Description
The Indian film industry, largely dominated by Bollywood, plays an integral role in representing India to the world but also representing various ‘India’s’ and ‘Indians’ to an extremely large viewership across the world. Media representation is crucial to a people’s perception of identity, culture and the ‘other’ (Rajadhyaksha & Willemen, 1994, 10). The representation of Kashmir in Bollywood films has been studied by cultural theorists, focusing on how the territory of Kashmir is shown as a territory of desire (Kabir, 2009), as a tourist paradise and after the period of militancy in 1989, as a conflict zone. This article builds on this existing research to study the representation of Kashmir and Kashmiris in Bollywood post-1989 to the most recent film, Kashmir Files. Employing a postcolonial and decolonial framework, this paper studies the state’s attempt to create the ideal ‘Indian Kashmiri’ through film. Using postcolonial and decolonial schools of thought, the research further explores how these visual representations depict the Indian state’s coloniality and their role in legitimising its exercise of colonial power in the region of Indian Administered Jammu & Kashmir.
