The winds of change

Garm Hava describes the gradual fraying of the many threads that hold a family and a country together.

I ’m sitting in my favourite DVD-browsing space — the seedy, lizard-ridden attic of a Palika Bazaar shop that sells ‘original copies’ of world-cinema titles — when the salesman leans across and whispers, “Mere paas ek bahut special film hai. London mein copy banaaya. Poore India mein aapko sirf iss dukaan mein milegi.” (“I have a very special film, copied from a London print — you won’t get it anywhere else in India.”) So saying, he unwraps a DVD of M S Sathyu’s Garm Hava.

 

It’s a bizarre little moment: just a couple of days earlier I was speaking with an aunt about the puzzling unavailability of Sathyu’s film in the Indian market. For a movie that’s considered one of the key works of the ‘New Wave’ of the early 1970s, it seemed to have gone underground, never to resurface.

Naturally, I buy the DVD. The print is poor — faded colour, spots and scratches, a couple of seconds missing here and there — but thankfully not bad enough to spoil the viewing experience.

Garm Hava begins with a montage of images related to the Independence struggle and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, followed by a lengthy shot of Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahni) at a railway platform, waving at a departing train. His sister is leaving for Pakistan and he’s seeing her off; they’ve spent their whole lives in close proximity, now they are being parted in their old age.

“A hot wind is blowing,” a rickshaw-driver tells Salim as they leave the station, “Those who don’t get uprooted will get burnt.”

The garm hava in question is the cruel aftermath of Partition, and Salim and his family are being forced to make wholesale adjustments in their way of life. Because of legal complications, their ancestral house is slipping out of their hands. Salim’s daughter Ameena is separated from the man she is betrothed to. There are subtle changes in equations between Hindus and Muslims: a potential landlord assures Salim that he is unconcerned with religion, but then asks for a year’s payment in advance, because “someone from your community left without paying seven months’ rent”.

Central to the film’s impact is Balraj Sahni’s immensely dignified portrayal in the lead role. Sahni invests a great deal in little gestures, speaking volumes with a subtle shift of his eyes, or by cocking his head ever so slightly, or tapping his cane nervously on the floor while speaking to a moneylender. Equally notable is the anthropomorphising of the Mirzas’ old haveli. The house is given a life and personality of its own, with the camera freely exploring its interiors, pointedly framing characters in doors and stairways as if to stress the relationship of these people to their setting; almost suggesting that one is incomplete without the other. We are reminded that ancestral houses become a part of the people who have lived in them for decades; and of course, the haveli can also be seen as a symbol for the nation.

Most ‘Partition films’ contain moments of strong violence — the movies can’t bring themselves to look away from the horror stories about neighbours killing each other or ghost trains filled with dead bodies, gliding across the freshly created borders. But the violence of Garm Hava is subtler: it’s about the gradual fraying of the many threads that hold a family and a country together. This isn’t a flawless film (there’s something a little manipulative about the way misfortune repeatedly hits the Mirzas) but it’s an important one — a personal, ground-level perspective of a critical time in India’s history — and it’s encouraging to hear that the original print is now undergoing restoration. Not a moment too soon: this movie deserves to be introduced to a new generation of viewers and displayed outside musty attics.

Jai Arjun Singh is a freelance writer