The decolonization of India after 200 years of the British Raj was coterminous with the Partition of the country along religious-ethnic lines in 1947. Genocidal violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs during the Partition led to two million deaths and displaced over twelve-sixteen million people. Recent scholarship has foregrounded the processes of "silencing" (Butalia), "forgetting" (Pandey) and "amnesia" (Kabir) which have constituted the event as a festering psychic wound in the South-Asian imaginary. My paper endeavors to understand the role of Partition cinema as cultural memory work by mapping the figuration of 1947 in popular Hindi language/Bollywood cinema which has acquired the status of national cinema. Engaged in the act of "mourning the nation" (Sarkar), Hindi cinema emerges as one of the few critical nodes of public memory about 1947,stillhaunting discussions about democracy and minority rights. My presentation will interrogate the memorialization of the Partition in two Bollywood renditions: Manmohan Desai's Chhalia (The Trickster, 1960), and Yash Chopra's Dharmputra (The moral man, 1961).
Both cinematic narratives depict a pre-Partition era of religious tolerance and coexistence, itself a function of memory work. As Marianne Hirsch theorizes, "[t]his need for a 'before' is not a matter of reality […], but of fantasy and affect" (52). On one hand, spectacular violence is repeatedly framed as aberrant behavior by people who have temporarily gone insane and lost their bearings, thereby eliding entrenched social antagonisms and keeping alive the possibility of recuperating national health and healing in the future. Questions of community and violence are problematically mediated with the final resolution always provided under the sign of the nation. However, on the other hand, the normative subject of national cinema is often split, fractured and dissonant, instead of cohesive and whole. Nationalization of identity, which dislodges identity from local to national contexts, is represented as being a profoundly disorienting and disruptive experience in early post-independence Hindi cinema. Chhalia and Dharmputra underline how this identity is deeply gendered and not easily accessible by drawing attention to marginal subjects whose identities cannot be nationalized.
I will focus on the representations of women and the technologies of gender which play a powerful role in consolidating the "imagined community" of the newly constituted nation (Anderson). Women emerge as symbols of anxiety in both cinematic narratives, fluid signifiers who circulate between men, sites upon which intergenerational and interethnic affective bonds are forged. In Chhalia, women emerge as symbols of patriarchal exchange with the family and the national community ultimately held up as a woman's "proper" refuge. In contrast, Dharmputra, one of the first films to address Hindu nationalism and majoritarian violence asserts and ruptures the normative discourse about the Partition. Men are simultaneously depicted as victims and oppressors while the cinematic narrative stages the traumatic implosion of identity. Problematizing the iconicity of the maternal as a symbol of the nation, both Chhaliya and Dharmaputra corroborate and disrupt the gendered semiotic undergirding national cinema, subverting the resonant Bollywood trope of suffering maternity.
