that have been made from 1992 to 2014. The research is based on theories of nationalism, collective memory, and representation, and it uses qualitative content analysis to examine the representation of Kashmiri, Indian and Pakistani identity and of the Kashmir conflict in film narratives. The results indicate that the earlier films in most instances dealt with the idea of Kashmir in terms of terrorism, national security and territorial integrity, while the later ones are more concerned with the sufferings of the common people, their sense of alienation and the human cost of a long-standing conflict. The article contends that Bollywood is an important cultural phenomenon which not only mirrors the dominant policy discourses on Kashmir but also helps in shaping public perceptions, national narratives and collective understandings of the longest running political dispute in South Asia.