Cinematic legacy: Bollywood on the trauma of Partition, through the ages

It's been 77 years since India and Pakistan were traumatically born as separate independent nations. Though so much time has passed, many people in the subcontinent are still processing the event.

In an act of self-healing and to better understand the country's founding, many Indian filmmakers have tried their hand at telling the story of Partition - one of the world's largest manmade displacements in recent history.

Like India, the telling and retelling has evolved and changed over the decades. To understand this, let's begin with what happened in 1947.

Things were unusually hectic at England's parliament that summer, as officials had a month left to decide the fate of the Indian Independence Act.

Stakeholders were in a hurry to push the legislation, a mandate to end British rule in India by dividing its territory across its Bengal and Punjab provinces, through parliament.

Those involved included Viceroy Louis Mountbatten and Punjab's Governor Evan Jenkins, political leaders Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Sardar Patel, and Indian civil servants B.N. Rau, and V.P Menon (later Constitutional advisors), who all jostled to ensure their own political goals were met.

Perhaps the only official who wasn't rushed, until Mountbatten assigned him the task of heading Boundary Commission, was the British lawyer Cyril Radcliffe.

Having never visited India prior to his assignment, Radcliffe had no understanding of the subcontinent, how it looked or the people who resided there, or how syncretic, complex, nuanced and beautiful the land was.

Radcliffe travelled there for the first time when assigned to divide a humongous territory of 450,000 square kilometres amongst a population of 88 million.

The exercise in creating boundaries led to one of the biggest manmade displacements in modern times – the Partition.

Professor Lucy Chester, a US-based scholar on British imperialism, nationalism, and anticolonialism, writes in her essay The 1947 Partition: Drawing the Indo-Pakistani Boundary that Radcliffe's "boundary-making effort was a failure in terms of boundary-making, but a striking success in terms of providing political cover to all sides."

Aftermath

Even before the official announcement was made, the subcontinent had plunged into chaos, with loss and killings, as tens of thousands of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs found themselves on the "wrong" side of the newly drawn borders.

The following months would see an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 women abducted, raped and killed, while approximately 12 million were displaced from their homes.

What ideally should have been the most luminous moment in the anticolonial struggle of the world was scarred by communal riots amongst Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs.

Even as people were murdered and trains carried corpses through the blood-soaked lands, refugees on the go had already begun the oral history of Partition, putting together their experiences of the brutal geopolitical happening which would pass on to the next generation.

Consequently, memories shared within families would create space for ample malleability, often much more ominous than the experiences of the savagery.

These post memories and their prosthetic versions constitute various memoirs, diaries, literature, theatre written and enacted, museum objects and cinema of Partition.

Early Partition cinema

Of all the cultural elements that wield the power of telling the tale of Partition, Hindi cinema stands out. Hindi Cinema has a definitive role in "playing back memory."

Alison Landsberg, an American cultural historian in her essay Prosthetic memory: The ethics and politics of memory in an age of Mass Culture, reminds us about cinema's ability not only to play back memory as if transporting one to the present, but also to transform it.

According to Landsberg, "Thanks to these new technologies of memory on the one hand and commodification on the other, the kinds of memories that one has 'intimate,' even experiential access would no longer be limited to the memories of events through which one actually lived."

How the genre of Partition cinema has grown over the years in Bollywood resonates well with Landsberg's understanding.

For example, Lahore, released in 1949, is among the first Hindi films on Partition, revolving around the story of two childhood sweethearts who get separated in the displacement.

Not much is known about the film other than director ML Anand who also produced successful movies like Bewafa (Disloyal,1952) and Khandaan (Family, 1955). Anand himself was a partition survivor.

While Lahore is a portrayal of the emotional impact of partition on individuals, a couple in love, other early films leaned towards the political.

In 1959, Yash Chopra, one of Bollywood's most successful filmmakers, produced his debut directorial Dhool Ka Phool (Flower of Dust), centring around the parenting of an abandoned Hindu child (born out of wedlock) by a Muslim man in the backdrop of communal tensions.

Flower of Dust is an evocative story touching upon religious orthodoxy and divisiveness. Chopra showed how the fear of being shamed by society compels a young Hindu woman to abandon her child and how a Muslim man on the other hand decides to save the toddler without knowing his parentage or faith, raising him despite social ostracisation.

A story of such compassion and humanity can be inspired by one's own experiences. Yash Chopra and his family were among the thousands who survived Partition.

Notably, Chopra's elder brother and producer B.R Chopra, a well-known producer in later years, had completed his masters from the University of Punjab, starting his career as a film journalist in Lahore. As B.R. ventured on his first film production, riots broke out and the family had to flee Lahore.

In 1961, after the success of Flower of Dust, the brother duo produced one of the most political and incisive films, Dharamputra (Son of the Faith, 1961) about Partition and its aftermath.

This time the story is reversed. It is about a young man Dilip, raised by an upper-caste Hindu family. Dilip grows up to become a Hindutva activist. The director's script does not hesitate to address the growing fanaticism and religious bigotry as Partition takes place.

