The International journal of analytical and experimental modal analysis ISSN NO:0886-9367

Suffering and Trauma: Identity of Partition in the movie Garam Hava

Minakshi Chauhan

Research Scholar,

Deptt. Of English

Baba Mastnath University, Rohtak

Supervisor: Dr. Nazar Mohammed Abstract:

Garam Hava, writer narrates a couplet, which rather bestow's an implication, "..Nobody listens to Gita or Quran, shocked conscience was here as well as there."Garm Hava is a sorrowful narrative. An experience which evokes pathos inside one's conscious. But, even after constant circumstances resulting in quite similar fates - one, like the most characters in the film - searches for little hope throughout - and I tend to incline that this is what makes this cinematic piece - rather complete.Quality focus has been kept in costumes & set. Characters are mainly seen traveling in horse-driven carriages and usually donning traditional outfits - it being a period feature. However, the film's slow pace sometimes gets between it's tight narrative. For instance, picturisation of song(s) looked overly-extended; could've been smaller in length - though the movie's music score is very nice, special mention to the song 'Maula Salim Chisti.' This movie would however, be incomplete without mentioning the legendary Balraj Sahni who, unarguably gave an excellent performance as Salim Mirza. He made his character hard to forget. The eyes, the style of Mirza's body-movement - could only be achieved successfully by an actor of his caliber.Overall, Garm Hava is a very well-executed narrative, and informs us extensively about one of the many poignant chapters of the subcontinent's vast history - aftermath of The Partition.

Key Words:

Partition,Community, Attic ,Palpate, Hoax, Archetypes, Trauma and Virgin.

M S Sathyu's "Garm Hawa" brought in furious winds of change in cinema and its approach and attitude to the theme of Muslim isolation in pre-Partition . Though it is set in Agra just after the division of India into two separate countries, "Garm Hawa", which re-released on Children's Day Friday, doesn't focus on the riots and bloodshed that followed the decisive moment in history.Sathyu's film, brilliantly written by Kaifi Azmi and Shama Zaidi, seeks to pin down the violence that the community experienced from within their own hearts and souls. That sense of agonised isolation when history seems to have betrayed a whole community and its

Volume XII, Issue X, October/2020 Page No:1424 The International journal of analytical and experimental modal analysis ISSN NO:0886-9367

people comes vividly alive in "Garm Hawa" as Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahni) watches his family torn apart as one by one they all leave, most of them across the border and a beloved daughter for the other world.

The film traces the impact of partition on the family of Salim who chooses to stay in India after partition. His daughter Amina is engaged to Kazim. Kazim goes to to find work. However, he is forced by the family to stay in Pakistan and marry some other girl there. He returns back to India to marry Amina but gets arrested and is deported to Pakistan. Amina is heart broken. Her family pushes her towards Shamsad. After initial reluctance she accepts his courtship. But Shamsad’s parents also force him to marry someone else. After this second betrayal Amina commits suicide. On the other hand Salim Mirza’s mother is forced to leave her family’s ancestral house. When she gets to know that they have to shift to some other house she hides herself in the attic. Her attachment to her house was the same as someone’s to her/his own land. So we can see a parallel between the two: people being forced to leave their country and Salim’s mother being forced to leave her ancestral house where she came as a newly wedded daughter-in-law. She could not understand the legalities and the causes why they were forced to leave their own house. The sense of displacement is strongly projected through her character. When her condition worsens Salim takes her back to her house on a palanquin. She recalls her memories of her first trip to the haveli and how she came there as a bride. Garam Hawa is not a film merely about characters. It is a film about experiences that we have all had, generation after generation, and have settled as archetypes in the soul of this piece of land that we call India. For this piece of land is not mere land, but the feelings, sensations, dreams, and traumas that move the hearts of those who walk on it, and those who have walked on it through history. The film expresses something of the essence of that soul of India.

The cinematic experience is a gratifying hoax, predicated on a suspension of disbelief. We are convinced that all the disparate elements contributing to the production of a filmic experience – such as the transition of time and space, sometimes expanded, oftentimes contracted, the sequencing of scenes, the staging of action, the movement or stillness of camera, the scripted, memorised, rehearsed, measured, timed and delivered dialogue, the birth and nurturing of

Volume XII, Issue X, October/2020 Page No:1425 The International journal of analytical and experimental modal analysis ISSN NO:0886-9367

characters, the orchestration of light, the composition of music – are not crafted but, combined with each other, represent a well-spliced, invisibly strung-together reality.

Cinema’s power lies in the illusion it creates, in making us believe that the constructed image, carefully (or carelessly) crafted and structured, is a reality that we are privileged to watch from a safe distanceVery few Indian films have had the enduring impact of M S Sathyu's "Garm Hawa". This is the kind of rare cinema that serves the very core purpose of art. And now this tale of imperishable resonance comes to us in a restored digitally mastered avatar.It stimulates the heart, stirs the soul, lifts the spirit and pricks the conscience. Dealing with Muslim pride and Islamic isolation during times of the stress and separation of the Partition, the relevance of "Garm Hawa" resonates to this day. The love of Amina, her longing, her innocent desire to spend her life with someone who truly loves her, is the love that palpates in the hearts of each one of us, young and old, Hindu or Muslim, or otherwise. Some of us are destined to experience the fulfillment of that desire, and some of us are not. Amina is a symbol of those among us for who the desire remains a desire only.In her very relatability, in her tragic humanity, Amina emerges as far more than a Muslim woman. She is a human being whose heart is crushed by the brutalities of fate, brutalities to which no living person is a stranger. In her, the ‘other’ becomes uncannily identical to the ‘self’.

