REMEMBERING PARTITION

Professor Ashis Nandy, ICSSR National Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS),  New Delhi, and among India’s foremost public intellectuals, has worked on cultures of knowledge, visions, and dialogue of civilizations. He is an original and vigorously independent thinker, with a taste for the unorthodox. He is best known for his writing on colonialism but in recent years he has come to be acknowledged as one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies. Ashis Nandy received the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize this year. On Saturday, August 11, 2007 at 6.00 pm Prof. Nandy will speak on ‘Partition and Living with Oneself.’

Sara Singh's The Sky Below / 75 mins/ 2007 / with English subtitles                 

From the shared, ancient history of the Indus Civilization, the people of the Northwest region of the Subcontinent have connections that go back millennia. In 1947, the partition of this region resulted in a legacy of suspicion and a profound inability to reconcile this political divide. In this feature documentary, a contemporary portrait of this region from Kutch to Kashmir, from Karachi to the Khyber Pass emerges by exploring some of the ground realities of the lingering fallout; and most importantly, if reconciliation is possible between two countries with interwoven histories, cultures, and faiths...after 60 years of strained relations and the ever-present, unresolved crisis in Kashmir.

Featuring (from both Pakistan and India) first-person stories from the time of Partition, as well as former terrorists, politicians, royalty, ordinary citizens, historians, and many others who share their insights of the past, present, and future of this volatile, yet emerging, South Asian economic bloc. The film features a particular focus on some lesser known aspects of the Partition, as well. Folk singers recorded live in their surroundings, found footage, reality based and conceptual location shooting, still photography, and some archival footage are merged to emphasize the contrasted realities which compose this culturally connected, yet politically disconnected, region. 

Sara Singh was born in India and has spent most of her life in the United States.  She is a painter, writer, photographer, and filmmaker.

Amar Kanwar's A Season Outside / 30 mins/ 1998 / English

Synopsis: There is perhaps, no border outpost in the world quite like Wagah, where this film begins its exploration. An outpost where every evening people are drawn to a thin white line and probably…anyone in the eye of a conflict could find themselves here. A Season Outside is a personal and philosophical journey through the shadows of past generations, conflicting positions, borders and time zones... a nomad wandering through lines of separation, examining the scars of violence and dreams of hope scattered among communities and nations. 

A graduate from the prestigious Mass Communication Research Centre at the Jamia Millia University, New Delhi, Amar Kanwar has been working as an independent film maker for more than 10 years now. Over the years he has made more than 40 documentaries, all of which have been broadcast with his canvas including topics as diverse as the history and politics of collecting water in the desert; the physical and mental spaces that men and women carve out for themselves within the family; and ecological interpretations of Buddhism. Other films have dealt with the opposition between globalization and tribal consciousness in the heart of rural India. His work has been recognized all over the world for its subtle imagery and compelling narratives and for this he has been awarded numerous awards including an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from Maine College of Art (USA); the MacArthur Fellowship; the Golden Gate Award (San Francisco International Film Festival); Golden Conch (Mumbai International Film Festival); First Prize at the Torino International Film Festival, Italy; Jury's Award (Film South Asia, Nepal); and many others. He was most recently awarded the first Edvard Munch Award for Contemporary Art from Norway. He is visiting faculty at a number of renowned institutions in India and abroad.

Yousuf Saeed's Khayal Darpan (A Mirror of Imagination) / 100 mins / 2006 / with English subtitles 

In a quest to explore the impact of India's Partition on the classical music traditions of South Asia, a Delhi-based filmmaker Yousuf Saeed spent over 6 months in Pakistan in 2005. Travelling in Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad - interviewing musicians and scholars, attending music concerts, and observing the teaching of music in various institutions, Yousuf not only documented some of the surviving practitioners and patrons of classical music, but also raised many vital questions, about cultural identity, nationalism, legitimacy of music in Islam, Pakistan's popular culture and its affairs with India, and the survival of classical music itself in South Asia.

This quest has resulted in a musical documentary film, Khayal Darpan, featuring some well-known as well as many lesser known but talented musicians of Pakistan. Divided into four roughly equal parts, totalling a 105 minutes, the film starts by exploring Pakistan's melodic past, especially in Punjab/Lahore where south Asia's most famous musicians of early 20th century performed before a highly discerning audience. It then goes on to explore how the 1947 partition of India affected the cultural traditions, especially of the classical music in South Asia. The film also raises many questions about how the classical music is going to survive in future, not only in Pakistan but in India as well, and whose cultural property it really is. More importantly, the film hopes to provoke the new generation of South Asians who are bent upon defining their cultural and national identities according to their religion.

