FROM the time talkies replaced silent movies to the period when television invaded our living rooms, cinema reigned supreme as the prime source of entertainment for the public. The Urdu / Hindi cinema, with its core audience based in the north and central subcontinent, extended its empire wherever the growing diaspora made its appearance.

Generally speaking, this genre of cinema with its excessive dose of song and dance, not to speak of the never-ending subject of romance, has been considered escapist entertainment. But one does occasionally discover mature themes in movies produced in the sister languages. Even in what has been called popular cinema by high-brow critics, one can see overt or covert references to problems that plague Pakistan and India. I am tempted to clarify that anything which is popular need not be pedestrian. K. Asif’s magnum, Mughal-e-Azam, for instance, did record-breaking business but it was, in every department of film-making, a superb film. It goes to the credit of film historian Ashok Raj that in his latest book, Cinema that Heals, he identifies the divisive factors in the region as well as the healing touch that some movies have provided over the decades. He delves deep into history and digs out some pearls which even ardent cinema goers often ignore.

A case in point is V. Shantaram’s now forgotten film Padosi (1941), which stands as one of the earliest cinematic attempts to portray the gap that often emerges between the two major communities of the subcontinent, the Hindus and the Muslims. It deals with two villagers, an upper-caste Hindu and a Muslim, who despite religious differences live like one family. There is no boundary wall between their houses, which is why women and children, like the families’ livestock and birds, are free to move from one house to another. But a narration, be it in a film or a novel, has to have a conflict and so does Padosi. However, as it usually happens near the end, the conflict is resolved and misunderstandings cleared.

Shantaram’s equally accomplished contemporary, Mehboob Khan, showed mutual respect that the Mughals and the Rajputs enjoyed in Humayun. The Rajputs and the Mughals were symbols of Hindus and Muslims in the historical movie.

A similar theme runs through Yash Chopra’s debut film, Dhool Ka Phool (1959), which tackles the subjects of religious differences and problems faced by unwedded mothers with a lot of maturity. The heart-provoking song, ‘Tu Hindu banega na Musalman banega / Insan ki aulad hai insane banega,’ beautifully worded by Sahir Ludhianvi and rendered with depth of feeling by Mohammed Rafi, is central to the theme.

Two years later Chopra’s movie Dharmputra, based on a Hindi novel by Acharya Chatursen Shastri, presented the theme of Hindu-Muslim love-hate relationship with no less heartrending treatment.

Post-Partition riots that erupted in India have been tackled often in recent years but two films treated the subject with great sensitivity and so merit a mention. The first is director Aparna Sen’s Mr and Mrs Iyer (2002). The haunting movie narrates the story of a young South Indian Brahmin mother who is travelling with her infant child in a bus that is to take her from a hill station in West Bengal to Kolkata, where she lives with her husband. Just before the commencement of the journey the parents of the woman meet a wildlife photographer whose surname is Chowdhry. He is taken to be Hindu by everyone. It is shortly after the odyssey begins that Mrs Iyer discovers that her fellow traveller is a Muslim. She refuses to share a glass with him but when Hindu mobsters attack the bus, she tells them that the man sitting next to her is her husband. But sadly, the elderly Muslim couple on the bus is not spared. Sen does not show the gory scenes but conveys the killing by showing a close up of the old man’s broken glasses lying outside the bus.The other is Firaq (2008), directed by actor Nandita Das. It shows the carnage of Muslims in Ahmedabad in 2002. The film is touching and based on facts, which is why the movie was not allowed to be screened in Gujarat.

Raj also catalogues and discusses films which have characters belonging to religions other than Islam and Hinduism, such as Christians, Sikhs and Parsis. The idea behind such films is to show the composite and pluralistic culture of India, which quite often is threatened. As a Pakistani, I can’t expand on the subject because conditions in this country are just as bad, sometimes even worse.Raj writes at length about movies that dealt with the theme of Partition. At a time when men turned into beasts, there were still incidents of help from the most unexpected quarters. It would be worth watching films in this genre such as Train to Pakistan, Pinjar, Tamas, 1947 — Earth and the highly moving, Garam Hawa. It’s a pity that Raj did not get to see yet another touching film — Saifuddin Saif’s Kartar Singh, which was based on Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi’s classic short story ‘Parmeshwar Singh’. It is the story of a Sikh tonga driver who, risking his own life, rescues a Muslim boy who had been separated from his parents before they could cross the newly-carved border in the Punjab of August 1947.

However, one movie from our part of the subcontinent, which Raj mentions in detail, is Mehreen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani (2008). It is a take-off from a real-life story when two Hindu Dalits, father and pre-teenage son, stray into Indian territory and are arrested by members of the Indian Border Security Force. They are thrown into a jail, where they share cramped space with many others who had erringly crossed the ill-defined border. Suffering no less is Champa, played convincingly by the Indian actress Nandita Das, who misses her husband and their son. The three are eventually united but not before they pass through very difficult times.

Set in the same locales are two Indian films, made by Vinod Ganatra, which somehow missed Raj’s attention. The first movie is Heda-Hoda, which is about an Indian boy who, in pursuit of his blind camel, enters into Sindh. Like Ramchand Pakistani, this film also has a happy ending, if one may use a convenient cliché.

Ganatra’s Arun-Harun, in simple Gujarati, was made primarily for kids, which is why it has a simple narration and clear cut characters. This equally worth-watching film is about an old man who sneaks with his paternal grandson to his village in Kutch, which he had left following Partition. His intense desire to meet his married daughter and his friends in what is now India forces him to take the risk.

All three movies are rich in human appeal and have won awards at international film festivals. Maybe in the next edition of his highly commendable book, the author would comment on Ganatra’s movies. He may also try to get a DVD of Kartar Singh, which did quite well when it was released in Delhi way back in the early 1960s. It is arguably the best Punjabi film made so far.

The reviewer is the co-author of the book Tales of Two Cities

Cinema that Heals

(Film Studies)

By Ashok Raj

Hay House India, New Delhi

ISBN 978-81-89988-28-9

263pp.