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Singh & Saini: Revisiting Partition of Punjab

Revisiting Partition of Punjab:
Retrieving Women’s Experience throughKhamoshPani
Barjinder Singh
Department of English Studies, Akal University, Talwandi Sabo,
PunjabAlpna Saini
Languages and Comparative Litt., Central University of Punjab,
Bathinda, India_________________________________________________________________The present article is a step towards retrieving the experiences of women during
Punjab’s Partition as depicted in the film Khamosh Pani, ʺSilent Waters,ʺ (2003)
and to provide an alternative to the written Partition history to articulate thewoman subaltern’s experience of the Partition. Through a thematic andformalistic analysis of the film, this article tries to understand how Partition andthe incidents of violence against women, rape, abduction, and killings of womenare depicted in the film, and how all these descriptions in the film undermine theofficial, patriarchal nationalistic, and colonialistic discourses of Partition history.

_________________________________________________________________The present article contends that Khamosh Pani, ʺSilent Waters,ʺ (2003) asa distinct voice from the mainstream Bollywood cinema, sees Partition
history in a radically different way than that of the official, colonialist
and nationalist historiographies, giving voice to the subalterns of IndianPartition, like minorities, and women. Deploying Rosenstone’s (2012)
view on the relationship between film and history as a springboard, itconsiders cinema as a significant medium to engage with Partition
history and attempts to foreground how cinematic narratives andpractices can be vital resources for rethinking Partition history.The study
further taking its impetus from the works of prominent revisionist
thinkers of Partition such as Gyanendra Pandey (1992, 2001), Urvashi
Butalia (1993, 1998), and Menon and Bhasin (1998), explore how the film
Khamosh Pani plays a significant role in recovering the woman
subaltern’s experience during the Partition and the violence and theJSPS 27:2

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trauma they faced by revisiting it from the perspective of the women
who have been largely silenced or excluded from the mainstream
historical accounts.
Khamosh Pani is an endeavour to disrupt the silence about theunderbelly of Partition by recovering the excruciating experiences ofwomen. The title of the film ‘Khamosh Pani/ Silent Waters’ is a metaphor
for the silence surrounding Partition and its female victims. It also
connotes the wells in the villages of colonial Punjab that became major
sites of forced or voluntary honour killings of female subjects. A
discursive silence has always reigned over the subject of Partition while
it lingers on in the life of the subcontinent. In this discourse of silence,
the most prominent one is the silence around the psycho‐sexual violence
perpetrated against women. Butalia (1993) recounts how ‘A resounding
silence surrounds the question of women and Partition’ (13) and how‘we hear little about the rape and abduction of women in historicalaccounts’ (1998, 193). The project of nation building in postcolonial India
and Pakistan is mirrored in the nationalist historiographies that led to
the repression of the dark sides of the Partition since they were seen as
blurring the achievements of the freedom movement and colonial
liberation. Pandey (2001) points out how Partition violence is presented
as ‘non‐narratable,’ or referred to as ‘a freak occurrence, like a naturalcalamity, which requires no historical explanation (“these things
happen”); as a characteristic happening in some unassimilated part ofthe society or the world (“these things happen there”)’ (46).Partition isseen as a sudden rupture in the history of colonial India that came withthe wind. However, the Partition of India cannot be seen as an event thatbegan and ended in 1947. It continues to shape the extended geopoliticalconflicts in many regions of South Asia as well as in the living memoryof millions of people1. Sarkar also comments on how ‘Partition as theunderside of independence, remains a festering wound in the collective
psyche of South Asia; yet public discourse following a trajectory set bynationalist historiography has celebrated 1947 mainly as the end of alienoccupation’ (Sarkar 2009, 1). There were few attempts up to the 1970s in
the recorded history as well as cinema to deal seriously with thePartition and its aftermath. In the words of Gyanendra Pandey (1992):‘Nationalist historiography, journalism, and filmmaking have tended togenerate something like a collective amnesia. Consciously or otherwise,
they have represented Partition and all that went with it as anaberration’ (32‐33).

