Train to Pakistan
[Screened at the Cinequest Film Festival 9, San Jose]
[3.0/4.0] (dialog in Hindi, English subtitles)
The Punjab in 1947 pre-partition India is a powder keg. As the British are about to pull out of their colonial holding, there are many people who would like to have a new, single country, but instead sectarian and ethnic prejudice is apparently going to create two new states -- the predominantly Muslim Pakistan and the predominantly Hindu and Sikh India. The unfortunate side effect of this is that many people living on their ancestral lands are going to find themselves on the wrong side of the new border, since the Punjab itself is being split in the middle. Mano Majra is a fairly typical village; peaceful and quiet. Although its classes are stratified into the unequal distribution of Sikh landlords and Muslim laborers, this economic division has not been a source of tension. Both communities coexist peacefully, but there are storm clouds on the horizon.
The communist party has sent the earnest Iqbal to organize worker and discourage sectarian violence with the ultimate goal of keeping India united. The local moneylender has been robbed and murdered, so the police initially suspect the newcomer and detain him. There have also been many agitators travelling the countryside who are encouraging the Muslims to fight the Hindus and Sikhs, and vice versa. Because of this, the local magistrate thinks maybe he can pin the crime on insurgent Muslim bandits (although he knows it was really done by local Sikh bandits) and connect Iqbal to them as an agitator. In jail, Iqbal meets Jagga Singh, one of the local Sikh bandits who is following in the general profession of his ancestors. Jagga is in love with Nooran, the daughter of a Muslim peasant, but their union is doomed because of the difference of their ethnicity, although Jagga naively declares that he is neither Sikh nor Muslim, but only a bandit.
The magistrate is the narrator of the story, but is a flawed protagonist. His main goal is to maintain peace and order in the district, but he is perfectly willing to sacrifice few innocents. But can this action be condemned? If he does not act, it appears a wholesale slaughter is possible, as a trainload of dead Hindus and Sikhs sent from Pakistan demonstrates. His cold-heartedness is apparently the result of the loss of his family. The death of his daughter (we are not told how she died, but violence is intimated) is a ghost that has swallowed his spirit. As a surrogate for both his daughter and his wife, he detains a young itinerant dancing girl. The girl herself symbolically represents the lost innocence of the subcontinent. Ultimately the magistrate realizes that he must send the girl with the other Muslims who are fleeing to Pakistan for their own safety.
The story is based on the novel by Kurshwant Singh. Anyone familiar with the history of the events will recognize this as an accurate depiction of all the factors leading to the tragedy; from the ability of radicals to exploit longstanding ethnic differences to the way a small spark of unrest can quickly escalate into an inferno, and to the way those who wish to control the situation are rendered into helpless observers. The main problem with the film is that it is too ambitious. Since this is a novel adapted to a screenplay, it tries to fit as much of the narrative of the original work into the running length of a film.
Recommended. The drama can be heavy-handed, but that is not unusual for Indian productions. It does accurately portray the many aspects of the issues it presents.
(c) 1999 Murali Krishnan The Art House Squatter http://pages.hotbot.com/movies/murali24/
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