Isha Bharati Pandit
For more than three decades, a strange silence has pressed itself into the collective memory of India-one embedded in official narratives, softened in textbooks, spoken in whispers, or erased altogether from classrooms. In 1990, an entire community was forced to flee Kashmir shattering a community that had inhabited Kashmir for centuries.
The reasons for this mass migration remain vigorously contested. Militant groups like the Jammu & Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) and Hizbul Mujahideen presented Kashmiri Pandits with three impossible choices-“ralive, tsaliv, yagalive” (convert to Islam, leave the place, or be ready to perish). Yet Pseudo scholars and analysts continue to debate the role of state action, local militancy, political manipulation, and genuine communal violence in precipitating the exodus. What is clear, however, is that this rupture-its causes, its scale, its meaning-has largely remained absent from mainstream public discourse and India’s historical imagination.
Only in recent years have two films-“The Kashmir Files” (2022) and “Baramulla” (2025)-forced the nation, particularly Generation Z, to confront this contested history. Unlike documentaries or academic essays, these films reach audiences where history books failed. They tell stories with faces, with fear, with trembling hands, and with emotional weight that demands acknowledgment. Yet they do so differently, raising important questions about how we remember, narrate, and reconcile complex historical truths.
The Haunting of “Baramulla”: Memory as Protection
“Baramulla” unfolds like a haunting, but its horror is deliberately rooted in historical reality. The film centres on the Sapru family, a fictional Kashmiri Pandit household depicted as having been brutally massacred during the 1990s after refusing to convert or flee-a scenario that mirrors the wrenching choices thousands of real families faced. What makes the film’s approach distinctly powerful is that it uses the supernatural as a metaphorical language for unresolved historical trauma.
One of the film’s most disturbing scenes depicts extreme violence and coercion-showing how systems of terror weaponized fear and dehumanization against entire families. This echoes survivor testimonies describing how terror operated not merely through direct violence, but through systematic humiliation and psychological breaking. The betrayal by neighbours-once friends, now informants-is depicted with chilling restraint. Doors that once opened for tea and community connection now become portals to danger. Homes that once represented belonging become sites of erasure.
The village itself becomes a character shaped by competing claims of ownership and belonging. The house in which the present-day story unfolds, once a Pandit home now inhabited by others, becomes a symbol of displacement and contested history. Its walls carry memories that the new occupants cannot understand. Its ghosts become metaphors not for revenge, but for justice that has been buried and unacknowledged.
The film also addresses the broader propaganda and cross-border militancy that fuelled the violence of the 1990s. It shows how these forces manipulated local youth, how radical slogans replaced school lessons, and how fear became a currency of control in the Valley. Crucially, the film’s supernatural elements function as reminders-the spirits speak for those whose experiences were never recorded in official documents, never acknowledged in mainstream narratives, never granted the dignity of public memory.
In the film’s climax, the shocking revelation that “Bhaijaan,” the child trafficker, is actually Zainab, a trusted schoolteacher, underscores a crucial truth: trauma doesn’t cleanly divide along religious or communal lines. Individual complicity, economic desperation, and moral compromise shape how societies fracture and perpetuate violence against the vulnerable.
The Wound Laid Bare: “The Kashmir Files” and the Question of Historical Truth
If “Baramulla” is a haunting rooted in metaphor, “The Kashmir Files” is a wound deliberately ripped open. Vivek Agnihotri’s film (2022) follows Krishna Pandit, a young Kashmiri Pandit student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who grows up insulated from the truth about what his family endured. His grandfather, Pushkar Nath Pandit, has hidden the violent deaths of Krishna’s parents, claiming they died in an accident. Krishna’s journey becomes an allegory for India’s own reckoning-a slow, painful unveiling of hidden history.
The film traces the killing of his grandfather’s family, presenting scenes drawn from survivor testimonies and presenting them as documentary-like reconstructions. It does not shy away from graphic realism: scenes of mass violence, torture, and families being forced to flee under threats of death. One sequence recreates the murder of GirijaTickoo, a real victim whose death in 1990 became one of the most horrifying symbols of the brutality inflicted upon Pandits. She was kidnapped after being lured back to collect her salary, brutally gang-raped, and killed by being sawed in two while still alive.