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It is the high politics of the subcontinent that has dominated most of
the Partition historiography (Roy 1990). The recorded Partition history
has been engaging with the nationalistic exploits of the elite nationalist
leaders in the backdrop of the colonial regime: the role of Nehru,
Gandhi, and Jinnah and the English in Partition of India.2 Most accounts
deal with the physical act of vivisection and assigning the culpability
either to the Indian Nationalist Leaders, Muslim League or the colonial
rulers. The nationalist and colonialist historiographies often present
conflicting and controversial explanations of the Partition of India.3 Khan
(2007) notes a ‘gulf’ between the ‘later renderings’ (204) and the actual
experience of Partition.
In mainstream Indian and Pakistani cinema, particularly the years
after independence, there was a silence regarding the Partition and its
aftermath.4 Until the 1970s there were mild portrayals of the Partition
usually avoiding the bloodshed on screen as we have seen in the films of
Ritwik Ghatak, Yash Chopra, Manmohan Desai and M.S Sathyu. After
1984, and 1992 we have films focusing on the need for national unity andintegrity. After Kargil war, we have extreme nationalism in Gadar(2001), and in the twenty‐first century when concerns of gender havetaken centre stage we have Khamosh Pani (2003) and more recently Qissa(2013).
Recovering Partition History of Women through Cinema
Until the 1980s, before the reworking of Partition history by Butalia(1993, 1998), Menon and Bhasin (1998), it has been prominently a male
discourse dominated by men; a history of the men, by the men and forthe men that has marginalized and/or erased the experiences of women.
Women in the subcontinent have been confined to the domestic spaceand denied the reach to archive. Moreover, the language is essentiallyman‐made and inadequate for articulating concerns of women (Spender1980), hence the inability of the traditional historical discourse forscripting a female history. Indeed, the oral testimonies of women victimsof Partition are seen as an alternative to recover women history ofPartition; ‘Because women have used speech much more widely than thewritten word, oral history practitioners have found in interviews andtestimonies a rich vein to mine and to surface what, so far, has been
hidden from history’(Menon and Bhasin 1988, 9). While the search for an
appropriate medium for women history remains debated, the idea that

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cinema can be such a medium is contested because the classical
Hollywood cinema contains ‘patriarchal, phallic and proprietary
implications’ (Mayne 1990, 97). However, a women’s alternative cinemathat disowns and sifts all the institutional gender biases of the medium
can be used as a political tool (Johnston 1999; Quart 1988) to recover
women from the history. Cinematic language deprived of its patriarchal
ideological baggage, with the help of innovative strategies can be helpful
in giving voice to women. Whereas it would be a far off thing to claim
superiority of the film as a medium to articulate the concerns of female
victims of Partition over the written history, the present article argues
that the films like Khamosh Pani can be helpful in what Butalia (1993)
calls ‘the process of recovering women from history’ (13).
While the debate regarding whether ‘film can be treated seriously in
its own right as a medium for presenting versions of the past’ (Miskell
2004, 245) is uncomfortable for many professional historians who
consider the written text as the only legitimate and objective medium forhistoricising ‘few academic historians would deny today film’s ability toinstigate awareness to and enrich the understanding of historicalexperiences’ (Ashkenazi 2014, 289). Nowadays films are ‘central to how
we think about the past and about history’ (Westwell 2007, 587). White(1975) has shown that narrative, artistic, and rhetorical elements are
essential to all history writing. History is never an objective retelling of
the past events (Jenkins 2003). It is colored with the point of view of theone who writes it, so the truth claims and its pretended objectivity to thepast is to be challenged or deconstructed (Munslow 2001). Film as a
medium for conveying historical meaning was supported bypostmodern historians who believed that ‘film is simply another form ofhistorical narrative with its own codes and conventions’ (Chapman,
Glancy, and Harper 2007, 11). According to Rosenstone (2012), thefunction of a historian is to study the traces of the past and establish
certain facts about the past. But what traces out of a number of traces ahistorian selects and what he leaves out depends upon his own
subjective view (43). A film must not stick to the traces found by thehistorians but choose its own out of the contemporary reality and must
create some of them to suit the requirements ‘practices, and traditions ofboth the visual media and the dramatic form’ (43). It is, however, to be
noted that films about Partition may not provide ‘a detailed factual
portrait’ of the Partition but ‘what they do resurrect are emotional
contents’ of it, and these films do not create the past that is ‘the same as259

