‘In East Pakistan, Partition was seen as a good thing’

Film scholar Moinak Biswas, who participated in the Katha Film Festival here recently, tells DNA that for poor Bangladeshi Muslims, Partition meant land to the tiller.

Partition, which severed the subcontinent, has largely been swallowed up by a deafening silence in Indian cinema and literature. Of course, there is Garm Hawa, the films of Ritwik Ghatak and Pinjar in cinema, and the writings of Saadat Hasan Manto, Bhisham Sahni and Khushwant Singh in literature, among others.

But its expression has been muted, compared to the extent of the Indian Holocaust—one million dead and 12 million displaced. But film scholar Moinak Biswas, former head of the film studies department of Jadavpur University, Kolkata, who recently presented Ghatak’s Subarnarekha as part of the Katha Film Festival in the city, points out, “Not everybody sees Partition as a traumatic event.”

While the nation’s attention has largely focussed on the Partition of West Pakistan, Biswas refers to the Partition of Bengal —the ‘overlooked Partition.’ “It is true more Muslims died than Hindus in the Partition of Bengal,” he says.

“But in East Pakistan, many of the Hindus were landowners. And according to scholars like Partho Chatterjee, with Partition, there was expropriation of land by the tillers, leading to an agrarian revolution. The Bangladeshi poet al Mahmood even says, ‘Partition was a good thing.’ It is mainly the Hindus who were traumatised and so don’t want to talk about it. But for a generation of poor Muslim tillers, it was an escape from a life spent behind the plough.”

A number of Bollywood stalwarts, including B R Chopra, G P Sippy, Sunil Dutt and Rajendra Kumar were
directly affected by Partition, yet what explains the relative silence in mainstream Hindi cinema? “Mainstream cinema in Hindi and Bengali have dealt with Partition, but often indirectly, as the film scholar Bhaskar Sarkar observed,” says Biswas.

“There are films dealing with scarring or separation, that are metaphors for Partition. Raj Kapoor’s Aag is about a man in love with a girl who is scarred. I S Johar’s  Nastik, Manmohan Desai’s Chhalia and Yash Chopra’s Dharmputra referred to Partition. Yash Chopra’s Waqt has three brothers separated by an earthquake who meet again. By the ’70s, the brothers’ separation and reunion theme had become a formula, as in Amar Akbar Anthony. Recently, of course, there was Pinjar, among others.”

According to Biswas, theatre and film responses to Partition in Bengal were localised and vernacular, and so not widely known. “There was Nabarag and Bipasha. The latter, starring Uttam Kumar-Suchitra Sen, he points out, “connects both the Partitions: the heroine is from Pakistan, the hero is a dam engineer here, and she seeks out his mother, who was lost to the family. Of course there is Ritwik Ghatak’s trilogy on the Partition—Meghe Dhaka Tara, Komal Gandhar and Subarnarekha. Ghatak was ousted from the Communist Party of India, mainly for criticising its cultural policy.”

Is the passionate engagement with culture among ordinary people in Kerala and Bengal influenced by the communist governments there? “Certainly. In Bengal, there is a modernity in our vernacular culture that we defend,” he says.

“Tagore is a great modern author. Till a decade ago, the middle class usually sang Rabindrasangeet or Nazrulgeeti and looked down on you if you sang Hindi film songs. Middle class culture is tied up with left-wing ideology. The Communist Party also promoted cultural modernism—the IPTA movement had a huge impact. The CPI(M) has been in power 30 years and has a mass base. This is why our urban middle class cinema is led not by Prosenjit starrers from Tollygunge, but more by a director like Rituparno Ghosh.”
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