[Reader-list] Watching Khamosh Pani in India

[Anand Vivek Taneja]

Dear Yousuf,

Sorry for getting back to this email conversation a bit late, but I
finally saw Khamosh Pani today...
Let me qualify  - you mentioned being chilled, sitting surrounding by
Punjabis who wept while watching the film.
I am someone who is easily identified as a Punjabi, and find myself
increasingly easy to identify with being a Punjabi, even with all my
problems with easy labelling and simplified identities...
And yes, true to form, I wept during the film. 

And I don't think I can agree with you as to the dichotomy of films
that make you think, versus films that make you weep.
This is probably a fallacious construction, but here goes - 

Imagine I am ten years younger, fourteen years old... i have grown up
with an increasingly crowded media scape, which since i have been
eleven years old, has bombarded me, at least since i was eleven years
old (9/11) with images of Islam, Musilms and Pakistan which make me
think of them all as mad, bearded fundos, and burkha clad women who
are far less desirable and far less cool than, well, Jennifer Lopez...

Imagine also that I am the second or third generation  since those who
moved during partition. i've probably heard stories of the barbarity
and the cruelty of the muslims, and of how everything was lost in the
violence they perpetrated. maybe i've also heard stories of how
muslims actually gave shelter and helped those who were fleeing...
(and i have heard such stories from relatives, and well, they're not
necessarily either 'secular' or particularly tolerant... )

maybe the post 9/11 media scape has reinforced what i think about
Muslims and Pakistan from the more brutal partition stories that have
come to me throgh oral, family tradition....

What happens when i bring that baggage into the movie hall? what am i
likely to leave with?

i don't know. i'm not fourteen any longer, i have studied Partition in
some detail, I have fairly liberal, 'progressive', 'secular' tolerant
ideals when it comes to matters communal, and nationalistic.

but i have the feeling that even if i was a fourteen year old,
inclined to believe the worst of Islam, Muslims and Pakistan... this
movie would have shaken me to the core, and my prejudices along with
that.

And it works precisely becuase it is emotionally evocative, without
ever missing out on complexity of characterisation, or of historical
detail...

as filmmakers, i don't know how we can mark the dichotomy between
'thinking' films and 'sentimental' films... films aren't likely to
start thinking unless they enage you emotionally - unless you
empathize with the characters on the screen, whether 'real' or
'imaginary', and are interested in the trajectories of their lives,
and the larger histories their lives are involved in/affected by....

khamosh pani does that, even with the minor characters who give true
character to the film -
the characters of the 'mast' village barber who defies the
fundamentalists with a combination of humour and steel, the village
postman and his wife, whose daughter went missing on the Indian side
of the border, the 'hero's friend', who tries to reconcile his
friend's illicit love-life with their new found Islamic belief... If,
at age fourteen I saw this film, i would probablyfeel an empathy for
Pkaistanis as 'people like us', at the simplest, crudest level...

also, there is no evading the complexity of the history of Partition,
and the fact that women bore the violence of both their own men, and
of the Other. (If i was fourteen and saw the scenes of
Ayesha/Veero/Kirron Kher refusing to jump into the well and running -
i would ask questions of every story about Partition that I was ever
told...) my sense of perpetrator/victim, good/bad, hero/villain,
us/them would go into a major tailspin... or so can only hope...
 

and which brings me to the question raised in your  second posting... 
what if we made a film that was based on the premise, 'what if
partition never happened... '(isn't that, in a way, the question veer
zara asks, if we are to go by anupam kher's closing speech?) now, i'm
quite the fan of alternate history as a sci-fi sub genre, but the best
alternate history works with an awareness of the complexity of the
history we have inherited, and of  the fraught times that we bear
witness to... the best alternative history is also, often, fairly
depressing...
but as film-makers, or writers, or historians, I don't think we can
make refernece to the future without looking back at the past...

and were i to look back at the past, and Partition, and acknowledge
that the past happened, and that it was violent, but it was a violence
and a guilt that cannot be blamed on anyone group of people - i don't
think i could choose a better film than Khamosh Pani - becuase it
never evades the past, or simplifies it, but dwells on how we can live
on, even perhaps accept, the memory of the fraught past, util people
try to simplify their worldview, and their world once again...
 i don't know how lucid or sensible this sounds, but I'd like to quote
Walter Benjamin, whose Theses on The Philosophy of History were
written after the Nazi takeover of Germany, German history, and
Germman memory...

'... nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for
history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of
its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past
become citable in all its moments...'

the mark of redemption, for India and Pakistan, is perhaps when we can
cite all the horrors of Partition - without silencing voices, without
flinching from discomfort, without the urge to simplify and fit into a
more acceptable view of 'what really happened'...

I's like to think of Khamosh Pani as a citation of the past of that order...

cheers,
Anand

 
On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 23:05:37 -0800 (PST), Yousuf <ysaeed7 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Dear Anand
> I believe that it is possible to make a film/media
> product that can entertain as well as make us think -
> its a challange that few filmmakers take. It is
> probably taken for granted that the populace who goes
> to see veer-zaara or any other sentimental
> (un-thinking) film will remain where they are, and
> cannot 'mature'. But I am sure the average audience is
> ready for an alternative.
> 
> I remember one effort of this kind of film was Zakhm
> (from the Mahesh Bhatt family) which used
> sentimentality but also made people think - it didn't
> offend only one community (though some thought that it
> was more pro-Muslim). It wasn't a box-office hit but
> its a tool that we use in our campaigns.
> 
> Actually such films could become problematic only when
> they depend too much on real historical events, and
> romaticize them. They do not try any alternative
> histories or alternative futures. I am sure if someone
> makes a film on "What if Partition hadn't happend?" or
> What if the British never colonized us? the average
> audience would be curious. One could even make a
> futuristic film on exploring tactics of mutual
> survival/co-existance by Hindus and Muslims, of course
> by keeping all the history and sentimentality and
> song-and-dance in it. Its a challange that filmmakers
> need to take if they are genuinely interested in using
> popular cinema for social change.
> 
> Yousuf
> 
> --- Anand Vivek Taneja <radiofreealtair at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > Dear Yousuf,
> >
> > This is not a reply to your mail, directly, but off
> > on a tangent.
> >
> > Khamosh Pani is not, as you write (and as the media
> > has widely
> > reported) the first Pakistani film to be released in
> > India.
> >
> > There were a few Pakistani Punjabi films released in
> > India in the mid
> > nineteen fifties, the most prominent of them beig
> > 'Dulla Bhatti',
> > released in 1956.
> > I am absolutely definite about Dulla Bhatti because
> > of
> > fieldwork/interviews at Imperial Cinema, PaharGanj -
> >  where the film
> > was screened, and was a hit, catering to a large
> > refugee population.
> >
> > Dulla Bhatti, the character on who the film is
> > based, is a fairly
> > important character in Punjabi folklore - a bandit,
> > and RobinHood type
> > chivalrous rebel, who opposes the tyranny of Mughal
> > tax collection in
> > Akbar's time.
> >
> > Apparently, songs sung during the annual 'Lohri'
> > celebrations allude
> > to Dulla Bhatti. Dulla Bhatti has, perhaps
> > retrospectively, been
> > identified as 'Musli'm, a category which might have
> > been fariy fluid
> > back in sixteenth century Punjab.
> >
> > Coming back to the points you have raised -
> >
> > Last year, as part of my graduation from MCRC, along
> > with two other
> > people, Akshay Singh and Sakina Ali, I made a film
> > on the twentieth
> > century histories of the Purana Qila, 'The Past is a
> > Foreign
> > Country...'
> >  (which you have seen being edited on FCP)
> >
> > The film, among other things, focuses on the Muslim
> > refugee camp which
> > came up inside the Purana Qila after the Delhi riots
> > of September '47.
> > It is not a pleasant dwelling - at all. Along with
> > this, there are
> > fairly obvious and un-nuanced fulminations against
> > anti-Muslim
> > prejudice in the preservation of monuments and the
> > presentation of
> > history....
> >
> > It is not a great film, by any standards - but in
> > India, in Delhi, it
> > has gone down well with audiences - generating
> > awareness of the
> > marginalised hsitories of the city, and debates
> > about the politics of
> > heritage conservation. it also gets a few laughs at
> > the digs at our