Singh & Saini: Revisiting Partition of Punjab

the past provided by traditional history, but it certainly should be called
history— if by that word we mean a serious encounter with the meaningof past events’ (Rosenstone 1995, 5). This article neither intends to delve
deep into the theoretical debate over the nature and relationship of film
and history nor to present a comprehensive analysis of women history
through Partition cinema in such a limited space. Partition films
featuring the concerns of women can be seen as a welcome corrective tothe nationalistic and colonialist biases of history with the help of a studyof Khamosh Pani.
Khamosh Pani: Juxtaposing the Present with the Past
Khamosh Pani can be examined in relation to the presentist use of history,
a film that helps in the new interpretation of Partition as well as gives a
new dimension to the contemporary reality by linking it to the past
(Lichtner & Bandyopadhyay 2008, 435). The film juxtaposes the sufferingof women in contemporary Pakistan under the totalitarian regimes of
military dictators with the misfortunes of women in the post‐
independence Pakistan and India. It also comments on the domesticationof the female subjects in an extremely oppressive social and politicalsystem marked by violent past and present. The Partition works as aunifying narrative leitmotif in the film. Set in the village Charkhi ofPakistani Punjab in the late 1970s, Khamosh Pani is directed by Sabiha
Sumar, a Pakistani‐born film director who is known for her
documentaries about the rise of extremism in Pakistan and its impact on
the condition of women. Khamosh Pani is a story of a middle‐aged
Muslim woman Ayesha (Kirron Kher) and her son Saleem (Amir Malik).
The narrative of the film is set in the backdrop of the times of GeneralZia‐ul‐Haq’s emergency when he dissolved the democraticallyestablished government in Pakistan and executed the then Prime
Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. On the world stage, the cold war was in its
full swing, and the Soviet Union was trying to tighten its stranglehold in
Afghanistan.
The film begins with a high angle long panoramic shot of village
Charkhi in the Baluchistan province of Pakistan, full of scorching yellow
sunlight and a crow cawing and flying over the rooftops. In the
background, the voice of azaan (a Muslim prayer) can be heard. The shot
appears again after few minutes, reinforcing the dryness and remotenessof the landscape. Ayesha and her friend Shabbo (Fariha Zaheen) areJSPS 27:2

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shown barefooted, drying a blood red cloth on the hot roof in theafternoon. The scene suggests the entrapment of women in a stifling
environment. When a little girl asks Ayesha, ‘Don’t you ever go to thewell?’ Ayesha is immediately disturbed by the thoughts of Partition, andwe have the first flashback of the well with the voiceover of Ayesha:‘Summer days in 1947 seemed so much hotter. How we ran. How did weknow, it would be forever?’ Violence has been an integral part of the
lives of millions of women in the subcontinent, either it is the routine
violence (Pandey 2006) within the domestic space faced by them in a
predominantly patriarchal society or the gender‐specific violence during
the times of political upheavals in the conflictual space of nations(Purkayastha and Ratcliff 2014, 19). The gender violence incontemporary South Asia and during the Partition share certain
attributes; ‘It would seem to be quite wrong to regard the rape andabduction of Punjabi women in 1947 as a product merely of the anomieof the times . . . violence against women is embedded in everyday
relationships in this society’ (Major 1995, 60). Sabiha Sumar, the directorof the film comments:
I came across a reference to abducted women on both sides ofthe border, and also a reference to the Recovery Act . . . Which
India and Pakistan signed in 1948. I also thought it was very
important that I somehow connect this violence with present day
violence so that it’s not as if it becomes a historical film thatsuggests that violence occurred and then it ended, but rather
that it is a continuous process. I wanted to show the continuationof the violence against Ayesha. (Sumar 2005)
Religious Nationalisms and Sexual Violence during Partition
Ahmed (2002) calls Partition ‘a gory consummation of a long process ofmutual demonising and dehumanising by Hindu and Muslim
extremists’ (9). The rising tide of religious nationalisms in the twentiethcentury India fueled by colonial masters swept away the harmony ofcommunal relations (Pandey 1990). It was the loss of the pluralistic
traditions and rise of communalism during the Partition era that led tosexual brutalities against women, objectifying the body of women as
territories of revenge: ‘The performance of nationalism —throughembodied acts of sexual violence, conversion, martyrdom and state261

