Baramulla: Review

By Gaurav Toshkhani

Finally managed to watch “Baramulla” late last night after promising myself every morning of every day to watch the movie at the end of it (and not keeping that promise).

The first thought that came to me was about the correctness of the Karma principle: that Karma strikes, hits you hard in unimaginable ways and spares no one.

If you have not incurred the wrath of karma immediately, you will later. If you don’t in this lifetime, it will get carried over to the next one, for you to pay for. It could be you directly or your family, your children—whatever extracts the price.

If “The Kashmir Files” was a movie based on true events and gave the world a glimpse of what Kashmir—or rather the Kashmiri Hindus—went through in 1990 and the years immediately prior, “Baramulla” is a fictional story grounded in reality, about the aftermath, the consequences of Karma.

It is a story unfolding in the lives of a Kashmiri police officer (SSP) and his family, and other inhabitants in the town of Baramulla, where the police officer is posted to investigate and resolve the mysterious kidnappings of school children, one after the other. The family finds residence in a huge and well-built house, originally owned by a Kashmiri Hindu family.

From day one, the family experiences things that are hard to explain. For example: the daughter complaining of unbearable dog stink in her room; the son discovering a box of shells carefully hidden under the flooring of one room and even having an apparitional experience of a child as old as him playing with shells. Then there is the SSP and particularly his wife Gulnar, who hear knocks on the doors, thuds on the floors, and so on. In fact, when their daughter has a fit one night, the couple is horrified to discover a bone with dog saliva dripping from it, outside their house.

The couple tries to dismiss it all as coincidences or a figment of their and the children’s imagination—especially the daughter’s, who has been through a traumatic experience at the previous place where the family lived (which her experiences are attributed to).

Then one day, the daughter, wanting to find a resolution—a closure to her horrible experiences in the house—ventures into an unused and locked attic room to find out what is wrong and to capture it on video. There, she goes through something terrifying and then disappears while unsuccessfully trying to escape from the room.

That’s when the story in the movie actually starts to unravel.

The devastated mother (wife of the SSP), determined to find out what took away her daughter and bring her back, is willing to go to all lengths.

In the process, she runs into something horrifying every single day as she digs deeper to find what lies beneath the surface. One such experience is when the walls of the room she ventures into suddenly start reverberating with hymns of the Shiv Stotra, and the voices only grow louder.

Eventually, the couple finds themselves face to face with the chilling reality that the house is haunted and their unexplained experiences aren’t imaginary, but paranormal.

Most importantly, they come to understand that the house they live in—and in fact, the whole town—is basically what has been usurped from those it belonged to. Those who owned it were killed by the terror unleashed on them by the usurping community. They may have perished physically, but their souls refused to leave the place. They stayed as ghosts to haunt the perpetrators and punish them into repentance. It’s a realisation that sins committed against the Kashmiri Pandits, the aborigines, have come back to haunt the people of the place.

The family who owned the house finds closure through the SSP and his wife, who kill the terrorists and their accomplices who had murdered the Kashmiri Hindu family and now have come for the SSP and his family but cannot succeed.

Gulnar and her family find their closure too, and the Hindu family who once owned the house—and have now become the guardians of the place—reunite the lost daughter with her family. The other kidnapped children too. It turns out that the children who had suddenly disappeared had actually been taken by the guardians under their protection to save them from the clutches of the terrorists, who wanted to turn each one into one of their kind.

The message “Baramulla” seeks to convey is one which reminds that God is the arbiter and Karma his instrument.

The people in the Valley are either learning that the hard way or eventually will. The movie, as it ends, leaves you spellbound, horrified, devastated, and forced into introspection.

While all the actors in the movie are superb in how they have portrayed the characters, a special mention goes to Bhasha Sumbli.

Bhasha is a young actress whose acting prowess we all witnessed when she played different characters in “The Kashmir Files,” each of which she actually lived on the screen for those three hours one watched the movie.

She does that with equally amazing brilliance as Gulnar, the hapless yet determined mother in “Baramulla.” While technically she can still be said to be finding her feet in Bollywood, being rather new to it, to my mind she has already landed on them—and firmly at that.