Earth shocks us into awareness
By Aradhika Sekhon

IN the recent past, films on Partition have been few and far between. Pamela Rooks, presented Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan on celluloid. In fact, it was a slight disappointment following the hype that preceded it. Tamas, directed by Govind Nihlani, was hard-hitting and realistic. It set a standard for movies on Partition.

Deepa Mehta’s treatment of this theme leaves one with a feeling of disquiet and disturbance. Not only does it deal with the tumultuous times but also strips away the veneer of civilisation that man hides behind. The film holds up a mirror to the savagery latent in most human beings. It seems, a stressful situation reveals the animal streak just waiting to be unleashed. This is made all the more strong by the support of a mob, feeding on hatred.

Mehta’s film deals with human emotions at various levels, heightened by the turbulent times. In the process, human relationships get negated. Indeed, the very core changes when love, friendship and humanity, get swept away before the tidal wave of hatred.

Like some ancient Satanic rites of witchcraft, the power to destroy springs forth from an unsuspected fount within and the sheer pleasure of humiliating and massacring the victim is so great that one forgets one’s own mortality!

Mehta has gathered a tremendous cast for the picturisation of Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man — Rahul Khanna, Nandita Das, Raghuvir Yadav, Pawan Malhotra, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Kitu Gidwani, Arif Zakaria, the little girl who plays the role of the Parsi girl Lenny and the coup d’ casting — the inimitable Aamir Khan, whose performance says Mehta "is to die for ".

Mehta has had to limit the characters in Sidhwa’s book for as Sidhwa says "it took me sometime to realise that Deepa could not have had all the characters I had in my book. Then it would have been a mini-series. Continues she, "I gave away my baby to her in full trust. And she had made an honest, beautiful, splendid and touching film".

Many performers in the film have short cameo roles but Mehta has in a few firm, swift strokes, been able to delineate their antecedents and characters effectively, adding to the authenticity of the time of narration. Thus we meet the kindly Khansama, the fiery Muslim rebel, the faithful Khalsa who refuses to leave Lahore till the end, Totaramji, the frightened Hindu and the Parsi family which desperately clings on to its neutrality for survival. The main characters are played by Nandita Das, the ayah who takes ‘Lenny baba’ for evening walks to the Company Bagh where she is surrounded by her admirers. The ayah is a simple, yet provocative woman, flirting with her admirers but yet is instinctively repelled by unrecognised evil. Rahul Khanna plays the massage-wala, an adoring paramour of ayah, who is willing to convert for the sake of her love. The role of little girl Lenny is truly and beautifully played. This girl is struck by polio but is comfortable and happy in her secure world. The observant and astute Lenny appears in every frame. In fact, the film is her reminiscence in retrospect. Although promoted as the Partition "seen through a little girl’s eyes," it is not really so, for it is the adult perception of what the eight-year-old girl lived through many years ago!

The pivotal role is of the raffish Ice-Candy Man, played by Aamir Khan. Dil-Nawaz personifies the times he is living through. Charming, attractive, immensely, amusing and popular, he is neither a bad person nor a religious fanatic. Then one incident occurs which wrenches out his darker side and he becomes a different man. On the threshold of a letting go, he appeals to ayah "there’s an animal inside me straining to break free. Marry me and perhaps it will be contained." The ultimate betrayal is not by the innocent trusting little girl but by the devil of hatred that cannot be contained.

The horror of the Partition riots is brought forth in a few tense, terrifying scenes. The rumblings of Partition are felt in the beginning of the film and suddenly the world erupts in the worst ever massacre in the history of the world. One is catapulted back in time as the train from India, full of massacred bodies, chugs into the station slowly, ominously. The lust for blood as a man is ripped apart, the dumb fear of the Hindus who either have to flee or convert, the helplessness and bewilderment of people who’d been dwelling in Lahore for generations and the immense, impersonal power of the mob. And from these painful birth-throes the birth of a new nation, India.

Partition is that dreadful chapter in history that Indians seem to want to forget but Mehta has reached into the gut of the problem and brought us face to face with the horrifying birth.