Singh & Saini: Revisiting Partition of Punjab

violence —is enacted upon female bodies that are transformed into
political artefact’ (Menon 2006, 29). The unique interplay of ideologies ofcommunalism, socio‐economic and gender dynamics is accountable forthe politics of sexual violence in South Asia. Veer (1994) believes that‘the nineteenth‐century nationalism in India has fed upon religious
identifications . . . Nation building is directly dependent on religious
antagonism’ (2). Even in India religious hostility or intolerance is thebasis of the so‐called nationalism of the right‐wing Hindu
fundamentalists today (Chhachhi 1991, 144); this kind of everpresent
religious bigotry in the name of nation‐building is satirised by Sumar in
Khamosh Pani. In the film we see that Rashid (Sarfraz Ansari) and
Mazhar (Adnan Shah) try to engage the village community in promoting
the cause of General Zia‐ul‐Haq: this includes the spread of Islamic
religious traditions, using the mosque for political activities, forcibly
shutting down the market for namaz, raising the wall of a girls’ school
and confinement of women to the domestic spaces. Ayesha’s son Saleem
and his friend Zubair accompany Rashid, and Mazhar to Rawalpindi toparticipate in a rally where Sumar intermingles the images of fast socio‐
cultural transformations alongside co‐existing hetero‐geneities.
When Ayesha comes to know about the activities of Saleem she
forbids Saleem from joining Rashid and Mazhar; Saleem conveys to herthat he has found a noble purpose in the dissemination of Islamic
traditions and Ayesha should be proud of him. As Ayesha expresses herapprehension that politicians are using faith for their self‐seeking
motives, Saleem starts suspecting her loyalty to Islam and chides her
saying, ‘You don’t know anything, and you take the blasphemy you
teach as the name of Allah . . . Why should a true Muslim fear Islam?’
Ayesha had married one of her abductors and converted into his
religion. Over the years Ayesha has adopted Islam with all her heart andsoul teaching Quran lessons to the village girls. However, she still finds
her at crossroads as she is considered an outsider and is asked to provide
a confirmation and commitment in the public square stating that she has
nothing to do with her former religion, Sikhism. Deserted by Allabi, herlifelong friend Shabbo, who tells her not to attend her daughter’smarriage ceremony, and above all her own son in whom she has
invested all her hopes, her life, Ayesha sees no light before her but thedarkness of silent waters; the bloody waters of the village well, and thefate which she had defied thirty years ago calls on her again. One night
Ayesha gets up from her sleep, prays for the last time according toJSPS 27:2

