At The Edge

Originally written for EPW Blog While Indian cinema of 1950s is mostly blank on the subject of Partition, poet Saifuddin Saif’s Kartar Singh (1959), a Punjabi film from Pakistan is perhaps the best specimen in which we can see the way Partition was explored in moving pictures by a generation that had been recently and directly impacted by the events of 1947. The story is set in a village where Sikh, Hindus and Muslims are a well-knit unit. The world outside is slowly getting more violent (in the first scene we see local Hindu medicine man Vaid Prem Nath reading the news aloud and wondering about the sorry state of the world) but the village is an island of peace where words of Waris Shah sung by the local mendicant still bring solace to souls of worrying kind. The only sign of trouble in the village is a rakish young Sikh man named Kartar Singh, the antagonist from whom the film gets its name. Kartar Singh is introduced to the viewers as he attempts to abduct a young woman in th...

Ritwik Ghatak's Subarnarekha (1962) -0- Subarnarekha (1962) is often described as Ritwik Ghatak's critique of Partition but that is just an understatement. There is a lot more actually happening in the film. A lot more that is said without being said. The film is in fact Ghatak's meditation on human beings and their condition under cyclic churning wheels of history. It about people going through same deceptive loops over and over again. According to the film, the wheel of history is mechanised, predictable. People would go through the same story over and over again. Failures leading to hopes, false hopes and fallen hopeless people getting up and and running again towards the golden shore, beyond which lies a paradise. We only make fresh mistakes with every fresh beginning. The cycles forever going. In the first few minutes of the film the directors lays before us the process by which the film will emphasis this cyclic churning of history....

A Muslim As "Krishna"! I cannot forget the words uttered by Khalil, a veteran among actors, at the Motion Picture Congress. Addressing Dad Phalke, he recalled how he, a Muslim, had been given the role of Krishna in dozens of films. In spite of the opposition from the orthodox element, Dada Phalke continued to cast a Muslim youth in the roles of Hindu gods. Art knows no barriers of caste or creed. And, looking through the pages of the history of the Indian film industry, you will come across numerous such instances. It was a Jewish producer who revived the glory of "Nur Jehan," a Hindu who dramatized the romance of the Taj Mahal in "Shiraz," a Muslim who produced "Chandra Rao More" and a Parsi who produced "Vaman Avatar". And even if some of these films were bad, I believe that they did bring the people of this vast country nearer in their understanding of one another's culture and traditions. Not only Art but Commerce too, dec...

Shah Jahan.  An average maharaja A Few statistics about princes are in order. On average each prince has 11 titles can wear three uniforms has 5.8 wives (or concubines) procreates 12.6 children lives in five palaces dies at the age of 54 owns 9.2 elephants kills 22.5 tigers during lifetime possesses 2.8 specially fitted railway carriages owns 3.4 Rolls-Royces ~  Life Magazine 31 April 1947

In 2009, after an entire day of experimentation with a scanner and a photo-editing tool, I posted an interesting newspaper cutting from year 1997 pertaining to year 1947. It was front page of The Hindustan Times, 15 August, 1947 . I am a Kashmiri. It was probably an eventless day for my ancestors. If I think about it well enough, the day is not supposed to mean anything to me. Just a footnote on myth building and nation building. Paper selling. But what about other people? Do they see through it too? Do they too know the absolute endgame of an epic nation building process? Car Sales. This morning I found the image used as a pointless prop in a stupid car ad. In the morning I felt like a mad dog who has been chasing fast cars for too long. If things keep going like this I will probably have to start an ' 8ate Impact ' section on this blog about how media from media industry posted here is re-consumed by media indust...

' Hunger, Not Independence, Concerns India's Peasants ' by Padmashree  Phillips Talbot "To him in August, 1947, the important question are whether there will be enough food to last through the winter, and when cloth will be obtainable, and kerosene and tea cheaper." Youngstown Vindicator - Aug 18, 1947. A daily newspaper serving Youngstown, Ohio. Just above the article you will find the photograph of Musket, a year-old Moose who loveed to eat Marple leaves. Just below the article is the news about French declaring Pondicherry, Karikal, Chandernagor, Mahe and Yanaon 'Free Cities'. ' Killings Mar Birth of New India States ' "Membership in all international organisations like the United nations went to Hindustan by previous agreement; Pakistan will not seek membership for itself." St. Petersburg Times - Aug 15, 1947. St. Petersburg, Florida. Next to the shot news piece there is a photograph of 'Strange bedfellows', a ...

An advert for Pagli 'First Dancing Picture from Punjab'. From the Film India collection shared with me by Memsaab .

