Watching the Trauma: Witnessing the Partition

Abstract

The academic discourse of the mass violence that took place during the Partition/Independence of India and Pakistan has acquired certain maturity over the decades. The corpus of literature generated has been insightful and path-breaking. In the backdrop of this scholarship, the current article attempts to engage with the experiences of witnessing and emphasize upon transformative potential of such encounters. With few Partition-based Hindi films, this study also looks at the landscape of the Partition on the celluloid, where the screen converges with history and where the memory of trauma generates guilt. Mobilising the fieldwork conducted seventeen–eighteen years ago in Delhi, Ajmer and Jammu along with the cinematic representations and written corpus on the Partition, an engagement with the figure of a witness in this article will hopefully allow us to engage with memory, archive and the mass violence with fresh questions and perspectives.

Keywords

Partition violence Hindi films trauma witnessing mourning cinematic memory guilt

Impressions

The discovery of the other in me does not make me schizophrenic.²

Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (New York: Columbia University, 1987), 55.

... And she kept staring her own body. After the Partition, this has now become the body of a ‘Devi’ (goddess) and not of Lājwanti ... She can be everything, but not Lājo. She was rehabilitated and she was ruined.³

Rajinder Singh Bedi, 'Lajwanti', in Bedi Samagra II (Delhi: Rajkamal, 1995), 227–37.

In Greek, the word for witness is martis, martyr ... the Greek term itself derives as it is from the verb meaning to ‘remember’. The survivor’s vocation is to remember. He cannot remember.⁴

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1999), 26.

Introduction

Some epitaphs last long. They get etched at the landscape named mind. With repetition, they do not wear off. In their refusal to leave, you coil around feeling cajoled, warm and eloquent, and stupid. In the comfort of epitaphs, you let go the ability to critically think and in turn push yourself dangerously on the verge of stupidity. Epitaphs are soothing when it comes to engaging with pain and trauma. The three aforementioned statements perform all these roles; yet, they exceed the assigned and contextual meanings and keep me baffled and provoked. While Kristeva’s ‘discovery of the other’ is suggestive of the numbness one develops when continuously exposed to pain and suffering, Lājo makes it difficult to ground the experience of brutality at any identified terrain. This is ‘uprootedness’ in its monstrous entirety. Agamben’s word is a reminder almost a condemned truth about the inevitability to witness. These three are like monads of Leibniz and lead to a researcher’s encounter, experiences of victimhood and the figure of a witness, respectively. The idea is to show the ways in which these three zones overlap leaving behind a messy field.

Mediating in between these three coordinates (of victimhood, researcher’s self and the figure of a witness), this article engages with processes of watching pain and sufferings on the celluloid. In the backdrop of a fieldwork carried out in different parts of north India (Delhi, Ajmer and Jammu) between 2001 and 2002, the article confines itself to few selected Hindi-feature films, which narrate the Partition of the Indian sub-continent into India and Pakistan in 1947.

The fieldwork was carried out for a research project titled ‘Reconstructing Lives’ under the supervision of Professor Ashis Nandy. The core idea was to build an archive of life histories of those who underwent the tragedy of the Partition. Armed with a questionnaire consisting of 238 close- and open-ended questions, the method was to enter into long conversations with the people who personally suffered during the Partition, to listen to them and to record their lives (i.e., in audio files, by filling up the questionnaire or by reconstructing the conversation in a narrative form). It was a large team of researchers, and a wide range of epistemic-ethical discomforts was intensely debated. Some of the key anxieties were related to the very idea of a questionnaire-based conversation, an ethical danger of opening up of the Partition wounds afresh, authenticity of responses, the content as well as the language of questions, selection of words, ways of selecting and approaching respondents, issues of post-conversation stress for the researcher, the pathos of half listening, incomplete listening, conversations left in the middle and mechanical listening bereft of any empathy.

The diversity and complexity of these conversations not merely raised several questions pertaining to documentation of pain, suffering and memory but also prompted to engage with the act of listening, which connected me to my respondents⁵

Sadan Jha, ‘On Listening to Violence: Reflections of a Researcher of the Partition of India’, in Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence (Delhi: Sarai-CSDS, 2006), 467–71.

and the figure of a witness far removed from the actual occurrence of a traumatic event in terms of time and space. Writing in the context of Holocaust, psycho-analyst Dori Laub remarks that ‘By extension, the listener to trauma comes to be a participant and a co-owner of the traumatic event: through his very listening, he comes to partially experience trauma himself’.⁶

M. Dori Laub, ‘Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitude of Listening’, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds. Shoshana Felman and M. Dori Laub (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992), 27.

Following from Laub, one could ask: How does listening to narratives of mass violence affect the listener? Also, how does the state of victimhood get transmitted from the situation (one might even say the body) of the respondent to that of the interviewer? Continuing with such a concern, this article attempts to engage with the second rubric, that is, the figure of a witness, albeit at a different terrain. This time it is on the celluloid screen of those Hindi feature films which centrally anchor upon the Partition violence in their stories.

This exercise is based on a simple assumption that both of these acts (listening and watching cinematic renderings of violence) are potentially transformative for the self of a listener or spectator. Listening in this sense is fundamentally different from supposedly a passive act of hearing and watching remains not merely a property of physical eyes but essentially embodies the cultural moorings of seeing. Watching in this way can potentially lead to witnessing that Agamben has referred in the earlier mentioned quotation with his dense investment in the Primo Levi’s recounting of experience. Agamben writes

Levi was profoundly uneasy with the fact that as time passed, and almost in spite of himself, he ended up a writer, composing books that had nothing to do with his testimony ... He could feel guilty for having survived, but not for having borne witness ... In Latin, there are two words for ‘witness’. The first word, testis from which our word ‘testimony’ derives, etymologically signifies the person who, in a trial or lawsuit between two rival parties, is in the position of a third party (*texstis). The second word Superstes, designates a person who has lived through something, who has experienced an event from beginning to end and can, therefore, bear witness to it. It is obvious that Levi is not a third party; he is a survivor [superstite] in every sense. But this also means that his testimony has nothing to do with the acquisition of facts for a trial (he is not neutral enough for this. he is not a testis).⁷

Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 16–17.

