Partition and its ghosts

At the MAMI film festival in Mumbai earlier this week, an old dilemma raised its head: should one stick around for the question and answer sessions that follow some of the screenings? As a journalist, such discussions - with their insights into the creative process and a film's back-story - are often invigorating; but as a critic who is still trying to absorb the film and write honestly about what he saw and felt, hearing the crew speak about their intentions can create white noise, or sway one's feelings.

My experience of Anup Singh's Punjabi film Qissa: Tale of a Lonely Ghost at MAMI was an unusually satisfying one, though. First, I loved the film itself, despite the physical discomfort of sitting in the second row. Second, the post-screening talk - which featured the director as well as some of the actors (including Tilottama Shome, excellent in a pivotal role), was genuinely engaging, and some of the things Singh spoke about touched on and confirmed my own feelings. For instance, I was unsurprised to learn that the Bengali director Ritwik Ghatak was one of his heroes, because I had wondered about this while watching the film. Like Ghatak's entire body of work, Qissa is about not just 1947 Partition, but in partitions more generally: The many levels on which we create boundaries, separating ourselves, defining various types of "others".

The Qissa synopsis I had read beforehand was reticent about the plot, saying only that the film was about a Sikh man named Umber Singh (Irrfan Khan) who marries his youngest child Kanwar to a lower-caste girl. But the story really hinges on the fact that Umber - dismayed by a proliferation of female children - decides to raise his fourth girl as a boy. "Decides" may be the wrong word, actually: It is more as if, by some mystical process, this simply happens that Umber convinces himself the lie is true. His wife is disturbed, but the family mostly continues as if nothing is amiss; Others - distant relatives, elders in the community - seem either not to know about the child's real sex, or turn a blind eye to what is going on, and there are elements of magical realism in this part of the story. Kanwar (Shome) grows up understandably confused but also eager to please, to be a good "son" - but when circumstances lead to her wedding to another girl, the conflicts escalate.

Qissa begins with the spectre of Partition, but widens its canvas to encompass the gender divide, the line between the human and the spirit world, between sanity and insanity. This dilution of themes may be problematic for some viewers, but there are important links between these ideas too. Many people who have been strongly affected by Partition become living ghosts in the sense that they are petrified in the past, unable to let go or to look ahead. And for someone like Umber Singh - a proud alpha-male who sees himself as the king of his crumbling castle - this situation is made even more complicated by the fact that he can realistically view the future only in terms of having a male child who can carry his line forward. As his frustrations and insecurities grow, the political becomes personal, and his family is affected in many overlapping ways.

This is a lush, stately paced film, with lovely background music that draws on folk tunes. There are many beautiful widescreen outdoor compositions, including some set in the desert, but there are also claustrophobic nighttime scenes in Umber Singh's house; the very air here is thick and oppressive and you can almost feel what might be going on in this man's tormented mind and the effect his actions are having on his wife and daughters. For all the vividness of these images though, there is a pleasingly hazy quality to the narrative, which has the texture of myth and legend. As the director pointed out during the discussion, many stories we hear about Partition begin on a strictly factual note, but then veer off into the realm of speculation and imagination. Qissa has that ghostly quality, very appropriate to its subject.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer