Ravinder Kaul
Some films emerge with a sense of urgency; others come like memory-uninvited, fragile, and quietly insistent. ‘Batt Koch’, which had its premiere in Jammu today, is of the latter type. It never shouts its history, nor does it seek validation through spectacle. Instead, it walks softly into the viewer’s consciousness, like some old lane that one believed had disappeared and you found yourself in stilled, serene, echo-filled silence. ‘Batt Koch’ is such a film. It isn’t announcing its theme – it’s allowing it to surface bit by bit, through repetition and pauses and the quiet labour of living with loss. In this respect, the film is not necessarily of the narrative cinema variety, but rather of the reflective cinema tradition, in that meaning emerges not just out of action, but also what remains after action is finished.
Set in Jammu, a city of provisional existence for large numbers of Kashmiri Pandit families, ‘Batt Koch’ takes place within an intimate geography of a household forged in absence. Central to it is an aged grandfather whose memory is fraying, his present porous. His wife, until she is alive, is adamant about their visit to Kashmir as he mocks her for her sentimentality. Her death places him stranded between what is and what once was. Kashmir for him has moved beyond a past; it is an ongoing metaphor – of companionship lost, of emotional continuity fractured, from which one’s life has broken in a pause in-between.
The elderly grandfather, whom the film lightly revolves around, remembers nothing of Kashmir fragmented; he inhabits it. His memory deficit does not obliterate the past – it dissolves the present. After his wife dies, Kashmir becomes for him, a psychic proxy for intimacy, where grief becomes a way of life. The urge to come back is, therefore, neither ideological nor nostalgic. It is symptomatic. It is memory searching for coherence. The title ‘Batt Koch’ – the lane of Kashmiri Pandits – is both accurate and illuminating. A lane is not a monument. It is a passage lived, built out of routine, of familiarity, of repeated crossings. By employing this metaphor, the film refuses to accommodate grand narratives of loss and instead locates displacement in the personal, the habitual, the unsettled.
Young Directors Siddarth Koul and Ankit Wali, operating with a notable restraint, refuse to aestheticise displacement or transform suffering into rhetoric. Anant Jain’s camera stays close to faces, gestures, pauses. Here, there’s an ethics of seeing work – an understanding that pain does not require embellishment. The domestic space becomes the film’s real landscape, one in which memory is traded on a daily basis – sometimes cavalierly, sometimes by exhaustion, but always with care.
The well known chronicler of Kashmir’s history Vinayak Razdan has made an audacious leap, having placed in his trust the two fledgling directors along with the rest of the team most of whom are born after 1990, and for them to live up to trust is a tribute to their courage.
Veteran actor M K Raina infuses the grandfather with a rare vulnerability-never begging, never feeling sad. His silences speak as eloquently as his words. Kusum Dhar as his wife, who does not survive to revisit her homeland, perfectly embodies her shattered life. Anil Koul Chingari as the son and Kusum Tickoo as the Daughter-in-Law serve as emotional touchstones bringing the play into a grounded reality of a life lived together. Both actors have been quietly confident and emotionally raw in their performances. The two children, in their teens, played by Sakshi Bhat and Ravin Bhat, represent, in the sense they have lost their cultural moorings, the loss of their mother tongue.
Saurabh Zadoo’s music and sound design are unobtrusive, letting the film’s emotional rhythms play out organically. His music doesn’t tell the viewer how to feel; it matches the movie’s internal cadence. His use of timeless melodies in the soundtrack along with subtlety in music design positions this as one of the finest music scores we’ve heard in recent decades. The editing, by Akanksha Zadoo, honors the flick’s inward tempo – trusting the viewer to sit with moments that don’t explain themselves. Batt Koch – in its literal sense, “the lane of Kashmiri Pandits” – is a fitting title. Lane is not a destination, but a passage, carrying footsteps, conversations, departures. This film, too, is a passage – through loss, through memory, through the unfinished business of belonging.
Batt Koch does not give responses, nor does it try to represent as an advocate. Its power is that it resists making experience into statement. Like reflective cinema at its most thorough and rigorous, the film is also asking the viewer to dwell – within confusion, within memory, within the uncomfortable space between past and present. Memory itself does not ultimately stop here, like ‘Batt Koch’. It lingers.
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