Something is wrong with AnupamKher becoming the dominant voice for Kashmiri Pandit

The Actor

Anupam Kher is a great actor. In the 30 odd years since blazing the cinema screens across India with his memorable performance as a 60-year-old Maharashtrian Brahmin in Mahesh Bhatt’s Saransh,Kher has built a tremendous reputation in Indian film industry for his versatility in playing different characters with conviction and credibility.

In varied roles ranging from comedy to villainy, from the main protagonist to a cameo; from the old, middle aged to young; across sexual orientations from gay, straight and in drag; in ethnicities varying from Kashmiri, Sikh, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati and Maharashtrian to playing a Hindu, Sikh, Christian or a Muslim, he has left himself almost no new frontiers to conquer, no challenges to overcome, no more heights to scale.

Besides earning name, fame and awards, accomplished actors such as Kher also have an ability to transcend their own persona to get under the skin of any other character that they are assigned to play. More than technique and hard work, it is the possession of a rare gift that makes it possible for them to do so. And that rare gift is empathy.

Even when playing the villain or perpetrator of a great crime, an actor does not only have to get into the soul of the character, feel like him, understand him but also has to make that character believable. This is why Anupam Kher is a great actor. He makes Dr Dang in Karma, BV Pradhan inSaransh, the alcoholic father in Daddy, the police chief in On a Wednesday’ the arms dealer in Rang de Basanti and as Shahrukh Khan’s father in Dil Wale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge seem real just by empathising completely with the imagination of the writers and directors of those characters. Kher performs them so well that the distinction between the actor and the character becomes invisible.

The Performance

There are hardly any bad performances by Anupam Kher that I can recall, including in the most recent and currently playing popular blockbuster in which he recasts himself as a suffering Kashmiri Pandit in the leading role.

This is not a Bollywood, Hollywood or any cross-over Indie film but a six-minute short video that was aired at prime time on India’s leading English language news channel on the occasion of Kashmiri Pandit’s annual commemoration of what has come to be called the Holocaust Day.

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In this, he makes an emotionally charged soliloquy. “I am a Kashmiri Pandit”. He begins, gazing directly at you. In his eyes, you see the hurt pride of a Pandit who has been grievously wronged:

“I believe in the idea of Bhartiyata with pure faith in my heart. I am a peaceful, non-violent, secular, law abiding and nationalistic citizen of India, and on this day (January 19) in 1990, I was shunted out from my homeland. This is my story.”

In the story that he narrates, he talks about the events as they happened to the Pandits of Kashmir – the killings, abductions, rapes, the slogans from the mosques, the murderous intent of the Kalashnikov-wielding militants, and various other deprivations his community had to go through. Sticking to bare facts, he not only articulates the “truth”, the pain and the agony of being a long exiled Kashmiri Pandit, but also dramatically embellishes, with the support of appropriate music in the background, the oft-repeated painful story of the Pandits’ banishment from paradise. With a teary-eyed, grimly-lit face, a fervently charged articulation and a resounding, reproachful punch intended to ring a stinging slap on all our holocaust deniers in India and the UNO, he delivers a real stunner of a performance. Towards the end of his moving performance, Kher, as a sad, distraught, victimised and angry Kashmiri, concludes his well-scripted soliloquy with an appeal.

“After recounting all this, I am still hopeful today that justice will be done to us.”

I must confess, though this story, in many forms, has been doing the rounds of all the human rights organisations over all of last 26 years, I have never heard my suffering so better expressed than this. Till today, I do not know of many leaders, barring a few international icons of peace that could have concluded the narration of their meek torment with an appeal to justice rather than an appeal to resistance of arms. Here it is, for all to see, but why are the peaceful, non-violent, secular, law abiding and nationalistic citizen of India still laughing and ridiculing Kher? Why are we still ignoring the story?

I do not have any clear answers. But I am sad to say that though I may, in private, have wanted to commend him for his articulation of Pandit pain, yet I will not do so. Because I cannot suspend my disbelief from a misgiving that Kher is indeed not only just playing a character here, but some more sinister game.

Privileging Pandit trauma

In the 50 minute long TV discussion that followed the airing of this short clip, it became clearly evident that the story he so ably tells, is in his hands just ammunition, a live grenade that he will not ever hesitate to explode so as to browbeat, shout down, humiliate and shame anyone who as much as dares to fit in certain other nuances or contradictions in the seemingly inviolate construct of his tragedy.

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It is important to tell our stories, to keep on telling them. It becomes even more important to do so as long as the other, the addressee of these stories in the valley of Kashmir, fails to respond in a way that provides a closure or a semblance of a respectful hearing. But more than the telling of your own story, it is also important to hear and to address the suffering of the other, if the desire is to solve, reduce and overcome the conflict that has ripped our two communities apart. This is where Kher so profoundly lets the Pandits down.

He fails to realise that for all our talk of being victims or fighters of a cause, neither the entire Muslim nor the Pandit community were really the ones who got to make the choices. We were all so unlucky that we lost our humanity then and that the separate histories of continued Pandit and Kashmiri Muslim sufferings over all these years makes us lose hold of basic kindness and the ability to empathise. Kher only comes across as caring for the ones he loves (fellow Hindus) not knowing that some of our old neighbours in Kashmir could also love us. As a self-professed leader of the Pandit community, he has lost his precious gift of empathy for the other.

In that discussion on TV, it became clear to me that the people he thinks and wishes to project as the enemies of the Pandits or of India, are not my enemies, at least not all. I am sure Kher has more Kashmiri Muslim fans and friends than I can hope to have in this life, but the few I have do not ever behave anywhere as shamelessly and cold-heartedly to the trauma of Pandits as the three Muslim gentlemen did on that TV discussion. One wonders why the anchor of the show always finds these types ever ready at hand to display and demonise as communal, anti-India and anti-Pandit?

The fact is that the gentlemen from Kashmir do not speak for the entire Muslim community just as the representatives of my community that the channel often brings on its shows for a”‘pre-fixed” boxing row do not speak for me or for the entire Kashmiri Pandit community. We cannot reduce our collective traumas to a show of debating (more appropriately, shouting) skills because there is certainly more to the intractable conflict in Kashmir than a one-sided Pandit story. The story of Kashmir is not only the story of Kashmiri Pandit exile but also of 26 years of continued presence of India’s soldiers in every street of Kashmir.

We never understand the anger we cause.

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