From a fellow grandchild of Partition: a view on Mogul Mowgli
By: Shabnum Gulati
Tags: Riz Ahmed, Pakistan, Partition Of India, Mogul Mowgli, Film Reviews

“Our bodies can still keep the score, we can taste it. My DNA knows that they hunted me.”

These chilling lyrics are found in Riz Ahmed’s single “Once Kings” from the film Ahmed co-wrote with first time feature director Bassam Tariq. In the film, Ahmed’s character Zed is a rising British-Pakistani rapper on the brink of achieving his greatest success, only to be diagnosed with an autoimmune disease when traveling back home to England from New York. Having followed Ahmed’s work for some time and seen Partition come up as a consistent theme, I was struck by how affected Ahmed seems by Partition as someone that didn’t actually live through it.

It dawned on me that growing up as the child of Indian immigrants to the US, the Hindi films and TV shows we consumed through the 90s and into the early 2000s were plastered with images of violence from the Partition — images that are now buried deep into the recesses of my memory, but come to mind immediately when thinking of it. Images of violence in the trains, images of young girls being abducted when straying away from family, and images of hordes of women jumping into a well. These images are recalled immediately in Ahmed’s lyrics, when he references these events directly. For those unfamiliar with the Partition, these descriptions will sound dramatic to say the least — but they reference the true horror that occurred when one country (India) was divided into three parts (India, Pakistan, and eventually Bangladesh) and people were forced to leave their homes to migrate to the part they were assigned to based off their religion.

As a grandchild of the Partition, I was curious to see Ahmed and Tariq’s adaptation of how Partition seeps into identity. Both sides of my family lived in what is now Pakistan, and moved to India during the course of events that followed. Both sides of the family experienced the threat of violence and violence itself, both having to leave homes and all material possessions behind to build a life in what was now their country. Violence was perhaps the most dramatic aspect of the Partition, but in my opinion what lingered was in some ways more traumatic — a feeling of being an immigrant in your own country, having to live in refugee camps because of having lost everything overnight, and perhaps most transcendental of all: a mixed identity.

As much as we can cling to notions of being “Indian” or “Pakistani,” for a lot of us that identity feels somewhat incomplete, and it stems from knowing that our ancestors are not from the place our family currently lives in. Although Mogul Mowgli was rich with images of violence, I think it was the non-belonging that stood out to me the most. It cast dimension to a problem that is unique to Punjabi and Sindhi Indians, Pakistanis, Indian Bengalis, and Bangladeshis. How many of us have heard our Gujarati friends claim “Back in my parents’ village” and thought, “can’t relate.”

Immigration stories in the West often focus on the most recent struggle we’ve all faced — the move from back East to either the US or the UK, the confusion the children of these immigrants face, and the desire to find belonging that both parents and children face. Mogul Mowgli challenged me to examine for the first time how feeble my sense of belonging is given that my grandparents were refugees from a traumatic event, my parents moved to America, and I spent a lot of mental energy reconciling eastern and western culture. When your parents and your parent’s parents are all immigrants to somewhere, where are you really from?

A lot of us descendants of the Partition have our identities split between the geography of one place — with families that made their fortunes on a portion of land that we no longer have access to, and the customs of another place. Religion being the amoebic force that it is establishes itself in quotidian ways into languages and customs that passed across borders and across time. We continue to use phrases that reference one religion on a technical front, but feel forced to claim the identity of yet another faith entirely based off a line on a map.

One of the most powerful scenes to me was the scene of a family gathering and Zed’s cousin criticizing Zed for adopting the nickname. “That’s the name they gave you,” he points out — referencing the fact that Zed should go by his given name of Zaheer, and not a westernization. When asked about what he would name his child, Bilal responds “Ashfaq,” to which Zed responds “Why would you do that to your child?” and proceeds to point out that the name would sound like “ass fuck” to white people. Although this scene at surface level lends humor, it also does a few things at once. It shows Zed’s relationship with a family that is starting to see him as a slave to the West, and it also shows the internal struggles most children of immigrants face in the West when trying to blend in but hold onto the identity that their parents have tried to pass down.

Overall, I think Tariq and Ahmed did a fantastic job of reminding us about how we only understand fractions of our identity, and there is more to the story — a story that was robbed from us through a series of political events. The fact that this fractionality is amplified by the liminal space the narrative takes place in — on the verge of Zed’s recovery from a lethal disease, makes us eager to find the missing pieces of our own identities. I haven’t even begun to cover the performances, but Riz Ahmed and Alyy Khan’s portrayals of two individuals caught in these situations while reconciling their pasts are truly gripping. The only thing I would have liked more of would have been a heightening of Zed’s revelations. I feel that the story didn’t complete its arc for the series of discoveries that Zed had been set upon, and I found myself wanting more. However, perhaps Mogul Mowgli is challenging us to find those pieces of our own stories, and as a work of art it does not fail to move and inspire deeper thought in its viewers.