Graduating from Jamia Millia’s Mass Communication Research Centre, Yousuf Saeed started his career in films and television in 1990 with the Times TV (Times of India) conceptualizing and co-producing the science series called Turning Point (45 episodes). Later, Yousuf produced many documentary films for Doordarshan and other institutions, including a series on Ladakh and one on the Sufi poet Amir Khusrau. Besides producing films, Yousuf has been involved in a lot of cultural, academic and media-related activism. He worked with Encyclopedia Britannica ( India) as their arts and design editor for two years. His recent short films Basant and Jannat ki Rail have been shown at prestigious international venues such as the universities of Harvard, Boston, Columbia, Chicago, Texas (in the US) and of Heidelberg (Germany), Vienna (Austria), and Sorbonne (Paris). Yousuf was awarded the Asia Fellowship to conduct his research on music in Pakistan

Ajay Bhardwaj's Rabba Hun Kee Kariye (Thus Departed Our Neighbours) 65 mins / 2007 / with English subtitles

While India won her independence from the British rule in 1947, the north western province of Punjab was divided into two. The Muslim majority areas of West Punjab became part of Pakistan, and the Hindu and Sikh majority areas of East Punjab remained with, the now divided, India. The truncated Punjabs bore scars of large-scale killings as each was being cleansed of their minorities.

Sixty years on, Rabba Hun Kee Kariye trails this shared history divided by the knife. For the first time a documentary turns its gaze at the perpetrators, as seen through the eyes of bystanders. While East Punjabis fondly remember their bonding with the Muslim neighbours and vividly recall its betrayal, the film excavates how the personal and informal negotiated with the organised violence of genocide. In village after village, people recount what life had in store for those who participated in the killings and lootings.  Periodically, the accumulated guilt of a witness or a bystander, surfaces, sometimes discernable in their subconscious, other times visible in the film. Without rancour and with great pain a generation unburdens its heart, hoping this never happens again. 

Ajay Bhardwaj is a documentary filmmaker based in Delhi. From 1990 – 1996 he worked with television companies directing and producing a diverse range of programmes like current affairs, election analysis, game shows, chat shows, popular science shows as well as infotainment programmes. He is making documentaries since 1997.

Ek Minute Ka Maun /A Minute of Silence (1997) was his first full-length independent documentary. It captured the spontaneous protest by students in Delhi in the aftermath of the brutal murder of Chandrashekhar Prasad, a left wing president of the students union of Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, by a criminal politician in Siwan, Bihar.

Kitte Mil Ve Mahi (2005) is his second full-length independent documentary. It explores a deep bonding between Sufism and Dalits in Punjab that brings to life a spiritual universe that is healing as well as emancipatory. Rabba Hun Kee Kariye (2007) is his third full- length independent documentary.

Paromita Vohra
Paromita Vohra is a documentary filmmaker and screenwriter. Her films as director are Un-limited Girls, a personal take on engagements with feminism in urban India which mixes fiction and non-fiction, Annapurna (1995), about a women food worker’s cooperative in Bombay's textile mill area, A Woman’s Place,(1999) an hour-length documentary for PBS on how women negotiate the space between law and custom to change their lives and those of other women in South Africa, the USA and India and A Short Film About Time (2000) an independent short fiction film about the funny-sad relationship between a young Bombay woman with a broken heart, her psychotherapist and his watch.

She is scriptwriter of Khamosh Pani (Golden Leopard, Locarno Film Festival, 2003), a Pakistani feature film about a woman abducted during Partition, whose past unravels as her son gets involved in the fundamentalist politics of Zia-ul-Haq’s regime (dir: Sabiha Sumar), A Few Things I Know About Her (Silver Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival 2002), a documentary that explores the many traditions that have sprung up around the life of Mirabai, a princess and mystic poet from 16th century North India (dir: Anjali Panjabi), Silver Conch, MIFF, 2002 and Skin Deep (dir: Reena Mohan), a faux documentary about women, body image and self identity.