Midnight's children

Summer films - This month, it will be 54 years since Partition. Salil Tripathi shows how Bollywood is only now able to tackle the taboo subject of India's relationship with Pakistan

It is the hot summer of 1947. Thousands of men, women and children, all carrying personal belongings, are walking in one direction. About 200 yards away, there is another long line of people, also carrying their possessions, walking in the opposite direction. Neither group looks at the other, but something snaps in one of the young men. He picks up a rock and hurls it towards the other line, and that is provocation enough. Men unsheathe their swords and run towards the assailant. Cruel mayhem, of the kind that people thought they were leaving behind, ensues in the no-man's land between India and Pakistan.

At least a million people died and 12 million others were displaced in those months leading up to Partition, when the provinces of Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east were carved up, dividing the populations of India and Pakistan. In terms of the human tragedy involved, this was one of the low points of civilisation. And yet, none of the sufferers wanted to talk about it, apart from Saadat Hasan Manto, who wrote Partition and Other Stories, and Khushwant Singh, who published the novel Train to Pakistan. But remarkably, even in times when millions lived with those memories, and even though Indians and Pakistanis are so naturally loquacious, they turned strangely reticent, preferring to leave the ordeal unsaid. As Salman Rushdie might put it, they wanted to leave the bad-enough alone. Appropriately, the publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia called her oral history of Partition The Other Side of Silence.

At the popular level, only outsiders could make south Asians look at that past again. In 1975, Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre published their largely pro-India book Freedom at Midnight. A decade later, Sir Richard Attenborough captured the violence of Partition in Gandhi. Since then, images of trains carrying corpses across the subcontinent have become more frequent in cinema. The Indo-Canadian film-maker Deepa Mehta explored some of these themes in Earth (1998), based on Bapsi Sidhwa's novel Ice-Candy-Man (published in the US as Cracking India). And now, Bollywood's latest blockbuster, the jingoistic Gadar: ek prem katha (Revolution: a love story) sets a similar scene.

In certain senses, Gadar: ek prem katha is a seminal film. It presents the simple, mythologised, Indian view of history: a secular leadership of the Congress Party defeated by the unreasonable demands of the Muslim League; cruel violence, usually started by haughty Muslims seeking Pakistan; and young lovers (Sikh boy and Muslim girl, in this case) whose lives are torn apart by community elders on both sides. But although the Sikh elders come to approve of the relationship, the Muslims try to destroy it. So the heroic young Sikh goes to Pakistan without a valid visa and challenges his lover's family. He then single-handedly kills hundreds of Pakistani soldiers and thugs who attempt to thwart his return to India with his beloved. It's a rousing film that merrily tramples on the subtleties of history. This simplification also explains why it has been so successful. The London-based novelist Aamer Hussein recently saw the film in the hope that he would find a sensitive treatment of Partition, but came away disappointed. "It has actually got about as much to do with history as the Indiana Jones movies, which it resembles, not least in its unsubtle portrait of Pakistani leaders," he says. "When Bollywood films try to 'do' the relationship between the countries they fail spectacularly, because they invent a culture that doesn't exist."

The reality, as the bloody history of the two countries shows, is far more complicated, but Bollywood has never claimed to represent reality. Bollywood is popular cinema at its best and worst, remarkably accurate in measuring the mood of the Indian masses. What is interesting is that it has begun making films that deal with the taboo topic of India's relationship with Pakistan. Even more interestingly, illegal videos of almost all Bollywood films are watched avidly in Pakistan (where, officially, Indian films are banned.)

Over the past half-century, Pakistani textbooks and mythology have claimed that it is impossible for Muslims to live peacefully in a Hindu-dominated India. The Indian self-image has glossed over the country's own miserable record of protecting minorities. But ever since the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party came to power in coalitions in India (for 12 days in 1996, and then twice again, in 1998 and 1999, after another election - never winning the polls alone, but in alliance with more moderate parties), the mood in India has been more aggressive and resurgent. If mosque-busters can run a government, then it should be all right for Bollywood to swagger on screen.

And so it has happened in the last four years. In the moral vacuum left by the discredited Congress Party, Indians have discarded socialism, a process started by Congress. (Foreign investment is now welcome and privatisation is being attempted at a pace that would exasperate new Labour.) Not only that, but many younger Indians are questioning secularism. Pakistan's continued moral and material support of those seeking independence for Kashmir has only hardened that resolve and strengthened the nationalist spirit in India.

