The highlight of my week was seeing Vivek Ranjan Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files. The Kashmir Files is the first ever movie that speaks about the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Kashmiri Pandits, my ethnic group, in the hands of jihadists in the Indian state of Kashmir.

The ethnic cleansing of Pandits is an event that rivals the genocide in Rwanda and the Holocaust, however, it is rarely talked about, both in India as well as on the world stage. In fact, most of my Indian friends know nothing about it. There are many possible reasons why this knowledge gap exists. For one, there are very few Kashmiri Pandits left, we are a minority amongst minorities. For context, whenever a Kashmiri gets married in Toronto, we usually invite the entire community to come celebrate; they can all fit inside one banquet hall. Our weddings, fortunately, still manage to live up to a truly Indian reputation of being  larger than life spectacles in spite of our decreased size as a community. The second reason is that there has been a widespread misinformation campaign that has existed in India for a long time. It is unclear to me why such a heavy truth has been hidden. Maybe it was due to the fact that such a massacre showcased the failures of India's government at the time. Maybe it was because of the fact that many of India's most powerful political parties can win votes largely while masking their disinterest in their peoples' sufferings  under banners of secularism and liberalism, appealing to large urban centers as well as significant minority groups.

Whatever the case, it is evident now, given both the reaction to this film, as well as the overall sentiment throughout the country, that India is hurting under this manner of government. Some key details that were brought up during the movie were the facts that Kashmiri Pandits were often only given 600 rupees a month when in exile (about $12 a month; exchange rate, 50 rupees per dollar) and jihadists were given 2000 rupees each time they surrendered. These individuals would use these doles to go out and buy more weapons, which they would then use to kill more Hindus. And then they would once again turn themselves in knowing that the government wouldn't arrest or punish them; it would simply give them another 2000 rupees.

The movie is the first time our massacre was shown in its true brutal horror. In the film, you will see a wife made to eat the blood of her husband with rice at gunpoint; a deal she makes in order to save the life of her newborn son. You will see the mass execution of pandits; you will see our bodies sawed in half. You will see our women raped publicly. You will see jihad versus democracy. Democracy loses.

And when I was leaving the theater, my family told me that these weren’t even the worst of our stories.

Today, many Kashmiri Pandits don't know what Kashmir is. My cousins know nothing about it, having not lived with their grandparents like I have. I have never seen home. My mother has never been back. We have seen our friends and neighbors die on the streets of India, razed, destroyed.

Being Kashmiri Pandit is an incredibly hard identity to have. People sometimes don't even realize that we are in fact Indian. We died for that country. And alongside our corpses lie our language, art, music, poetry, all at the bottom of the Dal Lake in Srinagar.

There is an incredibly poignant scene in the movie. When you see Pandit families living in tents (those who survived), now refugees in their own country; often 25 or 26 in a single tent no bigger than one that you or I would use on a camping trip. They are diseased and dying, no food, water, or help from the central government (in India we call the federal gov't the center). And in that scene I heard a lady singing in Kashmiri. It was in this scene that my mother started crying. She explained to me, after the film had ended, that in that moment, the woman was singing the same Kashmiri lullabies that my mother's grandmother would sing to her as a  child, that every Pandit used to sing to their children. My mom has seen these people first hand, and has taught their children in the camp schools.

One of the many things that hurts me, watching this film, was that I had never heard any of these songs before, my songs. I know no Kashmiri, yet even with the English subtitles, I didn't understand what they were singing about. I know nothing about our temples, flowers and home. I, like my non-Kashmiri Pandit friends who I invited to come along, am an alien to Kashmir, my ancestral home.

Why am I not home?

Please support this movie; see it in theatres.