The last film that Mahesh Srivastava watched in a theatre was Bhaag Milkha Bhaag, Rakeysh Om Prakash Mehra’s 2013 biopic on the late athlete Milkha Singh. A 55-year-old industrialist based in Rourkela, he went to a theatre again last Wednesday--after nine years--to watch The Kashmir Files.

Srivastava isn’t the only one. Countless Indians across the country, who have not visited a theatre in several years, are thronging cinema halls to watch the Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri directorial. Since its March 11 release, it’s giving a strong fight to big-budget multi-starrer releases like Farhad Samji’s Bachchan Pandey and SS Rajamouli’s RRR.

Srivastava, who watched The Kashmir Files on March 23, says he’d been trying to get the tickets for the last one week but there weren’t any available. “We went for the late-night show (9.30 pm) on a weekday. Even that was a full house,” he adds.

Bachraj Sekhani, a retired accountancy college professor in Rajkot, shares a similar situation. “There are just no seats available. People are watching the film multiple times. The halls echo with the chants of Vande Mataram and Bharat Mata Ki Jai. Although they didn’t show all that happened--what happened was 50 times more brutal and gory--watching The Kashmir Files was a surreal experience. Three hours felt too less,” he says. Sekhani had last seen Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor’s 102 Not Out in a theatre four years ago.

Based on the forced exodus of Kashmiri pandits from the Valley in the 1990s, the film features Anupam Kher, Darshan Kumar, Pallavi Joshi, and Mithun Chakraborty in important roles. Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party has been endorsing The Kashmir Files with all its might. Several BJP-ruled states, including Haryana, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Goa, Tripura, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, have given it tax exemptions, bolstering its commercial success. The BJP state governments have also been granting leaves to their employees to facilitate their watching the film.

Rajkumar Baid, a 60-year-old businessman from Jaipur, took 42 of his family members to watch the film on March 17. He paid for all their tickets. On why he felt the need to do this, he says, “I’m a Hindu nationalist. I’m very vocal and sensitive about any issue that concerns my brethren and nation. Since this movie was based on real incidents, I wanted my entire family to know. I wanted them to see what the Kashmiri pandits went through. I wanted them to realise how ugly politics can get. They can do anything for votes. They can appease, manipulate, and kill anyone, go to any extent. Whatever happened, happened because of bad politics. I wanted my family to see how brutally it can affect the everyday lives of regular people.”

“Wherever Muslims have grown in population, they have destroyed all other religions. Then you complain that Hindus are intolerant. If you look at it, wherever there is a Hindu majority, Muslims have grown in number. But the places where Muslims are more, the number of Hindus has declined. No, not declined, we have been wiped off entirely,” he adds.

Ajay Jain, Baid’s cousin who was also a part of the family screening, agrees. “I’m so glad someone took the responsibility to show what happened on such a large scale. The younger generation needs to know. They have no idea what happened. This film has united Hindus again. It has reignited a conversation that was long overdue. Its success shows our combined strength. More films like this need to be made,” he says. Before The Kashmir Files, the last film that Jain bothered to watch in a theatre was Salman Khan’s Sultan, which released six years ago.

However, Tanya Varma, a 29-year-old doctoral student of management from Hyderabad, says the film has scarred her for life. Not a regular theatre-goer, she was pushed by friends into watching this one. Since she hadn’t seen the trailer, she had no idea what was in store. “It began all right but started getting very graphic very soon. By the end of it, I was feeling like I was sitting in a butcher's house. I don’t recall seeing a trigger warning at the beginning of the film. They should have given one. I knew it would be heavy. But we were not expecting what did befall us. I went on Holi. So it was a very bloody Holi for me,” she says.

“I wanted to know the story of what happened. I didn’t want to be in a 3D simulation. They wanted to create a shock factor by showing gore. I would have got the message even if it was subtle. But I don’t think it was subtle at all. The storyline was missing. Moreover, there was no closure, no picture of what happened, say 12 years later. They just showed the killings. That was it. The agenda clearly was to not tell just the story. It was to incite violence and spread the simplistic, problematic message that Muslims are bad and they kill people.

“There is a very strong selection bias in terms of who is watching the film. I told a couple of people not to watch it. Your anxiety may get triggered. We were so scarred, we tried to look up why no one is calling the film out on this,” she adds.

Largely propelled by word-of-mouth and WhatsApp forwards, The Kashmir Files has been mired in misinformation that’s being circulated widely on social media. The line between fact and fiction is thin and hence often easy to distort. The viewer’s discretion is therefore advised.

Read other pieces by Sneha Bengani here.

First Published:Apr 1, 2022 8:11 PM IST