Since 1997, the year India and Pakistan celebrated their 50th anniversary, Bollywood has turned to films about Pakistan. Refugee told the story of lovers, separated by faith and nationality, and their eventual triumph over huge odds. Border was based loosely on a real battle between Indian and Pakistani troops, in which a small platoon of Indian soldiers held firm against Pakistani invaders. In Mission Kashmir, the Indian security forces combat a cynical extremist bent on destroying India's unity. Arms-smuggling from Pakistan and its fallout - urban terrorism in India - was tackled in Sarfarosh (Rebel, 1999), which showed an honest police officer dealing with that murky world. The following year's Hey Ram! (O God! - Ram is a Hindu god) was the first attempt in popular cinema to humanise the assassins of Mahatma Gandhi, and to explain their hatred of Gandhian pacifism; in the end, however, the film portrays them as villains.

As Hussein points out, in each of these films, Pakistan's early champions and current politicians are caricatured or demonised. But the crowds snapping up the tickets are not interested in subtleties. Shobha De, the popular Bombay novelist and social commentator, says: "After Kargil, the mood in India is definitely belligerent; the period of bhai-bhai [brotherhood] is over." The zeitgeist is arrogant and assertive in India: proud and nationalistic. And its films are successfully presenting a painting-by-numbers version of a far more complicated reality. Suketu Mehta, the New York-based co-author of Mission Kashmir, acknowledged as one of the more subtle films, says: "Bollywood has a very keen barometer of the national mood. It follows the headlines. When there is hope in the air between the two countries, when [the Indian prime minister, Atal Behari] Vajpayee has just hopped on a bus to Lahore or [Pakistan's president, Pervez] Musharraf is about to return to the haveli [mansion] where he was born, you'll see film-makers rushing to put out products that can tap into the great nostalgia all of us have for an undivided India. But when there are terrorist outrages, when the normal border clashes escalate into war, the theatres show films like Sarfarosh."

Such jingoistic cinema was unthinkable a generation ago, even though the emotions aroused by Partition were still fresh. Popular films from that era mouthed platitudes of Hindu-Muslim unity. Many of the scriptwriters and lyricists were leftists, convinced of the superiority of the secular, progressive model. Often the producers and directors were refugees themselves but they were unwilling, or unable, to articulate their feelings about the horrors they had experienced. The Anand brothers Chetan and Dev, the Kapur family of Prithviraj, Raj, Shammi and Shashi, and the Chopra brothers B R and Yash, did not want to dwell on that painful recent past. Partition brought memories of shame and reopened wounds that had not yet healed. Some Muslim actors who remained in India - Dilip Kumar and Jayant are the most famous examples - changed their names to Hindi ones in order to gain wider acceptance.

One reason why the older film-makers could not take on Partition was that they were too close to the events, according to Sidhwa. She explains: "Many of them were directly affected by the massive migrations and loss of property. The events surrounding Partition, the greed, the kidnapping of women, and the terrible vendettas it unleashed, were food for much soul-searching and debate. Partition affected them too deeply to subject it to simplistic and partisan Bollywood representations."

Instead, Bollywood provided the romance of love stories and family dramas. A mere handful of films was made either about Partition or the Indo-Pakistan wars: Upkar (Generosity) and Hindustan ki Kasam (In the Name of India; literally, I Swear by India) were the exceptions. Art-house cinema did better: the radical Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak's films are full of nostalgia and anguish over the partition of Bengal. And M S Sathyu made the wonderful Garam Hawa (Burning Winds) in 1973, about a Muslim family that chooses to stay on in India after 1947.

But India has changed: the new generation is assertive; its bravado comes from the country's relative economic success and its emergence as a nuclear power. Indians are also able to face up to the multicultural reality of their nation. Muslim actors now do not hide their identities or change their names: three of the biggest heart-throbs of the silver screen - Aamir Khan, Shahrukh Khan and Salman Khan - are Muslims.

As this new Indian identity gains in confidence, Mehta feels there is a desire for retribution. "Perhaps the younger generation wants to explore their parents' trauma, redress historical wrongs, take back the land that was lost," he says. It is much harder to do so in real life, as the failed negotiations between Musharraf and Vajpayee have shown. So why not reclaim the past through the fantasy of Bollywood?

Gadar: ek prem katha (PG) is on release at selected cinemas nationwide

Salil Tripathi is working on his first novel