A few nights ago Pankaj Mishra and Basharat Peer, the author of an eloquent and heartbreaking memoir Curfewed Night got together to discuss  Kashmir at the Asia Society in Manhattan. It was an evening of serious discussion and serious questions, prompted by the recent US publication of Peer’s book, which is a very personal history of coming of age in Kashmir in the late 1980s and early 1990s, amidst India’s brutal military occupation. In a rare occasion of levity—prompted by a question of mine that I thought was going to keep the conversation on its serious trajectory—Peer discussed actress Priyanka Chopra’s recent Twitter experience about her filming  the new Vishal Bhardwaj film Saath Khoon Maaf in Kashmir.

Priyanka tweeted, “kashmir is absolutely safe and definately a place i wanna come to on a visit.. stay on a house boat.. walk around the lake.. mmmm.. ” But when she returned to India, she tweeted, “Back to civilization,” which caused some offense.  She corrected this by tweeting further, “by back to civilization i meant coming back to my regular life.. kashmir has been amazing and i love it.. you guys MUST plan holidays here!!”

Peer’s mirthful and sympathetic (well, slightly)  tone toward Chopra points to a much bigger issue. One of the obstacles to peace in Kashmir is that fact that both Pakistan and India have tended to overcompensate and use Kashmir to project there own rhapsodic fantasies onto it. (Peer discusses this at length in the discussion, of which the full conversation can be viewed here.

In particular, Hindi cinema has tended to reinforce an ahistorical notion of Kashmir as India’s Paradise. For decades, Kashmir was the lush backdrop for some of the most exquisitely romantic song and dance sequences. To give Ms Chopra the benefit of the doubt, location filmmaking is gruelingly dull. Remember the fuss created when Sienna Miller, fatigued from filming The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, described Pittsburgh as “Shitsburgh”?

But Priyanka Chopra, wittingly or not, was playing into this ecstatic and traditional honeymooner narrative of Kashmir.

In this clip from the 1970’s super hit film Bobby, Kashmir is the dreamy backdrop for young Rishi Kapoor and Dimple Kapadia.

Political events in Kashmir over the last generation has made it all but impossible for Kashmir to be represented in this way. And as Hindi cinema has grown richer and more global, the whole world

is now its theater when it comes to song sequences. And Kashmir, in the Bollywood film imagination, has become a Paradise Lost.  The treatment of Islamic fundamentalism and the Kashmiri insurgency in films like Fiza and Mission Kashmir — both of which curiously star Hrithik Roshan as a dream boy Taliban — are in many respects political cop-outs,

even if they at least acknowledge a history of state violence, repression and discrimination in India against religious minorities. Suketu Mehta in his staggering book, Maximum City, tells of the experience of being politically at “left angles” while writing the screenplay of Mission Kashmir with Vinod Chopra, “I do not believe in the mouths of my characters,” he wrote. “The script,” he complained, “keeps making half-hearted attempts to balance the view of the Indian state with that of the Kashmiris.” Mani Ratman’s visually very beautiful Roja of 1994 plays virulently plays into this tragic- paternalistic and Indian nationalistic Paradise Lost narrative. (Ananya Jahanara Kabir has an interesting discussion of Roja in her book Territory of Desire.)

Where, one wonders, is the bold, Pontecorvo-or Loach-like  filmmaker to unsettle this and turn Bollywood’s treatment of Kashmir upside down? Could a filmmaker of the dazzling and subversive talent of Anurag Kashyap frame Kashmir in a non-nationalistic way? There are rumors that Arundhati Roy–a brave writer who is never one to shirk controversy—is writing a novel set in Kashmir. And one can hope that there is a filmmaker who has the sensibility to render Peer’s eminently cinematic memoir to the screen.