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Islamic rituals, and jumps into the village well. After Ayesha’s death,
Saleem offers her belongings to the river that included a copy of Sikhreligious scripture.
The film presents the view that proliferation of the extremist andreligious nationalisms is the cause of the turbulent histories as well as
the present‐day forms of violence in South Asian societies. This violence
saw a consummation in Partition and the ruthless exploitation of
thousands of women. Later, when the spectres of Partition visited thesubcontinent in the form of 1971 civil war in East Pakistan, around two
hundred thousand women faced the trauma of rape (Saikia 2011, 60) as
sexual violence was used as a genocidal strategy by the Pakistani army
(Sharlach 2000, 89). Again, in the 1980s, there was rampant sexual
violence against Hindu women and men to dispel them from
Bangladesh. 5 Feminists today should be more and more aware of thegrowing religious fundamentalism since it ‘uses women’s bodies as abattlefield in its struggle to appropriate institutional power’(Jayawardena and de‐Alwis 1996, ix).
Partition’s Women: Honour killings and Partition of Punjab
Khamosh Pani helps demystify narratives of Partition that describe it as asmall detour on the road to freedom. It questions the communal politics
and violence in the South Asia by depicting females as the ‘chief
sufferers’ of Partition of India; ‘“power rape” —the raping of women inorder to demoralise and defeat rival men in a particular society—isparticularly common in northern India’ (Major 1995, 60). The men of thedifferent communities abducted, murdered, raped and killed the womenof the other religious community. In some cases, the police wereinvolved in the abduction and rape of women: ‘the police officers who
were appointed to protect the women themselves committed the worst
crime’ (Singh 1998, 14). Gender‐based violence such as ‘stripping;parading naked; mutilating and disfiguring; tattooing or branding thebreasts; knifing open the womb; raping, of course; killing fetuses . . . tells
us about women as objects in male constructions of their own honour’(Menon and Bhasin 1998, 43). The attached stigma of abduction and rape
led to sacrificial or honour killings. Apart from the violence coming fromthe outside of their community, women were the victims of the violencefrom their own communities and families. Many women were killed by
the men of their own communities to save their honour: ‘for many

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Singh & Saini: Revisiting Partition of Punjab

women it was not only miscreants, outsiders or marauding mobs theyneeded to fear—husbands, fathers, brothers, and even sons could turnkillers’ (255). Butalia (1998) quotes an example of Mangal Singh from
Amritsar who killed seventeen women and children of his own family to
avoid their rape or conversion: ‘After leaving home we had to cross thesurrounding boundary of water. And we were many family members,
several women, and children who would not have been able to cross thewater, to survive the flight. So we killed—they became martyrs’ (194).
The paradox is horribly simple: women just as secure in the hands oftheir adversary whose attack to ravage their honour was preferable tothe brutal extermination by their own families. A vast number of women
were killed or were forced to take their lives at the altar of religion toescape from the cruelties of disgrace. Talib (1950) a Sikh historiancomments on the incidence in the village Thoa Khalsa that was attacked
in March 1947, ‘After long and heroic resistance, 200 Sikhs were killed.
The women were asked to embrace Islam, but 93 of them, old andyoung, decided to escape dishonour by drowning themselves in a well’(83). Talib celebrates sacrificial killing of women in the name of saving
the honour of the community. Das (1995) argues how during violent
times a woman’s body is taken to be a symbol of honour or identity of
the whole community:
The woman’s body . . . became a sign through which men
communicated with each other. The lives of women were framedby the notion that they were to bear permanent witness to theviolence of Partition. Thus, the political programme of creating
two nations of India and Pakistan was inscribed upon the bodies
of women. (56)Preckel (2008) believes that ‘Rape and sexual violence are symbols of
newly created borders and boundaries on the real landscape. They aresigns of forcefully set marks on the body separating “our” from “other”’(74). Surprisingly enough, all and everything about women in the third
world is decided by men. In Khamosh Pani, Ayesha/‘Veero’s father wants
her to jump into a well, her brother wants her to return to India, her son
wants her to renounce the Sikh religion because he is turning into an
Islamic fundamentalist’ (Kher 2003). In the film,a Sikh pilgrimremarksthat some of the Sikh women were left in the village during Partition towhich another Sikh strongly opposes and proudly affirms: ‘Not aJSPS 27:2

