Abstract

The brutal unfolding of the violent conflict in Kashmir; its representation and reportage has reconfigured the discursive imagination around the landscape and its people. While images of the picturesque landscape have circulated widely, the inhabitants of Kashmir have been strangely missing. Bombay cinema has for the longest time, privileged the stunning landscape of Kashmir while emptying it of its inhabitants. At the cusp of the 21st century, the missing inhabitants return as militants to haunt the imagination of Bombay cinema catalyzing thereby far-reaching formalist and narrative shifts while at the same time, producing a force field of powerful affects. The spectre of a `resistant’ Kashmir, this presentation will argue, reanimates the cinematic image by inaugurating a `new’ cinema of action, melodrama, sensation and spectacular star bodies.