Just as a witness is condemned to remember, the culture is the ground for that memory and its twin: the amnesia. The figure of the shāhid (urdu: witness) in its close resemblance to shahid (urdu: martyr) connects the circle bringing in victimhood, researcher’s act of listening and watching the narratives and images of violence all in one fold. The question is how to render the pain that circulates in different forms in this tradition, only a shahid can be qualified to be a shāhid. The question is how to engage with the experience which may be in the core when an observer undergoes a transformation and becomes a witness. Focused on cinematic representations, here we shall be primarily in the act of watching; though in an audio–visual format, listening is an implicit aspect of witnessing the pain on celluloid. Listening is also crucial as I entered into an intertwined zone of witnessing, memory and the archive through the act of listening. In many ways, it predates my attention to partitioned celluloid. Yet, keeping in mind the scope of this article, the ambit of this discussion will remain confined to few films which are selected not for their representativeness to speak for this entire field but primarily for their ability to help us achieve certain analytical and interpretative depth for our discussion on the figure of a witness in the context of the Partition violence.

Witnessing

There is no dearth of scholarship on the act of witnessing. However, this corpus is densely populated by studies on trauma, holocaust and memory and over the decades, each of these three has also acquired the disciplinary status in western academia. With the passage of time, along with the status of these three, the act of witnessing has also undergone analytical shifts. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer explain this shift by comparing the approach of Hannah Arendt and Shoshana Felman over one particular testimony from the Eichmann Trial held in Jerusalem in 1961. This was about a holocaust survivor Yehiel Dinoor (who also wrote extensively by the name of K-Zetnik about what he termed as ‘Planet Auswitch’). During the trial, when the prosecutor asked few direct questions, he fainted and had to be admitted to hospital. For Hirsch and Spitzer,

Instead of describing him as a failed witness, as Arendt does, Felman sees him as a terrified, re-traumatized witness—one who, in the courtroom and in the encounter with Eichmann, returns to the ‘other planet’ and relives his horrific experience there before the eyes of the world, collapsing the distance between present and past, between ‘here’ and ‘over there’ ... K-Zetnik’s moment of collapse becomes a paradigm for the aporia of Holocaust testimony—the necessity and the impossibility of bearing witness to the ‘planet Auschwitz’.⁸

Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, ‘The Witness in the Archive: Holocaust Studies/Memory Studies’, in Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates, eds. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz (New York, NY: Fordham University, 2010), 393.

This treatment of difference between Arendt writing Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963 and Shoshana Felman’s The Juridical Unconscious from 2002 suggests that ‘the function of the testimony has also changed’.⁹

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1963); Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in Twentieth Century (Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 2002), 106–30.

Testimony had the status of an archival document and now in Felman’s treatment, the primary function of a testimony is to transmit. ‘It is no longer to bear witness to inadequately known events, but to keep them before our eyes. Testimony is to be a means of transmission to future generations’.¹⁰

Ibid., 394.

One may agree or disagree with the argument, yet one cannot deny an enhanced emphasis upon the affective dimensions inherent in this shift. This entire episode also places seeing at the centre of an experience of witnessing.

However, before deliberating upon the significance of the sight and the act of seeing in the experience of witnessing, let me briefly touch upon another key constituent factor—indeterminate location—an incomprehensibility of trauma, the way where violence is never fully known and its facets are never precisely grasped. This indeterminateness has been emphasised by Cathy Caruth who, while extending Freud’s ‘traumatic neurosis’, argues that ‘trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on’.¹¹

Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD and London: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4.

With the parable of the wound and the voice from the romantic epic analysed by Freud, Caruth says that in Freud’s writing, ‘trauma seems to be much more than a pathology; it is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available’.¹²

Ibid.

She then asks, ‘what it means to transmit and to theorize around a crisis that is marked, not by a simple knowledge, but by the ways it simultaneously defies and demands our witness’.¹³

Ibid., 5.

In this web, witnessing is constituted by three fundamental elements: an encounter with the violent event or the process resulting in the wound; an innate inability to fully comprehend the nature of such an event; and finally an utterance or a voice which can transmit such an experience. In this article, we are particularly concerned with this third aspect where the wound cries out, where an utterance takes place and where a testimony surfaces.

It is at this terrain, we have also noted an analytical journey that the testimony has undergone in the last five–six decades in terms of its primary function. Now, the task of a witness is no longer confined to merely producing and recounting what happened or the traumatic past as a faithful chronicler but also to orient this faith towards the affective and its transmission of that traumatic experience which remain incomprehensible. Thus, when Alain Resnais was commissioned to make a documentary film on Hiroshima, he refused to carry out the task with collected archival material and maintained that ‘the direct archival footage cannot maintain the very specificity of the event’. The directors, Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras, preferred a fictional story for Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) exploring ‘the possibility of a faithful history in the very indirectness of this telling’.¹⁴

Ibid., 27; Hiroshima Mon Amour. Directed by Alain Resnais. Script by Marguerite Duras. Produced by Samy Halfon and Únatole Dauman. Languages: French, Japanese and English. France and Japan, 1959.

Mobilising such analytical shifts which also led to an enhanced attention towards the affective and the act of seeing in the discussion on the act of witnessing, this article focuses upon few cases of mainstream Hindi cinematic illustrations of the Partition trauma and how this register articulates its own act of witnessing the violence and sufferings.

