The Kashmir Files: When Art Changed the Artists
More than a film, The Kashmir Files became an emotional movement and a catalyst for discussions surrounding history, loss, and identity on a national scale. Directed by Vivek Agnihotri, the production dealt with one of India’s most traumatic events – The exile of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley.
But, The Kashmir Files was not only a paradigm shift in the political and social realms of the audience. It was also a transformative experience for the film’s creators. For a large part of the cast, the film was not simply another project in their career. It became an emotional and existential turning point in their lives as the film ‘shaped’ their ‘identity’ even after it had stopped rolling.
The Wound and the Witness
At its centre, The Kashmir Files tells the story of an elderly Kashmiri Pandit, Pushkar Nath Pandit, portrayed by Anupam Kher, and his grandson, Krishna, played by Darshan Kumar. While the film recounts the story of Krishna’s journey and his family’s history, it simultaneously recounts the story of the Kashmiri exodus, and the history of displaced people, betrayal, and unacknowledged grief.
The film’s unpolished, documentarian-like approach transcended cinema and became testimony. For the actors, that reality profoundly impacted them. What tragedy unfolded on screen was not distant fiction; many of those present had personal and familial relationships to the tragedy it portrayed.
Anupam Kher: When Role Meets Roots
The Kashmir Files was personal for Anupam Kher. He belongs to the Kashmiri Pandit community. For Kher, portraying Pushkar Nath was mixing personal memory and lived experience. Kher’s father’s name was the character’s name and Kher said, “Every line I spoke was the truth.
Kher was known for his versatility, for moving between the extremes of comedy, villainy, and disparate roles across the globe. However, The Kashmir Files was the film that placed him firmly in the public consciousness as a voice of memory. It shifted his public persona and the definition of versatility, From simply being a veteran actor, he became a voice of an identity and a history.
The film not only reignited his international career and earned accolades from critics and audiences alike for his ferocity and genuineness, but also tethered him even more closely to the political discussions about the film. Kher processed this overexposure gracefully, using his platform to request an acknowledgment of the Pandit exodus. Professionally, he was climbing to new heights, but he emotionally admitted how the role impacted him profoundly — a performance that was intertwined with the personal.
Darshan Kumar: The Reluctant Star Steps Out
The role of Krishna Pandit was a turning point for Darshan Kumar. Prior to the film, he delivered commendable performances in Mary Kom and NH10, but had remained an under-the-radar player within the industry. The Kashmir Files transformed that overnight.
Darshan’s Krishna begins as a contemporary modern, skeptical student — disconnected from the horrors that lie in the past — and ends as a man who bears the collective pain of his people. That journey mirrored Kumar’s own evolution. The actor stated in interviews that he didn’t really grasp the depth of the tragedy until he started the research for that role. By the end of the shoot, he felt “drained but awakened” emotionally. There was a shift in his high art as he took the role.
After the film was released, his phone was incessantly calling. Those who once viewed him as a tertiary actor, now began offering him major roles. The film did not simply offer him recognition — it also awarded him artistic credibility. The fear of being typecast, however, also came with this recognition. In contrast, Kumar’s The Kashmir Files has also resulted in him being more selective, as the intensity of drama in the story more directly correl with his serious roles.
The performance from Bhasha Sumbli, who played Sharda Pandit — a character inspired by the real tragedy of Girija Tickoo, a Kashmiri Pandit woman who endured terrible violence during the exodus was, as the film depicts, a more haunting tragedy. Sumbli’s performance is, as the film depicts, a more haunting tragedy.
For Sumbli, the role was personal. She is the daughter of Kashmiri Pandit writers, and she carried that intergenerational memory of loss into her performance. She disclosed that some scenes were so emotionally challenging that she had a panic attack during the shoot.
Sumbli’s performance made her a national name instantly. Her portrayal was so sincere that she became a quietly powerful advocate for broken and displaced people. But with that recognition, Sumbli also bore the burden of a narrative too closely aligned with her own family’s suffering. She referred to The Kashmir Files, in interviews, not as a project but as “a calling.”
The Ensemble: Finding Purpose in Pain
While Kher, Kumar, and Sumbli bore the emotional weight, the supporting actors shaped the moral fabric of the film. Joshi (who also co-produced the film) embodied Radhika Menon, a professor whose ideology starkly opposes that of Krishna as he attempts to rediscover the truth. Her performance was so contained and calm that it directly offset the film’s fury, and the off-screen collaboration with her husband, director Vivek Agnihotri, provided the production with a sense of mission on a personal level.
Chinmay Mandlekar, Mithun Chakraborty, and Puneet Issar showed depth in portraying characters that reflected institutions — the government, media, and politics — rather than individuals. For them, the film was also a shift, a reminder that the cinema was still capable of starting a public conversation.
Filming The Kashmir Files was emotionally challenging for everyone involved. A significant part of the film was shot in Dehradun and Mussoorie, with some sections created to resemble Kashmir. To keep the film authentic, director Vivek Agnihotri interviewed displaced Pandit families and used their testimonies to guide the film emotionally. The cast used time with survivors, integrating their trauma and the quiet dignity of suffering.
Agnihotri was famously meticulous about his direction. He wanted the actors to “live” the scenes as if they were real rather than perform them. During the filming of the exodus, a number of crew members were said to weep for the actors, unable to refrain their tears. For Kher and Sumbli, the lines between the performance and the reality of the situation were completely fused.
Creative tensions also arose. The subject of the film was polarizing, and crew members frequently addressed the challenge of balancing truth with cinematic narrative. Actors, however, claimed that such discussions improved the project. It was more than filmmaking to them — it was catharsis.
After the Storm
The Kashmir Files achieved quasi-phenomenon status upon its release. Expected to do well since it was relatively inexpensive to produce, the film ended up making astonishingly over ₹200 crore at the box office, shocking industry analysts. Yet, it enjoyed more than mere monetary success; each member of the cast achieved fame, some more than others, to the point of becoming targets of public ire, each in their own way.
Anupam Kher’s reputation became more international; Darshan Kumar was recognized as a symbol of introspective passion; and Bhasha Sumbli’s notoriety and platform advocacy reached new heights. In similar fashion, Pallavi Joshi and Agnihotri publicly promised new projects as advocates for the narrative of “forgotten India” for which they had assumed the role of torchbearers.
Divisive responses to the film’s political subtexts meant the impact of the film on the cast and crew was also unsatisfactory. They had to engage in discourses well beyond the screen. While some embraced the civic visibility, others chose to disengage, letting the work speak for itself.
More Than a Movie
For the creators of The Kashmir Files, the work was more than retelling a history; it was about reclaiming a memory. The film reshaped their careers and friendships, becoming a permanent part of their identity and imprinting itself on their personal lives in the process. The emotional burden they carried from the project also became a part of their identity.
Though the film may have divided viewers, for its cast, it created something more profound: unity of purpose. They discovered something on that set that fame had not brought them: belief. Perhaps that is the film’s greatest legacy.