What do you love about me? Your golden hair and your blue eyes! And on hearing these words from lovestruck Nargis, Raj Kapoor undergoes spontaneously combustion. His body starts shaking, his face is napalm of pain. No, No this can't be . He tells her:'Body is nothing, heart and soul is everything.' His best friend is in love with that nargis while Raj Kapoor is obsessed with an imagined character, his Nimmi, a women whose shades he believes are present in Nargis.  Sacrifice. This calls for sacrifice. Had he spontaneously combusted, that would have been easier on the senses of viewer but no, a song later, he picks a lit torch and sticks it into his face. This is Raj Kapoor's Aag. Everything you need to understand about Raj Kapoor's cinema is right here (not necessarily in this post). Burn Nightmare of Zeenat Aman in Raj Kapoor's Satyam Shivam Sundaram (1978) Only minutes before Raj Kapoor's combustion, a couple of scenes earlier, in an iconic sce...

It is believed that while India was having its little “Tryst with Destiny”, Gandhi was at a place called Noakhali in East Bengal(that had already become East Pakistan and what is now Bangladesh). * Noakhali at the time (and in 1946) witnessed some of the most macabre killings with Hindus and Muslims butchering each other ( wiki entry actually reads Genocide ). Gandhi, going against all advice and odds, went to the center of this mindless violence and was pacifying the rioting crowd on the first eve of Indian Independence. People at first abused him but slowly the tide turned. There were no reports of rioting in Noakhali while he was there. Mountbatten went on to call it a miracle. I recently came across some rare photographs of Gandhi's Noakhali experiment in an old Film Magazine. Captions full of ' Bhakti Bhav ' make an interesting read in themselves. On January 28th, at Panchgao (Noakhali). From FilmIndia dated April, 1947 From FilmIndia dated May, 1947 F...

A poster of V. Shantaram's film 'Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani' published in year 1946 in Telugu film journal Roopavani. Found it in the archives of Centre for the Study of Culture and Society. Dwarkanath Kotnis, the Indian doctor who treated Chinese soldiers during the Sino-Japan war of 1938 and won the heart of Mao Zedong has been chosen in national poll in China as one of the top ten foreigners who made “exceptional contributions to the country in the past 100 years." The Internet poll organized by the China Radio International has the stamp of official approval as Jia Qinglin, chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference National Committee, took a direct interest in it. ( more at Times of India dated 11 Dec, 2009)

No, I don't think Lord Mountbatten's Chief of Staff, Lord Ismay, was really thinking about 'Samosa and Tea' in that meet of 3rd June 1947 when Nehru and Jinnah signed on the Partition Plan.

This is what the front page of The Hindustan Times (Delhi Edition) looked like on August 15, 1947. [Click the image to enlarge] Things to not note: Newspaper banner has the by line, 'largest Circulation in Northern, North-Western and Central India' Head line, simple,  'India Independent: British Rule Ends' Only three ads and two of them carry public message. Ad on top left corner, 'Help the Refugees Ahuja Swadeshi Stores Chandni Chowk, Delhi.' Ad on top right corner carries an ad for Quality Publicity Service Office Opp. British Motor Car Co. Connaught Place, New Delhi. Designers and Printers. Somewhere on the page you will find a line, 'It was the greatest hour for Delhi.' Cover Photograph: India's Big Three - Earl Mountbatten(new of his Earldom at the bottom), Governor-General of India, Pandit Nehru, Prime Minister, and Dr. Rajendra Prasad, president of the Constituent Assembly.  Bottom left carries a homage to the Father of the...

Subhash Chandra Bose should have known better. Bose visited Berlin in 1939 to enlist Nazi support for his independence movement and shook Hitler's Hand. And I come to have more and more respect for Gandhi. If you say yes to A of  Z then B of Y certainly follow and C of X can't be logically denied. So Gandhi said clear no to A. Image found in Hindustan Times (dated April 17, 2009) story on a collector of vintage currency and coins. I looked around for some more information on this note and found this: It turns out that Azad Hind may have never actually minted any banknotes meant as currency ( according to a rumor Germans printed banknotes for Bose, but  allegedly they were lost when the ship they were sent in was torpedoed on its way to Japan). The 1000 (currency unit less) notes depicting Bose shaking the hand of Adolf Hitler were commemorative propaganda banknote minted at the end of the war and meant to be sold with the profits going to various charities for the ben...

Mahatma Gandhi on way to his last prayer meeting On Trial looking relaxed: (Front row, left to right) Nathuram Godse , Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare; (back row, extreme left Digambar Badge - the government approver) The photographs can be found in The Men who Killed Gandhi by Manohar Malgonkar. Found these in a review of the book published by India Today dated Feb11, 2008.  -0- "perhaps it was not an accident that Godse began his political career as a participant in a civil disobedience movement started by Gandhi and ended his political life with a speech from the witness stand which, in spite of being an attack on Gandhi, none the less revealed a grudging respect for what Gandhi had done for the country" -  Ashis Nandy Long ago, I had posted an extract from an essay by Ashis Nandy titled The Politics of the Assassination of Gandhi that appears in his book At the Edge of Psychology: Essays in Politics And Culture . The extract traced the early life of Gandhi...