His protagonist is anti-Islam and oblivious to his Muslim lineage. Flower of Dust and Son of Faith are produced within a short gap of two years, yet one notices the unmistakable political quality of the latter.

The director confronted Partition as a reality seemingly radical in hindsight. His intimacy with his own memories and its temporal dislocation through cinema as a medium allowed him a more critical understanding of an event that had disrupted social, economic, cultural lives of countless. Son of Faith thus sets the path for Partition cinema.

Later Partition films

Though the seemingly radical Son of Faith was released in 1961, Partition as a theme in Hindi cinema returned much later.

Interestingly it wasn't mainstream Bollywood that co-opted this historical event or its public memory. On the contrary, it was a humble budget, alternative cinema which took on Partition as a subject.

Garam Hawa (Hot Winds, 1977) by M.S Sathyu, Tamas (Darkness, 1989) by Govind Nihalani, Mammo (1994) by Shyam Benegal along with a host of others like Train to Pakistan (1998), Earth-1947 (1998), Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters 2004), Qissa (The Story 2013), and Kya Dilli kya Lahore (What is Delhi, What is Lahore 2014) are just some of the films.

Poignantly made, these movies do not centre themselves around the blame game or hold either Muslims, Hindus or Sikhs responsible. Instead they look into Partition and the making of borders as a phase of blemished humanity complicated by political ineptness along with ultra religiosity.

The 1977 Hot Winds is perhaps the most sensitively made film on Partition in India, with Balraj Sahni, one of South Asia's finest actors, playing the lead. Sahni who had experienced partition was able to portray the role of protagonist Salim Mirza, a shoe manufacturer from Agra and his dilemmas in migrating to Pakistan, with a rare finesse.

Darkness in 1989 on the other hand had filmmaker Govind Nihalani at its helm and Bhisham Sahni as its writer. Both Nihalani and Sahni are partition survivors, who delved deep into communalism in their script. To that the actualisation of Darkness took place after the riots of Bhiwandi (a neighbourhood in suburban Mumbai) in 1984.

"Such is the vigor of the memory of Partition which seems to lie just below the surface of the collective unconscious that needs only a light prodding to awaken," noted scholars Geetha Vishwanath and Salma Malik.

The prodding here was the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992 and Bombay riots after which mainstream Hindi cinema picked up Partition as a story they wanted to tell.

Citing Ira Bhaskar, a seminal film scholar, "Bhaskar observes that subjects considered taboo for nearly 40 years were being talked about openly: preconceived stereotypes and prejudices against one another, communal and racial sentiments, rise of Hindutva and erosion of secular values."

Commodification of partition

A host of films got released in the following years after these devastating national incidents, wherein memories of Partition inducted in the script were commodified and suited to fit majoritarian perceptions.

They include Bombay (1995), Sarfarosh (1999), Refugee (2000), Hey Ram (2000), Gadar, Ek Prem Katha (Rebellion – A Love Story, 2001), and Pinjar (The Cage, 2003), Fanaa (Annihilation, 2006), Kurban ( Sacrificed 2009), and New York (2009).

Curiously the reference to partition and identity in these films contained strong elements of stereotyped communalism with discourse of 'good Muslim' and 'bad Muslim' well-defined.

As Bollywood was increasingly mainstreaming Partition as a theme, Yash Chopra returned with his film Veer Zaara in 2004, trying his best to bridge the gap that Partition as an event had created between India and Pakistan, with subsequent wars adding on.

Though the actual Partition was not the setting of his film, Chopra spotlighted the idea of secularism, and on accepting individual, cultural, and religious identities, like he did decades ago in Flower of Dust and Son of Faith.

To that he made Veer Zara a contemporary love story of an Indian Army personnel Veer (Shah Rukh Khan) and a Pakistani woman Zara (Preity Zinta). Chopra invested much trying his best to give his film an unbiased humanitarian approach.

By the next decade, Partition would remain a ghoulish backdrop and then erased from Hindi cinema as Bollywood recalibrated itself to highlight nation first, heightening identity politics and washing out the individual trauma that the event impressed upon millions across the border.

This gradual change in the cinematic narrative had already begun post Roja (Rose, 1992) with religious identity as the lens of storytelling followed by Bombay (1995) and Gadar, Ek Prem Katha (Rebellion – A Love Story, 2001) wherein the dark, destructive and evil are represented by the Muslims.

Rose and Bombay do not directly weave in Partition while Rebellion – A Love Story which had a sequel in 2022 uses Partition as its canvas. The latter is a blockbuster film that emphasises the politics of otherisation, showcasing the heroine's Muslim family as dogmatic, irrational and overtly religious.

Towards the late 2000s, when films like Kurban (Sacrificed 2009), and New York (2009) were released, Partition as a historical event or as a canvas of storytelling was nearly omitted, with scripts lapping up the idea of politicising identity (read: stereotyping Muslims as perpetrators of all things malicious).

In a post 9/11 world, it didn't take much for Bollywood to embolden this narrative locally by churning out historically incorrect and or biased period films like Padmavat (2015).

Since then, the Partition of India has been completely sidelined as a film subject, while cinema laced with nationalist thinking has taken over.