Author: Aditi Prasad
Publication: www.indya.com
Date: June 28, 2001
URL: http://news.indya.com/thegadaranalysis.html
The controversy may have fuelled
box-office collections. But cascading protests across the country against
Nitin Keni's Sunny Deol-Amisha Patel starrer Gadar are threatening to fuel
more than that. Already, there have been protests in Bhopal, Lucknow, New
Delhi, Ahmedabad and even Mumbai against the film. In Ahmedabad, angry
Muslim viewers torched six vehicles and burnt a portion of the theatre,
taking exception to certain scenes and dialogues in the film.
According to the Muslim League,
Gadar hurts the religious sentiments of the minority community. In fact,
the Mumbai Regional Muslim League has also said that it will file a petition
in the Mumbai High Court against the Censor Board for Film Certification,
demanding that certain guidelines be issued for the depiction of all religions
in Indian films.
But what are they protesting against
anyway? Just how communally slanted is the plot and dialogue of the Partition-and-after
saga?
First, consider the plot. The film
tells the tale of the romance between Tara Singh (a Sikh man) and Sakina
(a Muslim woman) at the time of Partition. It opens in a village now in
Pakistan, where Hindus and Sikhs are being terrorised into crossing over
to India.
The next sequence cuts to gory scenes
of brutal massacre and rape at railway stations. A train arriving from
Pakistan with piles of blood-stained bodies brings along with it the massacred
family of Tara Singh, a truck-driver.
During the riots that follow, Tara
Singh meets Sakina, the convent-educated young woman from an influential
business family. Sakina's family succeeds in fleeing India, but not without
losing Sakina at the crowded railway station. Angry Sikh youths assail
her on identifying her as a Muslim.
Tara Singh saves Sakina, provides
her shelter at his home, despite facing stiff opposition from kith and
kin. Inevitably, they fall in love and get married.
One son and many years later, Sakina
finds out that her father is actually now the mayor of Lahore in Pakistan.
She, of course, is overjoyed and visits her family in Pakistan. Her happiness
turns out to be short-lived.
Her family in Pakistan does not
acknowledge her marriage with Tara and detains her in Pakistan, against
her wishes. Press reports suggest that Sakina was forced into marrying
Tara.
Her politically motivated family
wants her to play the "sympathy wave" and enhance her political career.
So Tara visits Pakistan - without a visa - to fetch his wife and, many
problems later, finally succeeds.
In essence, you might say, the film
is a simple love story, with the customary dose of cross-community conflict
and amity. Sure, since the backdrop is the Partition, the film does have
its fair share of gory scenes, abusive dialogue and a strong community-driven
perspective.
But there's more to Gadar than such
a black-and-white picture. In a sense, of course, it is a tribute to the
naturalism in the film that it evoked the protests that it has.
Actress and Rajya Sabha MP Shabana
Azmi, while not criticising the film outright, has said on record that
"there are subtle but definite communal undertones of a villain and a hero
in the film, and that the hero is a Sikh and the villain a Muslim."
Is she right? Counters a movie critic:
"If there are any undertones, they are political rather than communal.
One cannot make a film based in the era of Partition without portraying
the communal disharmony at that time, which the film has successfully done.
Even if her family detained Sakina in Pakistan, it was probably less because
of her marrying a Hindu and more because her father wanted to further his
own and her political career."
"There is no good or bad in the
film. There is nothing against Islam, although there are a lot of anti-Pakistan
statements. The director has just depicted the situation then, as it was.
More importantly, it is a true story and in real life Sakina was a Muslim
and Tara was a Sikh. It was actually Sakina's family that was the villain,
not Pakistan or Islam. After all, in the end, it's a Muslim who helps them
escape," points out a member of the audience of the film, at a recent screening.
"In fact," says an avid movie-goer,
"if anyone must protest, it should be Indians - whether Hindus or Muslims
is irrelevant. A character says: "Hindustan Murdabad", not Hindus or Muslims
murdabad. Because we are a democratic country, we don't mind criticism
of our own country, which is why the film has not hurt the sensitivities
of us as Indians."
But while that may represent the
popular sentiment, what of the official objections listed by the Muslim
League?
Objection 1: A dialogue at the beginning
of the film states that Muslims had raped non-Muslims. The Muslim League
has objected that the dialogue suggests that Muslims as a community were
rapists.
Actually, the film depicts atrocities
- too well documented by now to be disputed - committed by members of both
communities on one another. Gadar begins on the solemn and violent note
of Indo-Pak Partition.
History is witness that trains from
both Lahore to Amritsar and from Amritsar to Lahore reached their respective
destinations full of blood-stained dead bodies - and that scores of both
Hindu and Muslim women were raped mercilessly. The film does not ignore
the double-edged violence and violation.
Why, even Sakina, left behind at
Amritsar railway station, is shown to have been close to being raped by
a gang of Hindu Sikhs who jumped her after identifying her as a Muslim
girl.
Objection 2: The use of the name
Sakina for the character of the Muslim girl played by Amisha Patel is deliberate,
as Sakina was the name of Prophet Mohammed's granddaughter.
Was there malice intended? Is malice
intended when a character in a Hindi film is named Rama, for instance?
Objection 3: The film suggests that
Sakina does not believe in Islam and converts to another religion because
of that, rather than because of her love for the Sikh man.
If that were the case, Sakina could
have changed her name and religion in the seven-odd years when she was
married to Tara Singh before she went back home. She would have disowned
her family and not offered namaz.
Crucially, nowhere does Sakina suggest
that Islam is bad or even that the "other" religion is good. However, she
does apply sindoor, but that seems to symbolise, in the usual broad-stroke
Hindi film style, the convergence of the two religions.
In fact, the film cleverly steers
clear of any religious slant and concentrates more on the India-Pakistan
divide than on the Hindu-Muslim divide.
Objection 4: The film depicts atrocities
being committed on Hindus and Sikhs during the migration across the borders,
but does not depict any exploitation of Muslims. Muslims too suffered during
Partition and the film ignores this historical aspect, thus losing balance.
The film has scenes where members
of both communities are shown at the receiving end. If Tara Singh's parents
and sisters were killed, so was Sakina's brother. The film effectively
shows the "tit-for-tat" mentality that existed at the time. Atrocities
committed by all communities are an integral part of the film.
It is probably a barometer of the
politics and sociology of hatred that has permeated India today that every
community is quick to interpret the human condition as a slight upon itself.
At the end of the day, Gadar is
a film that depicts narrow-mindedness and the suffering it causes and no
community has a monopoly on that.
