Paradise Lost?

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the memorial aesthetics of loss in Madhulika Jalali's documentary film Ghar ka Pata (Home Address, 2021). The article examines the documentary as a memory project made by a Kashmiri Pandit filmmaker of the “1.5 generation”—a woman who left Kashmir with her family at the age of six in the wave of Kashmiri Pandit migrations that followed the beginning of armed rebellion in Kashmir. The article examines the film's memorial aesthetics and politics by attending to the archival features of the film, and shows how the film, in a conventional diasporic mode, reconstructs idealized memories of Kashmir as a “lost paradise,” animating a fading sense of home for the filmmaker and future generations of her family (and, by extension, for future generations of Kashmiri Pandits). But while Ghar ka Pata mobilizes the family's visual archive to document familial loss with great emotional and pedagogical impact, its fixation on vertical genealogical descent at the level of both blood and memory leads it to enshrine a bordered and vulnerable Kashmiri Pandit family, obscuring the violence of the family itself, ruling out a horizontal examination of Kashmiri Pandits' historical relationship to Kashmiri society at large. This in turn curtails other modes of affiliation outside the family that could be much more generative for a future of coexistence in Kashmir.