> > right-wingers.
> >
> > In April this year, I took the film to Lahore, and
> > screened it for an
> > audience of about eighty students at the Lahore
> > University of
> > Management Sciences.
> > It turned out that some of them had grandparents who
> > had come to
> > Pakistan via the Purana Qila camps. and during the
> > discusssion that
> > followed, we moved away from issues of conservation,
> > and i somehow
> > ended up defending India in general, and the Indian
> > state in
> > particular - 'we're not that bad' - something I
> > never thought I'd have
> > to do.
> >
> > I guess what I'm trying to say is that we,as
> > film-makers,or writers,
> > try and make sense of the specific time and place we
> > live in - and
> > present them for People Like Us - by which I don't
> > people who
> > necessarily agree with one, but who inhabit the same
> > media-scape, so
> > to speak, and have inherited similar recieved
> > histories.
> >
> > In that sense, of course, Paksitanis are not People
> > Like Us, and vice
> > versa. we do not inhabit the same media scape, we
> > have not
> > recieved/inherited the same histories. And which is
> > why you don't need
> > to go out of your way to make a Gadar, to cause
> > discomfort or raise
> > anger against the 'Other'.
> >
> > Last week, I saw a beautifuly made film called 'The
> > Rock Star and the
> > Mullahs' which has a  liberal Pakistani Muslim
> > (Salman Ahmed of the
> > rock group 'Junoon') confronting fundamentalists
> > about the ban on the
> > public performance of music in the North West
> > Frontier Province. And
> > yet, doubts were raised as to whether the film,
> > instead of
> > demonstrating that not all Muslims are jehadis, was
> > in fact
> > reinforcing stereotypes about Pakistan...
> >
> > As long as we make films for 'Indians' and
> > 'Pakistanis' there is no
> > way we can escape creating stereotypes and
> > 'othering' on the Other
> > Side, as long as we're dealing with Kashmir, or the
> > Partition, or
> > communal violence, or religious fundamentalism...
> >
> > ...is it possible to make a film which deals,
> > however tangentially,
> > with Partition, Communal Violence,  Kashmir or
> > religious
> > fundamentalism... without someone in the audience
> > getting very bitter?
> >
> > ... unless, of course, it's something like
> > 'Veer-Zaara' ;-) ?
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Anand
> >
> >
> > On Thu, 9 Dec 2004 02:45:43 -0800 (PST), Yousuf
> > <ysaeed7 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > Watching "Khamosh Pani" in India
> > > (And why I cannot use it for peace activism)
> > >
> > > Yousuf Saeed
> > >
> > > While Pakistani director Sabiha Sumer's 2003 film
> > > Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters) is getting rave
> > reviews
> > > and highly emotional applause in many Indian
> > theatres,
> > > here are some personal thoughts, if anyone's
> > > interested. For those who haven't seen it (and are
> > > being reminded by the "must-watch" reports),
> > Khamosh
> > > Pani, the first Pakistani film ever released in
> > Indian
> > > theatres, is about an idyllic Pakistani village
> > called
> > > Charkhi which sees the rise of Islamic
> > fundamentalism
> > > in 1979's Ziaul Haq regime, and how it affects the
> > > ordinary villagers such as Ayesha, her son Saleem,
> > and
> > > many others, including the visiting Sikh pilgrims
> > from
> > > India. I shouldn't reveal the full story to spoil
> > the
> > > fun for those who haven't seen it â€" it's great
> > cinema
> > > to watch. I only want to express a chilling
> > uneasiness
> > > I had while watching it at PVR cinema surrounded
> > by
> > > many Punjabi families, a number of them sobbing
> > > through the film.
> > >
> > > Much has already been written, produced, staged
> > and
> > > sung about the subject of India's Partition (on
> > both
> > > sides of the border), and would continue to, since
> > its
> > > horrible memories still haunt a large number of
> > > affected people. But the question we must ask
> > today:
> > > is this memory going to help us resolve any of the
> > > present day crisis, or is it only adding further
> > fuel
> > > to the fire. These days, when I watch a movie (or
> > a
> > > documentary or TV show) on the subject of
> > communalism,
> > > India-Pakistan and so on, (especially after 9/11
> > and
> >
> === message truncated ===
> 
> 
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