Partition Films

The Indian subcontinent has been partitioned many times, and political boundaries have been drawn and redrawn with the flow of time. Yet, the Partition accompanied with the freedom from the colonial rule in 1947 remains colossal, unparalleled in history and unending in its ramifications. Academic discourse on these issues is now nearly three decade old.¹⁵

For some key interventions see Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhashin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998); Sukeshi Kamra, Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence and End of the Raj (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002); Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Delhi: Viking/Penguin Books, 1998); Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

However, the literary and cinematic engagements are as old as the event itself. Lahore, a popular film starring Nargis came in as early as 1949.¹⁶

Lahore. Directed by M.L. Anand. Starring Nargis, Karan Dewan, Kuldip, Pratima Devi, Gulab and Om Prakash. Bombay: Jaimani Dewan Productions, 1949. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3xBJb6yTDg

Many Partition victims (during my field work) immediately recalled and connected with this film; perhaps due to its title reminding them of a city they left on the other side of the border. This is a vast and densely populated landscape, an archive with huge potential still untapped. It may be beyond the scope of this article to cover the diversity and vastness of the field of this scholarship; yet, it may be pertinent that there is just one monograph dedicated to Partition films to a considerable depth and with academic suave.¹⁷

Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the wake of Partition (Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010). Sarkar quite comprehensively engages with the Partition films and a perspective which he terms as ‘effective history’. He advances an understanding of both the silence and the eventual ‘return of the repressed’ as strands of one complex process. ‘For him, it was a critical project of mourning through the lens of cinema, the Indian experiences of modernity and the nationhood’. Ibid., 2.

However, we do have a number of articles which map the cinematic field as well as focus on an individual film with considerable depth.¹⁸

Dorothy Barenscott, ‘This Is Our Holocaust: Deepa Mehta’s Earth and the Question of Partition Trauma’, Mediascape, 2006. Spring, http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Spring05_ScreenAngst.pdf; Gita Viswanath and Salma Malik, ‘Revisiting 1947 through Popular Cinema: A Comparative Study of

Informed by insights from this existing literature, I would narrowly focus on the question of guilt, centrality of seeing in the act of witnessing and finally on the transformative potential inherent in this act of witnessing.

Watching/Mourning

Following Sigmund Freud, the relationship between mourning and melancholia has been visited by a number of scholars. Without going into this debate, it may be safe to say that the mourning has a therapeutic potential. In the words of Freud, ‘when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’.¹⁹

India and Pakistan’, Economic and Political Weekly 44, no. 36 (2009): 61–69; M. K. Raghavendra, ‘“Undivided India”: Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001) and Veer-Zaara (2004)’, in The Politics of Hindi Cinema in the New Millennium: Bollywood and the Anglophone Indian Nation (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 27–41; Nicola Mooney, ‘Of Love, Martyrdom, and (In)Subordination: Sikh Experience of Partition in the Films Shaheed-e-Mohabbat and Gadar: Ek Prem Katha’, in Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement, and Resettlement, eds. Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia (Delhi: Pearson Longman, 2008), 26–49; Pavitra Sundar, ‘Silence and the Uncanny: Partition in the Soundtrack of Khamosh Pani’, South Asian Popular Culture 8, no. 3 (2010): 277–90; Ranjani Mazumdar, ‘Memory and History in the Politics of Adaptation: Revisiting the Partition of India in Tamas’, in Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, eds. Robert Stam and Alessandra Raegno (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 314–28.

Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement. Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 244, http://www.arch.mcgill.ca/prof/bressani/arch653/winter2010/Freud_Mourningandmelancholia.pdf (accessed 4 August 2015). On numerous occasions, Freud has revisited the relation between mourning and melancholia yet, he always maintained that the two are quite similar to each other. For him,

[T]he distinguishing mental features of melancholia are a profoundly painful dejection, cessation of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self-regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-reviling, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.

He maintains that

[W]ith one exception, the same traits are met within mourning. The disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning; but otherwise, the features are the same. Profound mourning, the reaction to the loss of someone who is loved, contains the same painful frame of mind, the same loss of interest in the outside world—in so far as it does not recall him—the same loss to capacity to adopt new object of love (which would mean replacing him) and the same turning away from any activity that is not connected with thoughts of him.

However,

[I]n melancholia the relation to the object is no simple one; it is complicated by the conflict due to ambivalence. The ambivalence is either constitutional, i.e. is an element of every love-relation formed by this particular ego, or else it proceeds precisely from those experiences that involved that threat of losing the object. For this reason, the exciting causes of melancholia have a much wider range than those of mourning, which is, for the most part, occasioned only by a real loss of the object, by its death. (Ibid., 255)

In this linkage between the two, it is probably the guilt that differentiates between mourning and melancholy. Guilt is central to partitioned bodies too. Cinematic bodies extend, re-articulate and represent this guilt at a gigantic, larger than, life screen images and as an alibi exterior to human bodies. The relation between spectacle and the guilt though central, yet an often ignored one in the discussion. Tamas initiates us towards this direction.²⁰

Tamas (Television mini serial). Directed by Govind Nihalani. Story by Bhisham Sahni. Produced by Lalit M. Bijlani, Govind Nihalani and Freni Variava. Starring Om Puri, Bhisham Sahni and Deepa Sahi. Language: Hindi, 1987/1988.

The film begins in a small Punjabi neighbourhood of what was going to be a part of Pakistan. In the wake of Partition, communal tension surfaces and an over-enthusiastic passionate Congress worker Jarnail Singh is murdered in a melee. Earlier, Nathu (a key character brilliantly essayed by Om Puri), a butcher was introduced, in the opening shot of the film, as exhaustively trying to overpower and kill a pig for the contract given by a subordinate of a colonial administrator. With the murder of Jarnail Singh, Nathu now realises that the pig killed by him was used to inflame communal hatred between Hindus and Muslims. Seeing the horrific murder of Jarnail Singh, Nathu runs back to his home only to enter into a narrative status of homelessness.

We encounter Nathu not just portraying a fear of getting uprooted but as a body haunted by the guilt of having fallen the colonial trap; a figure whose act of killing a pig spiralled events leading to the communal hatred, death and exodus. At the end of this sequence of camera tightly tracking this guilt-ridden body, when Nathu is anxiously probed by his pregnant wife (DeepaSahi), he denies, kuch nahi hua. mane kuch nahi hua (nothing happened ... nothing has happened to me).