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woman survived. The women went to my uncle, and said, “Shoot us.”
He kept firing and firing, all 22 women, our honour was saved, we killed
them, and the Muslims could not touch them.’ This mass killing of
women or sacrifices in the name of protecting the honour of thecommunity is shown in the film Tamas (1986) when the daughter of
Gurbachan Singh leads Sikh women to a well to jump into it. The well isthe central motif in the narrative structure of Khamosh Paani. Ayesha,
formerly a Sikh girl named Veero, now converted to Islam, never dares
to go to the village well of Charkhi. The reason behind Ayesha avoiding
the well is that she witnessed her two sisters jumping into a well during
Partition whereas she herself avoided that sacrifice by running away. In
one of the flashbacks in the film, the well is depicted overshadowed byviolent dust storms with a voiceover of Ayesha herself:
Two Countries were born, men abducted women, fathers killed
their daughters. Everyone said it was to save their honour. Someyoung girls died, others survived, people moved like the sea,leaving everything behind, broken memories, half‐dreamt
dreams, places of worship.
The film shows that there were thousands of other Hindu, Muslim,and Sikh women like Veero. Amin (Salman Shahid), the postman, had adaughter named Mina who was left in India when he moved to Pakistan.
Among the pilgrims to Panja Sahib, there was one named Jaswant(Navtej Johar), Ayesha’s Sikh brother. Jaswant discovers that his sister
Veero was living as a Muslim woman Ayesha, but she declines to
identify him. Saleem also becomes aware of his true identity of ʹmixed
bloodʹ since he is the son of a Sikh woman and a Muslim man. Saleem
denunciates Ayesha as an infidel and asks her what he should do now.
When Allabi’s husband discontinues her from fetching water for
Ayesha, she herself goes to the well. In a nightmarish flashback, Ayesha
once again reminiscences the incidence of sacrificial killings of women
during Partition. Ayesha sees that her father was reciting mool mantra
6and the women including her mother and sister were jumping into thewell. However, Ayesha runs away, her younger brother Jaswant tries tocaptureher but she runs away. Ayesha’s refusal to die sacrificially during
Partition marks her agency. When her brother meets her after decades hebeseeches her to come home because their father wishes to see her forthe last time so that he may die peacefully. Ayesha replies: “Wasn’t

265Singh & Saini: Revisiting Partition of Punjab

killing mother and Jeeto enough? He wanted to kill me for his peace,
what will he do if he sees me alive, and a Muslim? How will he go to
Sikh heaven?”
It is noteworthy that dealing with the sensitive issue of sexual
violence Sumar has taken care to evade melodrama and luridness. The
abduction of Ayesha is shown in flashback scenes, but nowhere has it
been evident what happens to her; the spectators are left to presume
what might have been the fate of Ayesha as she is captured andincarcerated by the men of a different community. The scene is followedby shadow cricket images on television, a sound of commentary, and theball going from one hand to another. According to Mulvey (1999),
filmmakers must ‘find cinematic strategies to depict the violence in ways
which donʹt incite the audience members who might be so inclined to
identify with the perpetrators’ (95). Sumar deliberately avoids depicting
rape on the screen by using cinematic montage to construct moretolerable substitute narratives and avoid the usual linkage between rapeand stereotypical descriptions of Muslim male as a violent, sexuallyproactive and destructive to women. Similarly, the scene of sacrificial
killings at the village well avoids much detailed description, but it is
only through successively broken flashbacks of Ayesha. To convey thetrauma and pain of women Sumar has skilfully used soundtrack as a‘non‐verbal, aural representational strategy, it demonstrates that
Ayesha’s trauma may be unspeakable in the present, but it is not entirely
unrepresentable. . . is temporarily resolved in the soundtrack’ (Sundar
2010, 285). Sumar takes pains to avoid scopophiliac perspective of thecamera; the woman is the subject not the object of the cinematic
narrative.
The flashback technique has been used to represent the painful andupsetting hallucinations or recollections of the village well that trouble
Ayesha. Mulvey (1999) holds that alternative cinema’s ‘formal
preoccupations reflect the psychical obsessions of the society which
produced it’ (71). The repetitive flashbacks of the village well that
disturb Ayesha stand for the memories of Partition that haunt thecollective memory of the two nations. The intermittent nature of theseflashbacks further conveys that the sexual violence is the part of theliving reality of the existence of Partition victims like Ayesha,
intermixing the temporality and spatiality of Partition with the 1970s’
and twenty‐first century Pakistan; Partition is thus a continuous andunfinished affair. Flashbacks in the film are ‘a cinematic representation

