At the end of Batt Koch, a film about Kashmiri Pandits made by Kashmiri Pandits, the text on the screen says it all: ''Our grandparents waited. Our parents searched for signs. Some waited too long. Some never made it back. But we, the children of memory, will speak. We are here, the voices that remember, we will speak, so they are never forgotten.''

The exile of Kashmiri Pandits from their own homeland is now a story the community is telling itself, most often in its own language. In Tasrufdaar, a short film directed by Kapil Mattoo, a ghost haunts a tree crossed by a man every day. The ghost berates him for the departure of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley, and says his father betrayed him. "We have houses made of stone now, not homes," says Tasrufdaar, to which the Kashmiri Pandit says he died of sunstroke in Jammu after he and his family were forced to migrate. Says Mattoo, who lost his father to terrorism in Kashmir: "These are questions my father would have liked to ask his neighbours." That was the fate of many Kashmiri Pandit families who left in 1990. Mattoo's was one of them. He was 14 then and still remembers having to leave downtown Srinagar.

Sushil Pandit, the Kashmiri Pandit activist is the subject of another short film, Cholhama, directed by Iranian Sarah Jabbari. Over three decades after Kashmiri Pandits left the Valley to the sounds of "Raliv, Galiv, Chaliv (Convert, die or leave)," their children and sometimes even grandchildren are telling their story. As Mattoo, an engineer-turned-filmmaker, says: "We are the last generation that remembers what the Valley was like when we lived there. We owe it to ourselves and future generations."That is the essence of Cholhama which captures the work of Sushil Pandit, who has spoken for the Pandits and recognition of their forced erasure. "Silence was not an option. There is much that we left behind. Our entire life, even our identity. We are clutching at the fragments. I speak up only to keep the memory alive," he says. Cholhama is directed by Jabbari, a documentary photographer who has worked for more than a decade with marginalised communities. Says she: "While I was in India, I learned about the Kashmiri Pandits. Apart from many similarities between Iran and Kashmir going back to the Gothic and Vedic period, I found the story of Islamification of both regions and the cultural resistance and identity preservation of Kashmiri Pandits and Iranians quite similar. I began a long-term documentary photography project called $elective Sympathy, which connected me closely with the Kashmiri Pandit community both in Kashmir and in exile. It focuses on memory and identity, with the aim of producing a photo book."

She is also writing a book on Kashmiri Pandits, currently in discussion with two UK publishers. Alongside this, she has presented talks at the British Academy and the Royal Anthropological Institute about Pandits and with support from a British Academy research grant, she is currently working on a new film and photo essay on Kashmiri Pandit memory and identity. For her MA graduation film, she had kept her visa ready to travel to India but the proposed protagonist Prof Pandita expressed doubt due to heat and old age, so Sushil Pandit agreed to participate instead. "Looking back," she says, "I am very grateful that things unfolded this way. Mr Pandit is
not only a prominent voice within his community, but also a controversial figure, which made the process particularly challenging. The film itself was never intended as a political work, rather, it focused on embodied memory and lived experience. In many ways, working with such a complex subject became a formative experience for me as a visual anthropologist."Razdan, co founder of a game developer, funded two young Kashmiri Pandits Siddharth Koul and Ankil Wali, who pitched Batt Koch as a short film. "Neither Siddharth nor Ankit had ever been to Kashmir. We finetuned the script and after MK Raina (veteran actor) came onboard, it became a feature film in the Kashmiri language." Razdan grew up in Chattabal, Srinagar, and was eight when he, his sister, and aunt left in a video bus. His father came later, and fled in a cattle truck. He went back to see his home recently, and was sad to the old structure of his home in ruins. It was built in the 1920s and is now in ruins, with an ugly concrete structure in place. "Our story has to be told and it is no one else's responsibility," he says.

Batt Koch traces the return of a family to their old home in Kashmir, with Raina playing the patriarch who cannot come to terms with the exile. It had 40 theatrical screenings all over India, of which 10 housefull shows were in Jammu. Batt Koch and Cholhama will both be shown at the New York Indian Film Festival beginning on May 28. Its curator Aseem Chhabra says: "While programming films for the festival, we try to find films that represent as many regions of India as possible. But it is often hard to find good films from Kashmir, especially those that speak from the Kashmiri Pandit's point of view. This year we were fortunate to find two films that speak the voices of Kashmiri Pandits. So we made a special programme by pairing the two films."

Mattoo, for whom Tasrufdaar is a labour of love, says the hidden pain that everyone is carrying needs to be articulated. He has worked closely with Sudhir Mishra on his Kashmir-based adaptation of the Israeli hit series Fauda, SonyLIV's Tanaav, and is now working on three more feature films. "We need closure," he says. With the film premiering at the 28th edition of the UK Asian Film Festival in London earlier this week, it seems the world might be ready for it.