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Manav Kaul got displaced from ‘troubled’ Kashmir, survived in Mumbai chawl on Rs 30 per day

Manav Kaul was born in Baramulla, but relocated to his mother's hometown of Hoshangabad, Madhya Pradesh when he was in Class 5 owing to the Kashmiri Pandit Exodus.

4 min readMumbaiJun 10, 2026 07:27 PM IST

Manav Kaul was born in Baramulla, but relocated from Kashmir in Class 5.

Last year, Manav Kaul starred in projects set in Kashmir, from Aditya Suhas Jambhale’s supernatural horror thriller Baramulla to Mahesh Mathai’s SonyLIV sports drama Real Kashmir Football Club. But he maintains he doesn’t feel that connection with Kashmir that often, despite being born in a Kashmiri Pandit family in Baramulla back in 1976.

Manav on displacement from Kashmir

“We came back to Hoshangabad because my mother is from Hoshangabad. My grandmother’s health had deteriorated badly,” Manav recalled on a recent podcast. Manav was in Class 5 when he moved with his family to Madhya Pradesh. Little did he know that he would never go back ‘home’.

“My father was still working there, so he told us to stay back because something seemed wrong. Then by the time things got worse, we had already stayed on, joined school, and kept saying, ‘Let’s wait another year.’ Eventually, my father had to come too,” Manav told Sangmitra Hitaishi, recalling how the 1990 Kashmiri Pandit Exodus led to his family’s gradual displacement.

Growing up as a Kashmiri in Madhya Pradesh

Manav and his brother looked like Kashmiri kids, a far cry from their fellow students in the Hoshangabad school. They struggled a lot and survived, but never got acceptance from their batchmates. The only way to survive was “to cut away from my Kashmiriyat”. “Children can be very cruel. Adults are often more empathetic and kind. Children aren’t,” added the actor. Manav confessed that he tried to push his Kashmiri identity away as a child for years, which led to him even forgetting the Kashmiri language eventually.

“I started having dreams of my house in Baramulla, and began crying at night that I want to go back. I have very strong memories when it comes to spaces. I can paint my house even today as it is,” said Manav on SCREEN’s Creator X Creator last year. “Twenty-seven years later, when I went back to Kashmir and landed in Srinagar, I told my friend I know this smell. It’s a part of me. When I started working in Kashmir, a weird sense of belonging crept in,” he added.

Mumbai woes

Manav relocated to Mumbai in the early 2000s to pursue a career in theatre and films. Since theatre didn’t pay enough and a break in films wasn’t as smooth, Manav spent his early days in the city living in a tiny chawl in Parel. He recalled how he had to survive an entire day in Mumbai on a slim budget of Rs 30. “You couldn’t go out. You couldn’t celebrate,” he recalled.

But his love for reading helped him wade through those years of uncertainty and depravity. “Thank God there were no reels back then. If there had been, I think I would have become a completely ruined person,” said Manav. He finally got his first break in films with Soumitra Ranade’s 2003 fantasy action comedy Jajantaram Mamantaram.

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But his breakthrough came only 10 years later with a key villainous role in Abhishek Kapoor’s 2013 sports drama Kai Po Che!, followed by Subhash Kapoor’s courtroom comedy Jolly LLB 2 and Suresh Triveni’s coming-of-age comedy Tumhari Sulu in 2017. He’s also now a renowned streaming star, having headlined shows like Puneet Krishna’s Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper (2024).

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