Directed by one of the key figures in the ‘Indian new wave’ cinema, Govind Nihalani’s Tamas is a cinematic adaptation of the novel by the same name written by Bhisham Sahni in 1971.²¹

Garam Hawa. Directed by M.S. Sathyu. Story by Ishmat Chughtai. Produced by Abu Siwani, Ishan Arya and M.S. Sathyu. Starring Balraj sahni, Farooq Shaikh and Dinanath Zutshi. Lamguages: Hindi/Urdu, 1973. For a close reading of Tamas see Mazumdar, ‘Memory and History in the Politics of Adaptation: Revisiting the Partition of India’; Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition.

The cinematic adaptation was first serialised for the television and was broadcasted by British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Though preceded by Garam Hawā, another pioneering new wave venture depicting the plight of a Muslim family from Agra in the wake of Partition, Tamas in 1987 was a ‘public media event’.²²

Mazumdar, ‘Memory and History in the Politics of Adaptation: Revisiting the Partition of India’.

The anti-Sikh riots of 1984 had reopened the old Partition wounds. Progressive scholars, academicians and civil right activists, particularly from Delhi, due to their exposure as witnesses to the brutality unleashed on the Sikh community came to a forceful realisation that the minority community of Sikhs was doubly uprooted first in 1947 and again in 1984. Many of them began excavating the long-forgotten dynamics of the Partition and a public intellectual discourse came to acquire certain visibility. In this contextual frame, surfacing of the guilt of Nathu also epitomised a return of the repressed.

Nathu leaves the house along with his pregnant wife and his old ailing mother hung precariously on his shoulders. The camera pans and we come across an archetypal scene of Exodus but before such a long panoramic shot we are faced with a screen occupying three pairs of centrally framed legs—two on the ground and one hung at a little height in the air. In this shot, we find that while the wife is the bearer of the womb or a possible future nation, the male body is the carrier of both the guilt and the responsibility of the old nation personified in terms of the hanging legs of an old mother.

Thus, in this sequence of events, we have a body running back home, his refusal to coming to terms with his own guilt before his wife and finally his exodus. Along with him, guilt travels on the cinematic screen. Just as the displacement and homelessness emerged as an unresolved and extended trope, un-reconciled guilt too remained a powerful subterranean force shaping the visual narrative across various Partition films.

Both these aspects of homelessness and guilt get accentuated through a romantic as well as stereotypical image of the past as a bountiful and prosperous territory. It is this portrayal of before and after the violence in terms of stark binary which also makes a body running back home—an ambiguous space escaping finitude of location in partitioned representations. The opening sequence of the Chhalia (1960) offers one such moment layered with meanings.²³

Chhalia. Directed by Manmohan Desai. Story by Inder Raj Ananad. Produced by Subhash Desai. Starring Raj Kapoor, Nutan, Sobhana Samarth, Rehman and Pran. Language: Hindi, 1960.

The film begins on a bridge (a potent metaphor) with a train (another powerful and evocative metaphor) rushing from right to left and cutting the frame into two uneven parts. A group of women (later on we come to know that these are abducted women) recovered from Pakistan are going from Lahore to Delhi. There are at least two kinds of distance viewers are asked to cover in two different directions: while the train goes to Delhi (India), camera directs the viewers to move towards Lahore. The train journey is long. Camera journey is smooth and short. Train journey leads us to a landscape of ruins. The camera tracks the fountain of prosperity and bullock carts full of the haystacks (symbolic of a bountiful harvest) and chirping girls exuberating youth and opulence.

The Screen as History

Directed by Manmohan Desai with an impressive star cast including Raj Kapoor, Nutan, Pran, Rehman and Shobhna Samarth, Chhalia is the story of a young wife (Nutan) and her young son separated from her husband (Rehman) and her own family. She is recovered by the Indian Government and is staying in a refugee camp in Delhi. Disowned by her parents and her husband, she attempts suicide but is saved by local pick-pocket (Raj Kapoor). Introducing the viewers to the camp life, poignantly captured also in an auto-biographical narrative by Begum Anis Kidwai in Azādiki Chhaon Main, the capital of the new nation, Delhi, is essentially reduced to a chaotic and claustrophobic campsite (a major concern for town planners and leaders in the 1950s) as well as in ruins (reminiscent of her majestic past and lost glory).²⁴

Begum Anees Kidwai, Azadi ki Chhao Me, trans. Noor Nabi Abbasi (Delhi: National Book Trust, 2000).

Symptomatic to the genre of the Partition films, Chhalia too is hugely invested in creating binary time zones: the pre-Partition prosperity is juxtaposed with post-Partition location of camps and ruins. A viewer is subtly guided to a range of scopic regimes through the camera movement and the mise-en-scène and the play with time zones remains floating at the surface of the text. Such playfulness and circulation acquires the shape of a translucent cloth screen, in one particular scene, obstructing the gaze of/over bodies, when the separated couple meets after a gap of five long years. With the camera movement, this translucent screen disappears quickly, the joy of the meeting spreads all over the frame only to be intervened by the politics of the name. Shanti (Nutan) discloses, for the first time, the presence of another body, their son, to both the viewer as well as her husband (Rehman). The husband first hugs the son but when he comes to know that his name is Anwar, disowns him.

Moving beyond the obvious and surfaced layer of this naming/identity politics operating here, I would like to point towards the ways in which certain names acquire a status larger than a proper noun. Thus, in the Partition oeuvre, we come across Shanti not merely as a proper noun but a common marker, almost as a readymade label to represent abducted Hindu women and Sakina is not just the sister of Abdur Rehman, a Pathan (Pran) in Chhalia, but also the wife of Tara Singh (Sunni Deol) in Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001) and name of the protagonist in Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s celebrated short story, Khol Do.²⁵

Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. Directed by Anil Sharma. Story by Shaktiman Talwar. Produced by Nitin Keni. Starring Sunny Deol, Amihsa Patel, Amrish Puri and Lilette Dubey. Languages: Hindi/Punjabi, 2001; Saadat Hasan Manto, ‘Khol Do’, in Dastavez II, collected and presented by Balraj Menra and Sharad Dutt (Delhi: Rajkamal, 1993), 199–202.