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of memory and of history and, ultimately of subjective truth’ (Hayward
2000, 133). The film uses the flashbacks to resolve the mystery behind
Ayesha’s troubled relationship with the present and agonising Partition
history. By focusing on the torturous experience of Ayesha, flashbacks
force the spectators to question the patriarchal reactionary structures ofpost‐partition societies manifest with zealot nationalisms that haveinterdicted the healing processes for Ayesha and thousands of other
women. Flashback codes in the film are marked by close up shots of
Ayesha or voiceover. The voiceover in the film appears in the narrative
voice of three women characters; it is in the form of a background voice
to Ayesha’s visions of the well, and after her death it is the voice of
Shabbo as an annotation upon the demise of Veero, and later when thefilm shifts to the present day Pakistan, it is Zubeida’s voice. The use of
female voiceover gives a sense of authority to the female characters(Silverman 1998) in the film that appear more or less like the omniscientnarrators.
Interestingly, the film was funded by fourteen different agencies
mostly the European and American. Although the politics of thereception of Sumar’s film can be placed in the broader spectrum of thecontemporary politics of the region and the changing perceptions ofMuslim masculinities in the shifting cartographies of global relations
especially after 9/11, the film is remarkable in itself as an articulation of
the victimization of women, especially the marginal women. It isdissimilar to popular Bollywood films that deploy melodrama andemotional re‐telling of Partition. The film’s handling of the theme ofabducted women is much more nuanced and sensitive than that of
Deepa Mehta’s Earth (1998); Mehta’s account of Ayah, the chief female
sufferer of Partition in the film is voyeuristic followed by a dramatic
abduction scene in the end. Unlike Gadar (2001) Khamosh Pani’s treatmentof themes, characters, religious or national identities is quite refined. Its
portrayal of female characters is much more convincing; they are active
agents, not passive female objects. Sakina in Gadar is a marionette
shifting interchangeably in the hands of her father or Sikh husband.
Ayesha is different as we see that she is a self‐made woman who makes
her livelihood by giving Quran lessons to Muslim girls. Similarly,
Zubeida (Shilpa Shukla) is a progressive woman highly aspirational ofmoving upwards in life, has a love affair, and dreams of a college
education. While Ayesha was confined to the four walls of the house,
Zubeida’s assertion is an attempt at the destabilisation of gender roles.

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Singh & Saini: Revisiting Partition of Punjab

Rafina in Sumar’s Good Morning Karachi (2014) represents the next step in
Zubeida’s struggle against this inheritance of violence. Khamosh Pani
depicts the misfortunes of a woman at the hands of society and herfamily, at the hands of an enemy turned family, and a family turned
enemy. The incessant violence against women after Partition in the nameof religion reveals the precarious nature of women’s lives and safety inSouth Asia on the one hand as well as an agonizing amalgamation ofdeath in life and life in death for females during Partition.
During the Partition, Ayesha chose to dismiss the commandment ofher father by refusing to jump into the village well, and later she decides
to reject the demands of her son to publicly affirm her belief in Islam by
jumping into the same well. She exercises her right to take her own life
but not to succumb to the dictates of a fundamentalist patriarchal
society. It is an act of subversion on the part of Ayesha and reveals theability to say no to the prescriptions of the institution of patriarchy. In
the similar way, in Pinjar (2003) Puro decides to stay with Rashied andthat decision is symbolic of the negation of the authority that made it
compulsory for the women to follow Abducted Persons (Recovery and
Restoration) Act7 and return to their relatives.
The film is notable in the discourse of Partition history because it
voices the pain and suffering of those abducted women who were left
behind in the ‘other’ country and who willingly or forcibly adopted thereligion of their abductors after marrying them. However, these women
have to face the questioning attitude or suspicious glances of thecommunity that treats such women as outsiders. This is a new issue
raised by the film since most of the earlier Partition research has ignored
the issues of women, and even those who engage with the issues ofwomen speak either of the incidents of the victimisation of the abducted
women or the double displacement caused by the Abducted Persons
Act. But there has not been much written or said about the identity
issues of those women and their children who converted into the ‘other’community and were still facing the discrimination because they weretreated differently from the people who were born into that religion.
Conclusion
While Partition and its legacy continue to haunt Punjab, cinema can be avital medium to historicize and construct alternative versions to theofficial, nationalistic and colonialist historiographies of the Partition. On

