From Zubin Mehta To Rang-E-Cinema: Kashmir Between Two Cultural Evenings

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer) By Dr. S Bashir Ahmad Veeri

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On September 7, 2013, Zubin Mehta stood before the Bavarian State Orchestra in Shalimar Bagh and led Beethoven, Haydn and Tchaikovsky against the Zabarwan range while Dal Lake carried the sound.

The city outside the garden walls was closed. A strike had been called, soldiers lined the approach roads, and the audience inside sat on invitation only.

On September 7, 2026, the International Film Festival of Jammu and Kashmir opened four kilometres away at SKICC under the banner Rang-e-Cinema. Chief Minister Omar Abdullah welcomed Dr Farooq Abdullah, Dr Jitender Singh, several governors and a room full of filmmakers and dignitaries. The festival promised 135 films from 41 countries.

Two evenings, one lake, and two atmospheres feel almost impossible to connect, but the distance between them calls for more than a simple note on how much has changed.

I sat in that hall at SKICC and thought about Ehsaas-e-Kashmir.

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Security in the valley has eased since 2013, something few would have imagined then. The bigger question is whether our idea of what cultural spending should achieve has changed too, or whether we are still satisfied with a well-lit stage and a strong guest list.

Large events are not the problem. An international film festival can place Kashmir in debates it might otherwise never enter. Music and films can travel further than official statements and speeches.

But the problem is that a single event cannot build something that lasts beyond its closing ceremony.

Visibility and development are separate achievements, and a place chosen again and again as a stage is owed an honest accounting of which one it is actually receiving.

That accounting should be based on what is left standing after the festival, rather than on how the inauguration looked.

Kashmir has supplied cinema with its mountains, lakes, gardens and meadows for decades. Films have used the valley as a backdrop since long before most of the crews or investors involved ever slept a night here.

Being filmed in is not the same as being built up.

A place that genuinely serves an industry needs trained local crews, production managers, location scouts familiar with permissions and terrain, equipment suppliers, editors, sound engineers, costume designers and post-production houses that do not require a flight to Mumbai for the smallest fix.

None of that exists in the valley in any working form.

The absence has a specific cause. Militancy closed cinema halls across Kashmir, and almost none reopened. Their disappearance took away more than ticket booths.

A cinema hall builds an audience over years, provides young people paid work, and gives a town a place to sit together in the dark and watch something unfold.

Losing that space removed a whole apprenticeship system that other film regions take for granted, the informal chain by which projectionists become editors and ushers become production assistants.

IFFJK-26 could help rebuild some of that, but only if it stops being a single week in September.

The test is what happens in October. Does a young filmmaker who attended a masterclass find someone willing to answer a phone call afterward? Does a script that impressed a jury get any development money? Does a technician trained this week get hired next month? Do producers come back because skilled local crews are actually available, or only because the scenery photographed well?

These questions decide more about the festival's worth than the number of films screened or the fame of the guests who attended.

The money involved is not small, and the potential returns are not either.

A working film industry pays wages in hotels, transport, catering, tailoring and set design long after a festival ends. Independent films, documentaries and streaming productions can run alongside the bigger commercial shoots.

A film can sell a place to travellers more honestly than a tourism advertisement ever could, because it shows the place doing something rather than merely posing for it.

None of that follows automatically from an opening ceremony, however large.

What Jammu and Kashmir needs now is unglamorous: faster film permissions, a public database of locations, trained crews on payroll rather than borrowed for a week, incentives for producers who hire locally, script-development support, technical training, small grants for short films, and cinema halls rebuilt where they once stood.

Public spending on culture earns its justification through the institutions and livelihoods it leaves behind, rather than through the applause it collects on opening night.

The comparison between 2013 and 2026 is not a complaint against either event. An orchestral evening and a film festival answer to different histories and different purposes. Their nearness in date and geography simply gives Kashmir a fair measuring stick.

A spectacular evening can change how a place is seen for a few hours, but a functioning institution can change what is possible there for years.

Walking out of SKICC, I kept returning to those two Septembers: Mehta's orchestra carrying over Dal Lake in 2013, and Rang-e-Cinema lit up at SKICC in 2026.

Thirteen years and four kilometres sit between them.

What Kashmir builds in the years between such evenings will say more about it than either evening alone.

If a young filmmaker can one day say plainly that this is where the work began, IFFJK-26 will have done something a successful festival rarely manages.

The hope, this time, is that the lights stay on after the festival ends.

• The author is a serving legislator from South Kashmir's Bijbehara constituency and contributes occasionally to public policy discourse and the discussion of contemporary political challenges. He can be reached at [email protected].

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