Screening of Mission
Kashmir Sponsored by the UC Berkeley English Department |
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Hindi with English subtitles, directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra,
2000, 155 mins. Thursday, March 10th, 5:30pm Followed by a Q&A with scriptwriter Vikram Chandra: Chandra is a finalist for a fiction-writer position in the English Department. He is the author of two award-winning works of fiction: the novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) and a short story collection, Love and Longing in Bombay (1997).
Mission Kashmir is a Bollywood extravaganza that takes on terrorism as only a Bollywood film can. Starring the pretty muscle-boy Hrithik Roshan as Altaaf whose parents were gunned down before his eleven-year old eyes by the police inspector, Inayat Khan, played by un-pretty muscle-man, Sanjay Dutt, the film chronicles the devastation of Kashmir from arcadia to ashes in the 'Nineties. The orphan Altaaf's problems begin when he is adopted by the police inspector as a salve for the policeman's guilt. Rummaging in a drawer one day, Altaaf discovers that the facemask that haunts his nightmares belongs to his adopted father, the inspector, and he vows to avenge his dead parents on his living ones. He joins a terrorist cell run by the magnificent Jackie Shroff who, we are to believe, was once tortured by the Soviets in Afghanistan and now runs a jihad against India funded by two shadowy Pakistani agents and, behind them, by an equally shadowy Osama bin Laden look-alike. The film resists the easy Hindu-Muslim binary by casting Roshan (Altaaf), Dutt (Inayat), and Shroff (Hilal) all as Muslims. Some play Good Muslims (Dutt, who is biologically the half-Muslim son of the 1950s screen goddess, Nargis, herself "half" a Muslim), some play Bad Muslims (Shroff), and some are just confused into terror but come around -- as Roshan (Altaaf) eventually does in the cricket match-on-Astroturf that concludes Mission Kashmir. The film explains the geopolitics of global terror through a family romance: forced to choose between a good father (the police inspector) and the bad one (the terrorist), Altaaf has the help of the lovely Preity Zinta, his childhood sweetheart. A few songs and dances along with stunningly choreographed fight sequences leaven the seriousness of patricide and the brutality of the Kashmir conflict. Complex political injustices are rendered as personal, psychological ones, and once again, the blood of Hindus (this time, of Altaaf's adopted mother) is honored as the sacrificial offering for communal peace, her murder diegetically displacing the innumerable atrocities against Muslims in Kashmir and in post 1992 India. Criticized by some for its depiction of a secular-but-Hindu India, Mission Kashmir remains, nonetheless, a major blockbuster. Along with Mani Ratnam's Dil Se (1998) and Khalid Mohammed's Fiza (2000), the film has kept terrorism in South Asia from being relegated to the easy dismissals it enjoys in post 9-11 America. The interest of Mission Kashmir lies in its ability to hold the state accountable for sponsoring violence as well as absolving it from major consequences at the same time. A fuller review of Mission Kashmir can be found on the invaluable website on Hindi film maintained by Professor Philip Lutgendorf (University of Iowa): http://www.uiowa.edu/%7Eincinema/index.html. |
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