This is one of the most provocative books to be published in recent years on Indian film. Although I already had seen most of the films that Bhaskar Sarkar writes about, his sophisticated insights reveal a lot about their themes pertaining to the partition of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. In many ways, the book is an eye-opener, even though I have my own disagreements and quibbles.
Sarkar divides his pathbreaking study into two major parts, bracketing them with his detailed introduction and a final brief “coda.” In part I, he devotes two chapters to analyzing the Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s, and a third chapter provides an overview of popular Bengali films. In part II, in the first chapter, he returns to some key partition films such as Nastik, Chhalia, and Dharmaputra, and then moves on to present Ritwik Ghatak films (the best part of the book), and then some recent films of the last two decades, such as Tamas, Gadar, Pinjar, Naseem, and Way Back Home.
In his introduction, Sarkar lays out his theoretical framework and the overall plan for the book with his personal experiences dealing with the partition of Bengal. My minor quibbles are with some of his points in this part of the book. Sarkar treats South Asia as a monolithic entity—as if India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh were proverbially “separated at birth,” a topic of several Hindi films, only waiting to be united in the happy ending. Much has changed since 1947 in all of these countries. While India continues to become a stronger nation (democratically, economically, technologically, and even cinematically with the global spread of “Bollywood”), Pakistan and Bangladesh seem to be following an opposite path of downfall on all accounts.
Such differences in these South Asian countries cannot be ignored in a project such as Sarkar's. For instance, he notices the “effective demotion of minorities to second-class citizenship” (p. 17). The fact that the religious nationalism project failed in India while it gained strength in Pakistan and Bangladesh once again highlights the differences in South Asia more than the uniformities. Elsewhere, he blames the Indian film industry for being a puppet in “the manipulation by the ruling bloc against minority interest” (p. 26), but then goes on to note in other places quite the opposite—that most films of the 1950s and 1960s in fact celebrated Nehruvian secularism, especially as progressive writers and filmmakers led the film industry when they all migrated to Bombay in the aftermath of the partition.
Surprisingly, Sarkar cites Faiz (p. 42), but not even a single mention of writers such as Sahir, Mazrooh, and Kaifi, who celebrated secularism in several of their songs. It is the latter group of writers whom Indians have enjoyed in their films, not Faiz, who never wrote for Indian films and whose influence is limited to the Urdu literary circles. Far from being a puppet of the government, Indian films criticized the ruling bloc even in the 1950s and 1960s, as even Sarkar acknowledges (p. 74) with his examples of films such as Amar (1954) and Naya Daur (1957).
I would argue that the Indian nation-state rarely, if ever, “mourned” itself, as the title of Sarkar's book suggests. The immediate mourning after 1947 was largely limited to the families directly affected, such as Hindus and Muslims in Bengal; Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in Punjab; and Muslims in other northern provinces of India. The trauma or mourning that Sarkar chooses to focus on in his project seems a bit far-fetched when imagined as a “national” experience. At several places (pp. 15, 29) Sarkar connects all of the religious violence in India to the single event of partition, which is again problematic. Similarly, linking the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai and other Indian cities to the partition is problematic. The rise of global terrorists organizations such as al-Qaeda has a much bigger role to play in global terrorist attacks than a singular event of partition, as I would argue.
My disagreements aside, this book will be a great asset in undergraduate and graduate courses on South Asian films or South Asian history. A great strength of the book is Sarkar's taking into account the debates about “religion” (p. 25) and “secularism” (pp. 14, 75) in India. He also notes the distinctive elements of Indian cinematic portrayal and experience, which is different from the Western style of filmmaking and film watching (p. 26). Other highlights of the book are excellent summaries and allegorical readings of lesser-known films such as Shabnam (1948), some of which are still not available in DVD format.