The mediation of nation, bodies and identities in and through names, though demands a detailed engagement beyond the scope of this essay, it also suggests the ways in which cinematic bodies respond to their own contemporary demands of their respective times.

Memories of Partition Films and Ownership of the Nation over Bodies

Film historian, Ravi Vasudevan, has analysed ‘the self-image of a new nation’ as narrated in the Indian cinema of the 1950s.²⁶

Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Dislocations: The Cinematic Imagining of a New Society in 1950s India’, Oxford Literary Review 16, no. 1 (1994): 93–124.

Films anchored on the Partition violence and sufferings, that is, Chhalia (1960), Nastik (1954) and Amar Rahe Yeh Pyar (1961) aptly suit such a narration.²⁷

Nastik. Directed by I.S. Johar. Story by I.S. Johar. Produced by Shashadhar Mukherjee. Starring Nalini Jaywant, Ajit and Ulhas, Filmistan studio, 1954; Amar Rahe Yeh Pyar. Directed by Prabhu Dayal. Story by Radha Kishan. Produced by Prabhu Dayal and Radha Kishan. Starring Rajendra Kumar, Nalini Jaywant and Nanda, R.P.Films, 1961.

The conflated image of the father with that of the nascent nation-state is quite central to such a project of nationalist reconstruction of its self-image. Particularly in the context of Awara but also suggestive for the 1950s films in general, Ravi Vasudevan remarks:

Very rarely is there a straightforward reconciliation between father and son. Instead, it is often under the law, signifying the overarching presence of the state that the hero’s legitimacy is confirmed and the point of resolution achieved. In this sense, a new patriarchal structure is put in place, aligned with the state and transcending or at least modifying the authority of the father. Thus the family narrative restores the hero, but in a social space which has been revised.²⁸

Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Dislocations: The Cinematic Imagining of a New Society in 1950s India’, Oxford Literary Review 16, no. 1 (1994): 93–24.

The authoritative presence of hero as the restorer of the order (both moral as well as social) is one such image of the father/nation-state. In Nastik, it is the question of moral dislocation, and in Chhalia, it is the restoration of new society/nation. However, I wish to push the argument further. The question of the self-image of the new nation is also a problem of owning bodies and moving away from its point of origin, its own birth. Amar Rahe Yeh Pyār disrupts this equation between patriarchal moral/social/national universe and the role of hero in the task of the nation-building.

In the first section of the film, father (hero/state; the name of the character is Anil) dies in an accident while transporting a truck full of explosives meant for some kind of construction work on a hilly track. Hearing the news of the death of her husband, the wife has a miscarriage. For the convenience of describing the plot, in brief, let us name this figure as the first mother. Simultaneously, we also find the communal tension of the Partition riots acquiring a momentum. Telephone rings mediate cinematic frames and geographic places, suggesting both the omnipresent nature of disturbance and dislocation as well as indicating the significance of modern communicational modes in spreading the riots across the locations (place names are not clear).

Iqbal Hussain (Rajendra Kumar), an advocate, is shown now as occupying the central space and as the hero with a family (wife and a newly born son). However, at no point in the narrative, he has been presented as a protector of the boy. On all the crucial moments, the boy/son is closely associated and safe guarded by the mother. Following an attack on the hero’s family, the mother manages to escape with the son. It is interesting to note that the father here, at this moment fails to tackle perpetrators who overpower him and the crowd finds the storeroom where we know that mother and son are hiding. Following this escape, the mother fails to cater to the demand of this infant son and actually leaves her son under a tree trunk near the railway line so that the first mother can find a son, as a gift of God.

The narrative progresses in such a way that we get enough indication that Iqbal Hussain and his wife are in Pakistan. They return to India, in search of their son. Again the hero, who is now a respectful and resourceful person, tries his level best without any success. On the other hand, his wife comes to know that her son is now five years old and has another mother. She quite elegantly begs for the child revealing her identity as the one who has given birth. The present (first) mother initially refuses but eventually hands over the child to the second mother. All these transactions remain restricted between the two mother figures without any effective presence of the father. In the climax, the son goes not to the (second) mother who has given birth but to the (first) mother who has been nurturing him for the last five years.

The contest over the ownership and efforts to recover abducted, left out and lost bodies as we have seen in Chhalia and Amar Rahe Yeh Pyār, can be perceived as a dominant and overarching theme of the Partition films in the 1950s. Lahore (1949) is a similar story in which the female protagonist, Nargis, was abducted in Lahore during the Partition violence when her lover was away living and studying in Bombay. The lover, the hero not only helps a woman to return to Pakistan and find her lost family but also makes a trip to Lahore, locates his own beloved (Nargis, who is now the wife of someone else), convinces her and finally escapes back to India along with her. In the 1950s, this narrative trope of loss and recovery largely revolved around lover-beloved or between husband–wife and son.

In the cinematic memory, however, a more interesting relationship and psychologically layered one has been kept alive over the last sixty years. In a great blockbuster, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001), it is about an infamous relationship (in terms of social stereotypes) between damad (son in law) and sasur (father in law) over the proximity with or control over the wife and daughter. In this movie, not merely the hero (Sunny Deol) goes to Pakistan to recover his beloved, but in this task of recovery, the young son also travels to Lahore. In alternate reading possibilities, one may replace hero with the figure of a lover or father of a son or husband or the personified state itself. Similarly, in this parallel universe of meanings, we can alternate the beloved with the mother of hero’s son, wife or territory. For a whole generation of the Partition victims, the film refreshed and reanimated the memory of Lahore (mentioned earlier), which people had seen just after the Partition and which was based on a similar plot.

