The Partition of India has inspired cinema, some of which has reached audiences outside South Asia, especially when produced or directed by the Indian diaspora: for instance, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children (based on the Booker winner by Salman Rushdie) and Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House. However, there are more films that draw from partition as setting, theme, entertainment and history in art as well as commercial traditions of film-making in India, and to an extent, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Most of the individual films in this substantial body of work have been brought together by John W Hood in Tear-Drenched Earth: Cinema and the Partition of India. By Hood’s own admission, the book is not an exercise in film criticism but a way of exploring the use of Partition, “a gold mine of stories for filmmakers”, as an idea and as a theme.
Various themes guide Hood’s classification of fifteen films, some of which appear in more than one theme. One, how do the films portray historical personalities—Jinnah, Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel—as people who exercised more power or could have exercised more power in the flow of events. Two, how do they depict the absurdity and the insanity of it all? How do they depict the dislocation, uprooting, and mayhem that happened at that time (or as it unfolds even today because not all films are historical, they are set in 1947 and some deal with the enmity between communities and nations in the present moment)? How do the films reflect on religion, God, and communalism? What do they make of the idea of home as disturbed by the partition? And finally, how does the partition continue to affect politics and identity in India?
Apart from the two films mentioned above, Hood’s filmography includes Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982), Ketan Mehta’s Sardar (1993), Nemai Ghosh’s Chinnamul (1950), Srijit Mukherji’s Rajkahini (“A Tale of the Raj”, 2015), Vijay Raaz’s Kya Dilli Kya Lahore (“What Delhi? What Lahore?” 2014), Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag (“Run, Milkha, Run”, 2013), M S Sathyu’s Garm Hawa (“Hot Winds”, 1974), and Bangladeshi films such as Tanvir Mokammel’s Simantarekha (“The Borderline”, 2015) and Tareque Masud’s Matir Moina (“The Clay Bird”, 2002), among others. Hood succeeds in making sense of parallel and mainstream genres due to the variety of films, not in spite of it. As he notes, “If the entire Partition could be condensed into a single film, it would seem far too incredible even for Bollywood.” As this comment shows, Hood writes very accessibly about the films narrating their storylines, comparing them with the same of other films, and making overall observations about a theme.
Tear-Drenched Earth ought to be seen as a deeply annotated filmography that places films in relation to one another. The historical films Gandhi, Sardar, and Viceroy’s House, to provide the most easily comprehensible example from the book, show the statesmen of the time in very different light. The first two show their eponymous characters as true heroes who tried their best to resist the politics while Viceroy’s House brings one close to Cyril Radcliffe who was tasked to divide the country, and in the process, makes the hero narrative impossible to imagine:
Attenborough, his focus firmly on his hero, gives us a Partition in passing, an event that would seem to have happened as part of the natural course of things. His Mountbatten is more of a decoration than an integral functionary, and while his Jinnah is querulous and obdurate, his urbanity shields him from being seen as sinister, and still less, in any way culpable. Mehta’s Mountbatten is also a good-natured bauble, but his Jinnah is churlish and unlikeable, a pig-headed menace. In Viceroy’s House, the notion of responsibility for the Partition is more subtle, complex and shadowy.
On the contrary, films such as the Salman Khan starrer Bajrangi Bhaijaan, set in the contemporary period, come with a huge dose of preachiness. The film is about a mute Pakistani girl saved and returned to Pakistan by a devout Hindu man. Not much is subtle about the movie but Hood contextualizes it well:
Perhaps the film betrays a degree of one-upmanship in its moralism, giving the moral high ground to India and to Hinduism in that Bajrang Bali would seem to be the ultimate victor, bearing Pawan through his gruelling ordeal wherein he single-handedly fights the Pakistan border patrol and sections of the Pakistan police, notable in the film for their blatant stupidity as well as their savage brutality.
The contemporary moment is also defined by different moments in the aftermath of the Partition: the Godhra riots of 2002 or the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, which Hood sees as continuing the legacy of the communalism of the partition.
Another example of Hood’s approach to partition cinema could be presented through his comments about Chinnamul, a film which shows the tragic displacement of a family from East Pakistan to West Bengal, he says:
There is an interesting twist to the popular history here. The Hindus start to feel that they cannot stay back, but it is not so much their Muslim neighbours who are pushing them out, but the cunning and contriving men – Muslim and Hindu – with the power that comes with money … For us today looking back on that tragic time, what makes the suffering more pitiable is the fact that it was often generated by ruthless acquisitive rogues seeking to profit at the expense of the helpless, unprepared and ill-informed. It would be nice to think that the likes of [names of the cunning characters in the film] were chastened by justice, but it is very likely that they died peacefully in their beds, leaving a nice legacy for their heirs, while [names of the central characters who suffered at the hands of the evil men]…. But that film has not been made yet.
In the process of covering what has been said about partition in cinema, Hood pushes one to think about what has not been said yet. Identifying these limitations about storytelling is the greatest takeaway for readers interested in partition and popular culture. Hood’s book makes one wonder about the kinds of affordances—financial, technical, skilled labor—available to Indian (and diaspora) filmmakers that makes it relatively more feasible for them to make these films.