The hasty reformer who does not remember the past will find himself condemned to repeat it. - Sir John Buchan Introduction to Govind Nihalani's year 1986-87 television film Tamas based on a Hindi novel of the same name and two other short stories (' Chief ki dawat ' and ' Amritsar aa gaya hai' ?) by acclaimed Hindi writer Bhisham Sahni (1974). The cover of Time magazine, October 27, 1947 (It has been available online for quite sometime as the magazine already has an online gallery of all its cover ) The cover of this American magazine read: INDIA Liberty and death Writer-Historian Patrick French, in the final words of introduction to his book Liberty or Death: India's Journey to Independence and Division, tells us about Patrick Henry 's phrase from American War of Independence, 'Give me liberty, or give me death,' that was reworked into the slogan, 'Liberty or death' by Indian freedom fighters. Later, Muslim League p...

It was in the upper deck of a London bus that the name ‘Pakistan’ or ‘Pakastan’ first flashed before the eyes of Choudhry Rahmat Ali. He finally settled for ‘Pakistan’, which meant ‘land of the pure’ and doubled as an acronym of Punjab, Afghan(meaning the people of the North-West Frontier Province), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan. These were the areas of north-west India where Muslims were in a majority; Bengal,in the east,did not come into the equation at this point. In 1933 Rahmat Ali published a pamphlet under the title ‘Now or Never’. Although its proposals grew out of Iqbal’s speech,it was the first conception of total national separation. The new nation, he wrote, symbolized ‘the proclamation of our freedom from British-Bania domination; the release of our nation from the bonds of Minorityism’ Little is known about Rahmat Ali, who vigorously pursued his ‘Pakistanian’ campaign from a bessit in Cambridge, bombarding politicians and dignitaries with pamphlets. Some reports say he wa...

On May 9, 1947 Brigadier Cariappa (he was yet to become a General) suggested at a private meeting that once the British had left there should be a military dictatorship. The force, ‘with either Nehru or Jinnah as Commander-in-Chief should take over power’. Mountbatten replied that such a course of action would be ‘not only wholly impractical but highly dangerous’. From- ‘Divide and Quit’ by Penderel Moon , London 1961 page 755 As you might have observed it were two men with army background talking about a possible solution to India’s problem. What purpose would have been served if India had taken control of the whole of Kashmir in Military action (which sorry to break your heart would have been impossibility then and is even now unless we want to create our own Afghanistan?), we still would have had to deal with the Kashmir problem. The problem in Kashmir was of political nature and Nehru was trying to find a political solution when he agreed to the pleblicite. Kashmir is today part ...

About elitism of Nehru, let me tell you about the incident that took place during his arrest at the start of Quit India movement. Nehru, who was arrested at a family flat in Bombay, later described the start of the Quit India movement as ‘the zero hour of the world’. According to one of his biographers,’the household staff was hardly unfamiliar with arrests. They quickly laid out a breakfast, which Jawaharlal loved: a bowl of cornflakes, eggs, bacon, toast, coffee. the inspector saw the spread and said there was no time for breakfast.” shut up!” said Nehru.” I intend having breakfast before I go.” India’s future prime minister was to be kept in prison for 1040 days. From “Nehru: the making of India” by M.J. Akbar , London 1988 page 349 Later as the train, reached Poona, instead of being whistled through as planned, the stationmaster had arranged for some urgent shunting to take place, and the train had to stop. Seeing a crowd of congress supporters on the platform being charged by l...

Gandhi was visibly depressed during his last days. According to political psychologist Ashis Nandy : “If Gandhi in his depression connived at it, he also perhaps felt- being the shrewd, practical idealist he was-that he had become somewhat of an anachronism in post-partition, independent India; and in violent death he might be more relevant to the living than he could be in life. As not a few have sensed, like Socrates and Christ before him. Gandhi knew how to use man’s sense of guilt creatively.” Did Gandhi know what he was doing? He once said: “I find no parallel in history for a body of converts and their descendants claiming to be a nation apart from the parent stock. If India was one nation before the advent of Islam, it must remain one in spite of the change of faith of a very large body of her children” Gandhi in “Jinnah of Pakistan” by Stanley Wolpert , New Delhi 1985(1st edn 1984) page 232-3. Ironically, the same line became a battle cry for BJP in the 90s.

Gandhi’s assassin was born in 1910, in a small village in the margin of the Bombay-Poona conurbation. He was the eldest son and the second child in a family of four sons and two daughters. His father was Vinayak R .Godse, a petty government official who worked in the postal department and had a transferable job, which took him to small urban settlements over the years. Three sons had been born to him before Nathuram and all three had died in infancy. Both Vinayak and his wife were devoted and orthodox Brahmans and, understandably, they sought a religious solution to the problem of the survival of their newborn son. The result was the use of a time-honored technique: Nathuram was brought up as a girl. His nose was pierced and he was made to wear a nath or nose ring. It is thus that he came to acquire the name Nathuram, even though his original name was Ram Chandra. Such experiences often go with a heightened religiosity and a sense of being chosen. In this instance, too, the child soon...