Gadar’s release coincided with my fieldwork and on many occasions, the film became a reference point to approach potential respondents and for convincing them about the significance of the archive building project and usefulness of sharing their life histories with me. In that milieu, Gadar motivated seventy-eight-year-old dada–dadis to go to cinema halls with third-fourth generation kids. Such cinema going ventures, I was told during my conversations, made their granddaughters and grandsons inquisitive about sufferings and dislocations caused to their grandfathers and grandmothers due to the Partition. In this manner, one may say that Gadar opened up possibilities of trans-generational dialogue within families. Memories and amnesias were revisited on specific and very soon on regular requests from kids. Kids started engaging themselves with their dada and dadis asking for details of the pre-Partition life. Obviously in most of the cases, as in the case of Chhalia, it was a land of plenteousness.

Gadar as a more recent illustration of creating a context for the social engagement with the nation’s memory/forgetfulness, then, also pushes one to ponder about the status of this memory/amnesia in these post-Partition decades. The question is how has the cinematic terrain, constitutive of Partition films, travelled and changed in this period? Here, one needs to place each of these cinematic texts, that centrally deals with the Partition and its aftermath, in their own producing contexts and to analyse how these texts dialogue with other registers of cultural practices and their respective sociopolitical demands. What is also needed is to analyse the ways in which these demands get addressed by the body of the cinema. This would be a mammoth exercise and certainly goes beyond the scope of this essay. Yet, to put it conjecturally and schematically, in all three films of the 1950s and early 1960s which are mentioned here, the cinematic register was clearly addressing the need for relocation, re-adaptation of abducted women and the ownership issues of new bodies of the citizenry.

By the time of Tamas, this whole object of social engagement disappeared (this argument obviously does not stand for a more popular and intellectually less explored text of a television serial Buniyād, which was first telecast in 1986 and which too narrated the story of the Partition affected family).²⁹

Buniyād (Television serial). Directed by Ramesh Sippy and Jyoti Sarup. Produced by G.P. Sippy. Story by Manohar Shyam Joshi. Casts Alok Nath, Anita Kanwar and Sudhir Pandey. Language: Hindi, 1986.

The cinematic language and techniques have also undergone massive change since 1950s and shift in the visual rendering of trauma must be taken in consideration. In terms of soundscapes, use of documentary mode and narrative strategies or in terms of the deployment of cinematic language, one can see the shifting contours of this cinematic landscape.³⁰

For example, Barenscott has argued for a resemblance of filmic strategies in Deepa Mehta’s Earth 1947 and films on Holocaust. She argues that

Earth, at some level, is engaging with filmic strategies that simultaneously occur within the conventions of melodrama to signal the excesses of what is being represented while also employing the use of stereotypically ‘Holocaust’ sequences to signal the severity of what is being shown. Notably, while these comparisons are also due to the staging of events at roughly the same period in history, where costumes, technologies (such as the train and radio), and social practices can overlap, what I am arguing is that these scenes carry even more force because of the doubling up of the episodes of Partition with the filmic vocabulary of the Holocaust. (Barenscott, ‘This Is Our Holocaust: Deepa Mehta’s Earth and the Question of Partition Trauma’, 10.)

In the movies of recent decades, that is, Gadar, Train to Pakistan, Earth: 1947 and Pinjar, I argue that an engagement with the social body is almost absent.³¹

Train to Pakistan. Directed by Pamela Rooks. Story based on Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh. Produced by R.V. Pandit, Ravi Gupta and Bobby Bedi. Starring Nirmal Pandey, Smriti Mishra, Rajit Kapur and Mohan Agashe. Language: Hindi, 1998; Earth: 1947. Directed by Dipa Mehta. Produced by Anne Masson and Deepa Mehta. Story by Deepa Mehta, based on Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa, Casts Amir Khan, Maiya Sethna and Nandita Das. Languages: Hindi/Urdu, 1998; Pinjar. Directed by Chandra Prakash Dwivedi. Story by Amrita Pritam. Casts Urmila Matondkar, Manoj Bajpai and Sanjay Suri. Languages: Hindi/Punjabi, 2003.

The family or love affair is mediated directly either with the ‘supra community’ or community concerns turn out to be humanitarian or religious. The body of the mass or the crowd in these texts appears before us primarily at ceremonial occasions or at the moments of crisis. The engagement with the mass is both restricted and properly marked.

Returning to the repressed, to the question of the guilt, the problem I am trying to address is not who carries the memory but how this act of carrying the memory/guilt/suffering has its own history. In other words, how cinematic bodies can reveal the traces of its own changing forms.

I argue that these changing forms, on the one hand, are influenced by certain intellectual discourses and popular expectations and on the other hand it is the changing dimension of the memory/forgetfulness that transforms its own cinematic representations. However, before coming to this complicated journey of Partition films, let me briefly touch upon the ways in which this memory gets fractured by the politics of gender.

In almost all the Partition movies, the violence shapes and transforms male and female characters differently but in a particular gendered pattern. At the surface, where the meaning production is the most germane and appealing, it seems that while male and female both bodies bear the pain and carry traumatic memories in one or another form, only male bodies give an overt statement to it. Female bodies often suffer silently allowing cinematic language its own play of field. A flip side of this gendered division of pain is that we never find a woman as a carrier of the guilt. The violence is scripted over the female body making the male guilty. The sole ownership of this guilt by male body further complicates the matter as it is easier to infer that he who has an exclusive right to be guilty also has an exclusive authority over the female body and its pleasure.

