Partition means different things to different people. For some, it is grief of separation, exile and loss. For others, a retrospective legitimisation of their prejudices. And for many, it is a terrible event that took place a very long time ago and has minimal bearing on the present. A collective memory of Partition seems to have settled in our minds as a layered narrative made of short stories, history textbook references, cinema and, of course, online discourse.

This collective memory, as is usually the case, has become the ‘common sense’ understanding of the partition. The prevalent understanding goes something like this: Partition was a wrong done to the country, its costs were borne primarily by one community and the lesson it teaches is one of communal suspicion rather than shared loss.

This common sense, like all common sense, is slow and passive and over time assuming a strong element of tradition. One could either take it or leave it, but it is mostly beyond questioning. This is not to say there is nothing beyond common sense. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence, for instance, remains one of the most significant attempts to recover what official histories and archives disregarded. Working with civil society groups responding to the violence against Sikhs in 1984, Butalia kept hearing people compare the targeted violence to that of partition. That connection sent her, over the next decade, looking for the people who had lived through this traumatic event and yet had never really been asked to recount it. What she found were complicated experiences and memories, not unlike Keenu and Jiya in Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga (MVA) and the utter tragedy of the Grewal family. 



The story follows a man in his nineties, Keenu/Ishar Singh Grewal (played by Naseeruddin Shah), whose memory keeps pulling him back to a village near Sargodha, now in Pakistan, and to his beloved Jiya/Afsana (played by Sharvari Wagh), whom he had to leave behind when the country was arbitrarily and violently divided in two.

His grandson Nirvair (played by Diljit Dosanjh) slowly pieces the fable together from the older man’s rambling, riddled with oblique metaphors. The older Keenu’s last painful breaths, it seems, hinge on whether Afsana will grant him leave one last time.

Screengrab from the trailer of Main Vaapas Aaunga, Photo: YouTube/Applause Entertainment, Tips Official.

The film moves back and........

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