The Great Divide

It was the mid-1980s, and I was a pre-teen studying in a school I had come to love and loathe at the same time; love, because it gave me good friends, strict but kind-hearted teachers and opened for me a level playing field where the kids of generals, industrialists, greengrocers and plumbers all studied together and loathe because it was in many ways a ‘Zia’ school — where there was little room for individuality, education meant learning by rote and the arts were viewed as a colossal waste of time. There was a drawing class in the junior years but you could only draw flowers or that ubiquitous one-room house with the sloping roof. There was no music class; singing was only for hamd-o-naat, and drama and dance were non-existent. So I was, I believe understandably, amazed and astonished when one fine day the entire girls’ section was sent marching to the (much larger) boys’ section to – shock, horror! – watch a movie! As we settled excitedly on the floor and conjectured wildly about which film we were about to be shown, the lights dimmed and the projector sputtered into action. It was a scratchy, washed out print but I could more than make out the title as it flashed on to the screen: Khaak Aur Khoon. None of us had ever heard of it before but apparently it had been a big deal some years earlier, being based on successful author Naseem Hijazi’s Partition novel of the same name. Roughly two hours later, as the lights went up, there were a few feeble cries of Pakistan Zindabad, before we shuffled off back to our classes, no better or worse for the wear than when we had entered. Even at that clueless age, though, I found the film lopsided, so clear was it in its depiction of Hindus and Sikhs as the psychotic, irredeemable villains of the piece, and Muslims as the sacrificing, persecuted but ultimately victorious, victims. Looking up excerpts from the film on Youtube, I am not surprised to find the comments section full of praise for it for painting “the true picture of Partition.” It is hard to argue with that assessment, for truth is subjective after all. Facts are another matter altogether though and when it comes to facts, the story of Partition gets murkier, and heroes and villains harder to discern.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the story of the great divide – as a moment in history, poignant and powerful – has found few representations on the big screen. It is, admittedly, not a simple or easy tale to tell, no matter which side you narrate it from. There is culpability on all sides, as is there suffering, told and untold. Unlike the Holocaust in Europe, there is a lack of extensive documentation, written and photographic, of the events (but then, here in the subcontinent, we do seem to have a general disdain towards recording and/or preserving our history in any form) that would not only give the subject gravitas that comes with historical detail but also universal resonance. Of course, there are the Partition stories in literature, Manto’s masterful Toba Tek Singh being possibly the most famous and widely read of them. Interestingly though, the further we get chronologically from the events of 1947, we also seem more and more incapable and unwilling to grapple with the ghosts of Partition, which, far from being laid to rest, have been instrumental in, among other things, creating the façade of a unified Pakistani identity, which, if our ensuing and current circumstances bear witness, is at best a fragmented one, based around divided ethnicities, religious sects, and even cultural norms, the vagaries of which were never clearer than today. No wonder then, that we have found it virtually impossible to give Partition stories a credible cinematic voice.

Not to say that the subject has not been depicted on screen at all. Elsewhere, it has yielded a number of cinematic works, to varying degrees of artistic and financial success, from Deepa Mehta’s well-acted but uneven 1947: Earth, to Anil Sharma’s jingoistic Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. Ritwak Ghatak’s lyrical Meghe Dhaka Tara did not explicitly mention Partition but took place in a refugee camp on the outskirts of Calcutta. Chandra Prakash Dwivedi adapted Amrita Pritam’s novel Pinjar to acclaim in 2003, while Bhisham Sahni’s sublime Tamas was adapted for an all-star television series in the 1980s by Govind Nihalani.

But the most moving and powerful depiction of the human consequences of Partition to date, remains M S Sathyu’s haunting elegy Garam Hawa. Released in 1973, the film is based on an unpublished story by Ismat Chughtai and contains the last screen appearance of legendary actor Balraj Sahni. Set in Agra, it tells the story of an aging shoe manufacturer Salim Mirza (Sahni) and how, in the wake of the division of India, he witnesses both his business and his family disintegrating before his eyes, until he has to make the painful choice between staying on in his ancestral land or migrating to the newly formed state of Pakistan. The film ends with the following couplet by Kaifi Azmi, who also co-wrote the script with Shama Zaidi:

“Jo dur se toofan ka karte hain nazara, unke liye toofan wahan bhi hai yahan bhi/Dhaare me jo mil jaaoge ban jaaoge dhaara, yeh waqt ka ailaan wahan bhi hai yahan bhi” (For those who watch the storm from a distance, there is a storm here as well as there/But if you join the stream you become the stream, this is the call of the times, here as well as there).