As I have pointed out earlier, the cinematic landscape of the Partition has also changed over the years. The only example where the guilt is owned not by any male body is Earth: 1947. The guilt here is owned by a female protagonist who also doubles as the anchor-narrator. In the film, we find that in the penultimate scene, in a heightened atmosphere of communal frenzy, the house of the Parsee protagonist Lenny is attacked. People from Hindu and Sikh communities were searched and falling into the trap of cunningness of the ice-candy-man (Aamir Khan), young girl Lenny, the narrator, revealed the hideout of her nanny (Nandita Das). She believed that the ice-candy-man had actually come to protect her Ayah. Her judgement went terribly wrong and the ice-candy-man betraying her trust passed the information to the gathered crowd who took the nanny along with them.³²

The novel Ice-Candy-Man captures this betrayal with the following passage: ‘Ice-candy-man’s face undergoes a subtle change before my eyes, and as he slowly uncoils his lank frame into an upright position, I know I have betrayed Ayah’ (Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-Man, 182).

With the abduction, the narrative of mass violence came to a closure leaving the multiplicity of the violent aftermath to be anticipated and to be picked up by the viewers from the maze of rumours and facts (it may be worth pointing out that unlike the cinema, in the novel, the story travels and does not come to a halt with this abduction). With a jump cut, the narrative traverses the entire time span and the camera lands at the contemporary. The film ends at an unusual yet a poignant location. The site is the contemporary dilapidated Coronation Park with marble busts of British emperors and rows of empty platforms in the company of Babool trees. This is in the vicinity of a village named Burari on the outskirts of old Delhi. In cinematic language, the empire is portrayed and ruined. The narrator confirms in her voice that the empire ended in 1947. In the very next line, she adds ‘fifty years have gone by since I betrayed my Ayah ... And that day in 1947 when I lost Ayah, I lost a large part of myself’. In this last shot, the mise-en-scène suggests that the guilt is not even owned by her but by the history or probably by the text itself. This is also probably the only text, in the context of the Partition films, where the cinema ends but guilt continues.

Conclusion

Once you see suffering

even the basic bits that make up everything,

you won’t be born again,

calm is how you will live

once you discard the desire for more lives.³³

Charles Hallisey, trans., Therigatha: Poems of the First Buddhist Women (London and Massachusetts: Murty Classical Library of India and Harvard University Press, 2015), 13.

The moment of betrayal to the Ayah by the ice-candy-man and by the narrator child, Lenny is an exemplary example. Both in the film as well as in the novel, this moment is constituted not merely through the storyline but also on the affective sphere through a dense visual communication, through a series of exchange of looks and point of view shots.

We have earlier noted a ‘subtle change before’ the eyes of Lenny when the ice-candy-man revealed his hidden intention of not protecting the Ayah but to hand her over to the crowd. This was followed by two characters Adi and Papoo looking at her ‘out of stunned faces. There is no judgement in their eyes—no reproach—only stone-faced incredulity’.³⁴

Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice-Candy-Man (Delhi: Penguin, 1989), 183.

The narrator goes on: ‘The last thing I noticed was Ayah, her mouth slack and piteously gaping, her dishevelled hair flying into her kidnappers’ faces, staring at us as if she wanted to leave behind her wide-open and terrified eyes’.³⁵

Ibid., 184.

Eyes tracking the narrator/witness are unnerving. Here, the interlocking of looks creates an affective landscape, which far exceeds its immediate and apparent subjects. There is a sense of unending and lack of closure. This exchange is also extraordinary when we get out of the affective zones created by the novel and the film. This leads us to what Hesford has termed in a different context as a ‘crisis of witnessing’.³⁶

Wendy S. Hesford, ‘Documenting Violations: Rhetorical Witnessing and the Spectacle of Distant Suffering’, Biography 27, no. 1 (2004), Personal Effects: The Testimonial Uses of Life Writing (Winter): 104–44.

To explain this point, let me go to a conversation in which the author Bapsi Sidhwa says:

[T]he first part of the novel is autobiographical except that the central character of the child was not me per se. I had to create some distance between the child Lenny and myself as a child. Otherwise, I would not have been able to write so freely. I made her a much more defiant and feisty child. Also, this child is informed by my adult consciousness ... I had no such Ayah either. But we did have servants like Imam Din and Yusuf (emphasis added).³⁷

Bapsi Sidhwa and Preeti Singh, ‘My Place in the World’, Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 18 (Post-colonial Discourse in South Asia 1998): 290–98.

Thus, the consciousness that bears witness to the act of betrayal as well as the figure which is betrayed and violated are fictive traces. In such a scenario, the obvious question is how to factor betrayal, an important component in the social suffering caused by mass violence? How to analyse when the act of witnessing is no longer about remaining faithful to the archival documentation but about the faithful transmission of the affective? Precisely, for this shift in the idea of witnessing, (which we briefly touched upon in the beginning of this essay), the author Bapsi Sidhwa’s statement pertaining to infusing the adult consciousness in the character of a child witness and her fictive representation of a victim and betrayed figure of Ayah becomes a complex one.

At one level, one may dismiss such statements as irrelevant as cinema and the novel which are fictional representations themselves cannot be analysed and judged on indexical values of what happened from a positivist perspective. With an entire epistemic shift owing allegiances to post-structural concerns, a text (both in the sense of a novel and in the manner of a methodological field) cannot be pitted against what the author says and what archive informs. Yet, as a researcher, who is not merely concerned about literary criticism, can I ignore Bapsi Sidhwa’s conversation and references about adult consciousness and the figure of the Ayah as a mere figment of her imagination?

It is at this level, from a researcher’s point of view, we find that the act of betrayal circulates in a rather uncomplicated manner in the Partition representations. During the fieldwork, respondents voiced definite understanding of who betrayed though many of them had ambivalent positions on why they betrayed. Betrayal in these two senses meant who were the perpetrators and why did the violence break out? In responses, which had crystallised understanding of who attacked, even there, they felt that the community betrayed rather than any specific individual belonging to the other faith betrayed them. Here, one may judiciously argue that it may not be appropriate to conflate the figure of the perpetrator with the betrayer. The purpose is to suggest that in the responses coming from the field and the oral archive, aggressors, attackers and perpetrators were unknown, unidentified and unfamiliar members of the crowd, people who came from outside the villages and neighbourhoods. In such a scenario, Partition victims never felt betrayed by people from other community within their villages and neighbourhoods with whom they had shared a long relationship and who were known to them. In fact, the scholarship on the Partition has tirelessly documented and emphasised cases when people from other community saved lives and protected families taking a huge risk. Here, I must clarify that we do have a number of examples when the abductor married the victim and both came to know each other subsequently and came to live together for the rest of their lives.³⁸

Also refer, Veena Das, ‘The Act of Witnessing: Violence, Gender, and Subjectivity’, in Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary by Veena Das (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 59–78.

