How 'Baramulla' Restores A Forgotten Kashmiri Story And Memory

As I sat to write this piece, the news of a blast tearing through central Delhi arrived. The car explosion near the Red Fort, which killed 9 hapless people, is a terrorist incident whose origins lie tangled with extremist networks seeded in the valleys of Kashmir.

And that makes Netflix's Baramulla feel even more eerie than it is, as real-life violence tied to Kashmir's long shadow again shakes our cities. Baramulla and the Delhi blast, which have happened within days of each other, offer a grim reminder that narrative and news running on different clocks can collide in the public imagination.

Baramulla, at its core, grapples with historical and emotional truths that connect the personal to the political. Its release on a mass global platform makes it significant as it seamlessly tells the story of Kashmiri Pandits, whose cry for justice and remembrance had been muffled for far too long in both our consciousness and our screens.

Craft is crucial for ideology

There is a simple lesson from decades of cultural politics in India. Ideas that are couched in craftsmanship travel farther and lodge deeper than didactic slogans. For much of the post-liberalisation era, the cultural Left in India seemed to have understood this well. Its strategy normalised a particular type of worldview, an empathy for certain kinds of victims, scepticism about state power, and a vocabulary of grievance that found foothold in elite cultural circuits.

Au contraire, the Right's offerings in art and popular culture were often blunt. Without putting too fine a point on it, they were mostly loud manifestos, partisan essays, polemical theatre and headline-hardened rhetoric. When ideology is delivered as a hammer rather than as a narrative architecture, it is easy to dismiss it as caricature.

That is why Baramulla, which adheres to a different grammar, one that is fused to the fundamentals of art, is laudable. Filled with atmospheric mise-en-scène, layered sound design and a moral ambiguity in its characters, it tells the story that many in the mainstream have overlooked. This is not propaganda disguised as art. Its approach is subtle and for the ideological marketplace, potent.

The unseen ghosts of Baramulla

At its heart are the all-too-human stories of pain, loss and longing, elements that resonate universally, even as the specifics remain rooted in the Kashmiri Pandit exodus of the '90s. Director Aditya Suhas Jambhale's choice to blend genres, as he melds investigative drama, supernatural horror and family trauma, is a smart strategy.

The 112-minute-long film unfolds as a brooding mystery, where snowy landscapes and haunted silences do as much talking as the protagonists. Every frame evokes a sense of a land perpetually suspended between past and future.

The plot revolves around DSP Ridwaan Sayyed (Manav Kaul), who investigates a string of missing children amid shadows thick with ghosts, both literal and metaphorical. Parallel to the investigation is the domestic thread. Ridwaan's wife, Gulnaar, their daughter Noorie and son Ayaan move into an old, run-down house that belonged to a Hindu Pandit family (the Saprus) who were massacred during the insurgency of the early 1990s.

As the disappearing-children plot deepens, supernatural phenomena begin to surface. White tulips, hallways echoing with past violence and children slipping into other realms. In the climax, the two story threads, the procedural investigation and the haunted-house mystery, converge. The film ends on a note of spiritual reconciliation. Talking about the story any further would amount to offering spoilers.

The film places the psychic residue of displacement and dispossession at its core. Rather than using the Pandit story as a footnote or a cinematic device to vindicate a pre-existing thesis, it treats that loss as a human register. It invites viewers who might otherwise sidestep a history lesson to feel its human consequences.

Jambhale and his creative team use the Valley's weather, its fog, its hush and its skeletal trees as a texture rather than as mere wallpaper. Manav Kaul delivers a performance that is quietly haunting, one that locates grief in the unspoken. Bhasha Sumbli brings a groundedness that prevents the film from tipping into melodrama. The sound design makes dread intimate and technically, the film favours restraint. It avoids showy jump scares in favour of a slow-burn mystery.

The film's success lies in its refusal to reduce people to symbols. The Pandit characters are presented as whole human beings rather than as props in an argument. Baramulla is ideationally effective and the politics follow the aesthetics rather than the other way round.

Why this story and perspective matter

The Kashmiri Pandit exile is one of modern India's grievous stories. Half a million people uprooted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, lives scattered across camps and cities. Yet their representation in mainstream cinema has been uneven at best.

Several high-profile films set in Kashmir chose particular vantage points that were predictable. State excess, militant recruitment or the moral injury of local Muslims under counterinsurgency. The larger Pandit story was marginalised or folded into other narratives. In that event, Baramulla does what movies like Haider did not bother to do. It centres the Pandit experience with truth and empathy.

But make no mistake, it would be a travesty to cast Baramulla as merely a Right-wing counterattack on left-leaning cultural articulation. The film instead exemplifies what happens when a previously marginalised story is told with seriousness and craft. It expands the national archive of memory.

In the end, Baramulla is not a panacea for historical injustice. But as a piece of storytelling it does two things that matter. It demonstrates how craft can carry conviction and it gives an often-overlooked community a cinematic frame in which to be seen.

For the Right-wing, for Indian storytelling and for a nation learning to hear every part of its history, Baramulla has not come a day too soon.