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the whole, Khamosh Pani can be seen as the cinematic manifestation of afemale historiography of Partition. By foregrounding the experiences ofwomen, particularly the agony, miseries, and trauma of women during
Partition, it brings out the fate of marginalized women ‐‐ past, present,
and future ‐‐ in societies dominated by the ideologies of communal
intolerance, and patriarchal religious nationalisms. However, it is only
through a nuanced use of film semiotics and cinematic apparatus—
different types of shots, flashback, voiceover, and sound—that KhamoshPani tries to disturb the still waters of the repressed female history ofIndia’s Partition. The film depicts the collective psychosis of communal
hatred during the Partition and draws parallels to the India and Pakistan
in the 1970s and present. It is worth mentioning here that extremism andparochial nationalist tendencies are on the rise in the entire subcontinent
including India where parallel movements of extremist intolerance canbe seen. Jameson (1986) believes that ‘All third‐world texts arenecessarily. . national allegories . . . the story of the private individual
destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public
third‐world culture and society’ (320). Khamosh Pani can be treated as anallegory of the violence of Partition faced by numberless faceless womenas well as their predicament in contemporary Pakistan and India under
the siege of factionist Hindu‐Muslim fundamentalisms. This film is a
visual reminder of the ongoing dangers of religious nationalisms inSouth Asia and the precarious nature of a womanʹs existence whether inthe home of her father, husband, or son.

Notes

1

See for example (Kaul 2001), and Butalia (2015). Talbot and Singh (2009) notethat conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir has often been termed
as “the unfinished business of Partition.”2

For the prominent high politics accounts of Partition of India see Jalal (1985);
Wolpert (1984); Philips and Wainwright (1969); Mahajan (2000); Campbell‐Johnson (1953).

3

The historiography of Partition of India is highly influenced by thenationalistic and imperialist perspectives, for example the Indian national

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perspective sees Partition as the result of the sectarian policies of the Muslim
League and the policy of divide and rule of the English, for example, see Lal
and Johari (1988). Similarly, the official Pakistani perspective blame thecongress which represented the interests of Majority and the Hindu practicesof discrimination which suppressed and exploited the Muslims in India, forexample, see Zafar (1995); West Punjab Government (1948). The British
perspective of Partition sees the Partition as an inevitable result of the age old
Hindu‐Muslim hostility and hail the role of British administrators andsoldiers, for example, see Moon, Mansergh, and Lumby (1979); Mansergh et al.
(1970).
4

See for example Sarkar (2009); Sarkar attributes this silence to the newly
independent nation states and their hopes of national integration and nationbuilding. There has been little response in the mainstream Hindi cinema todeal seriously with Partition of India as compared to the Jewish holocaust.
This silence and lack of memorialisation is considered as one of the major
reasons of the inability of the nation states to come to terms with their past as
well as the recurrent communal riots and pogroms.

5

TaslimaNasreen in her novel Shame (1994) depicts horrible accounts of sexual
violence against Hindu women. Nasreen claimed that many of these
depictions were based on actual instances of such violence.

6

Sacred verse of Sikhs, written by Guru Nanak Dev, contained in their religious
scripture the Guru Granth Sahib.

7

Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act, 1949 was an agreement
between the newly established nation states of India and Pakistan to resettle
the abducted women with their own communities. But with the passing oftime most of the abducted women had become part of the family of theirabductors. In some cases such women were married and had children and did
not wish to leave their new families.

Funding
This work was supported by the Senior Research Fellowship ofUniversity Grants Commission (IN) awarded to the author.

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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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