Partition films coming from the 1950s are in sync with this oral archive and we do not come across cases of betrayal. In other words, neither betrayal nor violence is personified and identified in the oral archive and the films of the 1950s. Informed thus, we are left wondering why the author mobilised an ‘adult consciousness’ and gave a face to the act of betrayal? Or, keeping in mind our own analytical frame and the epistemic shift in looking at the act of witnessing, we may reframe the question and ask, what this shift from the 1950s film and the one coming from the 1990s (Earth 1947) tell us about the distance travelled on the celluloid? If the witnessing is about coming to terms with the trauma and an attempt to comprehend the violence inflicted upon human bodies as well as simultaneously about an outcry of the wound (as we saw with the help of Caruth and Hiroshima Mon Amour), then, is personification of the betrayer an index of this travelled distance on the landscape of affectivity?

By infusing the child Lenny with the mind of a grown-up, have we not disrobed her innocence, her faith in love, her worldview of comprehending violence and trauma, her own agency as a witness and therefore have we not betrayed her?

An adult consciousness in a child’s look or a particular fashioning of the look then also brings us back to our earlier discussion on the centrality of seeing in the act of witnessing. The core question is how does an eye witness get affected by an encounter with violence and suffering? Or, what happens to an eye when it sees suffering as foundational to the making of life, in our case in the making of the cinematic landscape of the Partition where suffering is not merely foundational but also at the surface? Here, we are reminded of a verse of a Buddhist Theri, Sumana with which we began this section. The verse directly leads us to transformational potential of seeing and witnessing the suffering, the point with which we began our engagement with the act of witnessing.

The transformational potential of seeing pain has been at the core of Buddhist history. In many ways, it is in the origin myth of Buddhism as the prince Siddhartha began his spiritual journey due to a chance encounter of scenes of suffering and pain on the street when he saw an old man, a diseased man, a decaying corpse and an ascetic. Similarly, we are told that the king Ashoka underwent a complete transformation after seeing the brutality of the war at Kalinga and adopted the policy of non-violence in the form of Dhamma. One may provide other examples when seeing pain can lead to renunciation and thinking about the immateriality of the life. In these cases, we find that in the eye of a witness, an act of violence may generate experiences which are similar to those which come from poetic experience (which too fundamentally demonstrates a tendency to escape the logical and leads towards undefined and ambiguous). These encounters exceed the logic of comprehension and thereby meaning too. This also brings poetry and tragedy not merely close but fundamentally connected to each other. In Sanskrit, the example of Valmiki comes effortlessly who is also widely celebrated as the first poet. When pained by the killing of mating birds, he spontaneously burst out with a verse:

mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhā tvamagamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ

yat krauñcamithunādekam avadhīḥ kāmamohitam (Ramayana, Book 1, Chapter 2)

(You will find no rest for the long years of eternity

For you killed a bird in love and unsuspecting)³⁹

William Buck, Ramayana: King Rama’s Way: Valmiki’s Ramayana Told in English Prose (London: New American Library, 1978), 5.

Just as poetic aesthetics never exhaust meanings, witnessing as an act can never be fully comprehensible. This quality of witnessing (as has been suggested by Caruth and mentioned earlier) and the poetic registers coming from Buddhist and Sanskrit aesthetic traditions then converge to take us into a zone of the affective where we are less concerned about the production of meanings and are more attentive about the revelation of emotions and inner conscience.⁴⁰

Here, I refer to the direction of what aesthetician Abhinavagupta has pointed as a core characteristic of the poetic. This is the power of suggestion (vyanjkatvai) or more literally the power of revelation. For Abhinavagupta, this power in its pure form is dhvani. Daniel H.H. Ingalls, 'Introduction', in The Dhvanyaloka of Anandvardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta, eds. Daniel H.H. Ingalls, Jeffrey Moussaiff Masson and M.V. Patwardhan, Harvard Oriental Series (Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1990), 14. Raniero Gnoli informs us that Abhinavagupta, the commentator of Dhvanyaloka writes:

Aesthetical experience takes place, as everyone can notice, by virtue, as it were, of the squeezing out of the poetical word … a poem, indeed does not lose its value after it has been comprehended. The words in poetry must, therefore, have an additional power, that of suggestion, and for this very reason the transition from the conventional meaning to the poetic one is unnoticeable. Raniero Gnoli, The Aesthetic Experience According to Abhinavagupta, Chowkhamba Sanskrit Studies, LXII (Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office, 1985), XXXII.

I argue that it is this aesthetic capacity to reveal rather than to produce meanings which the affective field aims at when we talk about a shift from the archival to transmitting functions of witnessing in cinematic experiences of trauma.

The earlier cited verse of a theri then also decentres our approach to witnessing which as a trope has a definite Judaeo-Christian lineage. Scholarly interventions and insights, I have mobilised, here in this article, also come from this terrain. Except, Veena Das, all these references come from Holocaust experience and one may legitimately argue that the experiences of trauma and witnessing in Holocaust and the Partition differ substantially as both are shaped by their own spatial and sociocultural specificities. One can, then, also deliberate upon such features in support of the argument. Along with an emphasis upon historical particularities, one may also point towards semantic conundrums in using the trope of witnessing in the sub-continental milieu. A possible route, in the wake of such anticipated criticism, would be to chart an alternative history of witnessing and search for its archaeology as well as for its exposition and expiation as an analytical category. This exercise is merely a beginning in that direction.