‘Baramulla’ ... a rare film !

‘Baramulla’ is a rare film that weaves timelines ... it weaves a decades-old unresolved wound into the realities of present-day Kashmir and uses supernatural as a metaphor for collective grief.

In the snow-covered town of Baramulla, also known as ‘Varmul’ in Kashmiri, a single white tulip blooms in the snow; a little boy is drawn to it and soon he disappears. This sets the tone for the movie. In Kashmir the tulip holds symbolic meanings: tulips bloom with the arrival of spring as a symbol of hope and renewal. The tulip becomes a recurring motif, a cinematic metaphor for the innocence of childhood that must be protected from extremists. 

The film unfolds through two layered narratives. One follows DSP Ridwaan Shafi Sayyed – a controversial police officer – who arrives in Baramulla to investigate the disappearance of school boys; while the other explores the paranormal experiences of DSP Ridwaan’s family members – his wife and children – in the old, creaky house where the family has been lodged. The police believe the children are being kidnapped by militants for grooming from a young age to ensure their lifelong loyalty i.e. what the CIA calls ‘diaper militancy’. The tulips gradually lose their pristine white colour symbolizing the bleakness of lost childhood.  However, as the investigation unfolds, DSP Ridwaan discovers that the case is far more complex. All the children have disappeared under mysterious circumstances: Shoaib Ansari vanishes from a closed box during a magic show, Faizal, disappears while fishing at a lake, Ridwaan’s daughter, Noorie, vanishes from their home – and finally, Yasser Ansari is pulled into darkness by a tree that transforms into a portal, before his own eyes. A white tulip blooms nearby before each disappearance and each leaves a weird clue, a snipped lock of hair.

The past and present converge in the final moments of the film to reveal the identity of the ‘abductors’. The old house in which DSP Ridwaan lives with his family once belonged to a Kashmiri Pandit family, Kamalanand Sapru, his wife and children, who were slaughtered by militants. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Kashmiri Pandits were persecuted in their own homeland and thousands were forced to flee from the Kashmir Valley or convert to Islam or die. ‘Baramulla’ revisits this painful incident and becomes a cautionary tale when the Sayyed and Sapru families are placed in the same situation – their home being invaded by militants. The narratives come together through Zainab – who betrayed the Sapru family as a child, and decades later, she leads terrorists once again to the Sayyed family because DSP Ridwaan is a police officer serving the Government of India – hence a ‘kafir’.

In a striking inversion of usual horror tropes, the tulip flowers are revealed to be the spirits of Pandits who protect children – and people in general, like the Sayyed family – from extremists; they are the saviours in the Kashmir Valley.

‘Baramulla’ is a film about loss – personal, as well as collective. The missing children represent the dead /displaced communities, with forgotten histories and erased identities. The real horror in Kashmir is not supernatural – it is man-made. The spirits haunting the Kashmir Valley are long- lingering memories, buried guilt, generational wounds and the unresolved pain of displacement, and also the resilience of the Kashmiri Pandits who have built a new life in exile. The film explores the predicament of families in the face of terrorism, regardless if they are Kashmiri Hindus or Kashmiri Muslims. The message of the film is universal – it resonates with victims of persecution, displacement and alienation all over the world.

# Netflix