While the violence against Kashmiri Pandits was real and documented, the film has been criticized by so called liberal historians for exaggerating casualty figures, even though thousands were brutally killed, massacred, raped, sawed and forced to run for their life in the middle of the night of January 18-19, 1990.
The film openly accuses political and media establishments of hiding or downplaying events for decades. Its portrayal of bureaucratic indifference, institutional silence, and media complicity sparked intense national debate. Critics contend that the film’s framing-particularly its comparison of the Pandit exodus to the Holocaust-conflates different scales and contexts of violence in ways that scholars find historically problematic. Simultaneously, supporters argue that the film corrects a genuine erasure of Pandit suffering from mainstream discourse.
The Awakening: Generation Z Confronts a Fractured History
What makes both films culturally significant is not their perfect historical accuracy, but the audience they have awakened. Generation Z-India’s most connected, outspoken, and digitally native generation-has encountered this history not through classroom instruction or family memory, but through cinematic narratives that demand emotional and intellectual reckoning.
For many young Indians, these films arrived as ruptures in their historical consciousness. They are asking questions that earlier generations were often pressured to suppress:
l Why was this history hidden from public discourse?
l Who benefited from this silence?
l Why were the victims never granted adequate historical acknowledgment?
l How do we reconcile competing narratives about the same events?
l What does it mean to seek justice for historical wrongs in a society still fractured by conflict?
Their response has been multifaceted. Social media campaigns amplify survivor stories. Educational initiatives demand curriculum reform. Podcasts interview survivors. Young artists create works reflecting displacement and loss. For many Gen Z Indians, these films filled a void created by decades of political hesitation, where parties across the ideological spectrum often avoided direct engagement with the 1990s violence, fearing communal escalation or preferring reconciliation over public truth-telling.
The Generation’s Burden: Reclamation and Return
Perhaps the most profound response has come from young Kashmiri Pandits themselves-the exiled generation Z whose connection to Kashmir is mediated through family memory, old photographs, and ancestral narratives rather than lived experience.
They yearn for a return-though not for revenge. Their desire is for reclamation:
l Reclamation of ancestral homes, now occupied by others or crumbling into ruin
l Reclamation of the land where temples once stood and communal life flourished
l Reclamation of orchards and gardens their grandparents tended with care and pride
l Reclamation of a language, a culture, an identity that was not merely changed but violently interrupted
l Reclamation of the possibility of belonging in a homeland from which they were forced to flee
Their longing is not ideological in origin, though it has become politically charged. It is deeply personal. It is the yearning of people who want to walk pathways their ancestors paved, who want to rebuild what was broken, who want to reconstruct a sense of home in a place that has been transformed by three decades of conflict and displacement.
This generation faces a profound complexity: they bear witness to historical wrongs through cinema and testimony, yet they must navigate a Kashmir that has itself been transformed. The Valley they seek to reclaim is not the one their grandparents knew. Return is complicated by questions of security, coexistence, property rights, and the needs and narratives of those who have lived in Kashmir throughout these three decades.
Toward Healing: The Path Forward
The awakening catalysed by these two films represents a significant moment in India’s relationship with its recent past. For decades, institutional forces and political calculation maintained a strategic silence about the 1990s exodus and the violence that precipitated it. This silence was not neutral-it was an active erasure that served particular political interests and prevented genuine national reckoning.
Generation Z’s engagement with this history through cinema suggests that younger Indians are unwilling to inherit the silences of their elders. They demand that complex, contested histories be brought into public discourse where they can be examined, debated, and integrated into national memory.
Perhaps in this awakening-messy, contested, and still unfolding-lies the first genuine step toward healing. Not through the imposition of a singular historical narrative, but through the difficult work of acknowledging multiple truths, honouring the suffering of those who were displaced and violated, and imagining futures in which communities torn apart by violence might find pathways to move forward.
For the Kashmiri Pandits, especially the exiled generation who know Kashmir only through family stories and these new cinematic witnesses, this moment offers both recognition and a profound challenge: to carry memory forward without being consumed by it, to seek return without denying the complications of that return, and to build futures that honour both personal recovery and collective well-being.
The journey is far from complete. But it has finally begun to be acknowledged-no longer whispered, no longer hidden, but brought into the light where the difficult work of historical reckoning and reconciliation can finally commence.
(The author is an educator and works at a prestigious institution in Gurugram.)
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