Amina and her family have almost given up on her marrying Kazim after Halim breaks his promise to return soon from Pakistan. Kazim returns on his own, and reveals that his father had become opposed to his marrying Amina, preferring that he marry the daughter of a Pakistani politician. Having received a scholarship from the Government of Pakistan to study in Canada, Kazim desires to marry Amina before he leaves, but before the marriage can take place, he is arrested by police and repatriated to Pakistan for travelling without a passport and not registering at the police station, as is required of all citizens of Pakistan. Amina is heart-broken, and finally accepts Shamshad's courtship.

Sikander undergoes a long string of unsuccessful job interviews, where the interviewers repeatedly suggest that he would have better luck in Pakistan. Sikander and his group of friends become disillusioned and start an agitation against unemployment and discrimination, but Salim prohibits Sikander from taking part. Despite his political connections, Salim Mirza's brother-in- law ends up in debt over shady business practices and decides to flee to Pakistan. Amina again

Volume XII, Issue X, October/2020 Page No:1426 The International journal of analytical and experimental modal analysis ISSN NO:0886-9367

faces the prospect of losing her lover, but Shamshad promises to return and not leave her like Kazim. Salim Mirza's reluctance to modernise and cultivate ties with the newly formed shoemakers union results in his business not receiving patronage and consequently failing. Disillusioned, his son Baqar decides to migrate to Pakistan with his son and wife. Salim's aged mother suffers a stroke, and through his friend, Salim is able to bring his mother to her beloved house for a final visit, where she dies. While Salim is travelling in a horse-drawn carriage, the carriage driver, a Muslim, gets into an accident and a squabble with other locals. The situation deteriorates into a riot, and Salim is hit by a stone and suffers injuries. With his business and elder son gone, Salim begins to work as a humble shoemaker to make a living. Shamshad's mother returns from Pakistan for a visit, leading Amina and her mother to think that Shamshad would also come soon and their marriage would take place. However, Shamshad's mother merely takes advantage of Salim Mirza's connections to release some of her husband's money, and reveals that Shamshad's marriage has been arranged with the daughter of a well-connected Pakistani family. Shattered with this second betrayal, Amina commits suicide, which devastates the whole family.

Amina, being neither formally engaged, nor married, but no longer a virgin, inhabits that third space which is fluid and temporary. Shamshad’s mother locks her firmly into that third space when she confirms Shamshad’s impending marriage to a local Pakistani politician. Both Amina and her grandmother inhabit a space which spatially disfigures and displaces their lived and known binaries and their inherent subjugation to those binaries make them unable to move out of that imagined and ‘unreal’ space. The grandmother breathes her last, as soon as she is returned to her own ‘local habitation and a name’ and Amina escapes herself only through suicide. Sathyu is thus unable to veer too far away from stereotypical closure for both women. The ancestral houses become a part of the people who have lived in them for decades (and the haveli can equally be seen as a symbol for the nation), and this is most poignantly realised in the scenes involving Salim’s mother. When the Mirzas have to leave, she resists, clinging to the walls, crying out that she’d rather die than go away. Later, she insists on sleeping on the terrace of their new accommodation, because from here she can see the haveli in the distance. A scene where the dying woman is carried back to the house, in a palki, is shot to suggest her memories of her first trip to the haveli – presumably as a young bride, in a palanquin, decades earlier.

Volume XII, Issue X, October/2020 Page No:1427 The International journal of analytical and experimental modal analysis ISSN NO:0886-9367

All the other characters – the Hindu friend who unceasingly supports Salim Mirza, the refugees from Pakistan who desire revenge, Salim Mirza’s wife who strives to hold a crumbling home together while her own heart crumbles, the youth who fight for their right to livelihood, the rickshaw driver who is oblivious to deeper political currents – these are not particular persons but archetypes, symbols of particular responses to the violence in our hearts, and to partition which manifested that violence in the physical world. They are the forces in us which either become complicit in that violence, or which refuse to give in to that violence, and therefore, remain rooted in goodness in the face of the harsh tragedies that history inflicts on us.

Works Cited

1. Three Hindi Film Scripts, by Kafi Azmi and Shama Zaidi, 1974. 2. Four and a Quarter Our Films, Their Films, by , Orient Longman, 2005. ISBN 81-250-1565-5.Page 100-102. 3. Garm Hava (Hot Winds) 1973 Limiting Secularism: The Ethics of Coexistence in Indian Literature and Film, by Priya Kumar, University of Minnesota Press, 2008. ISBN 0-8166- 5072-1. Page 186-187. 4. BSF's Operation ‘Garm Hawa' to Intensify Border Vigil." The Statesman. https://goo.gl/mEu4Rp. Accessed 16 June 2017.75

5. Chhalia,. Indian Cinema. https://uiowa.edu/indiancinema/chhalia. Accessed Jan. 17 2017.

6. Committee on Public Undertakings Report. edited by Nawal Kishore Sharma, vol. 5, Indian Parliament, 1976. general editor, Lok Sabha Secretariat, 8 March 2016.

7. Ethnicity. Cambridge Dictionary, Cambridge University Press 2017, http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/ethnicity, 16 June 2017.

8. His Honour Christopher Beaumont. The Telegraph 16 May 2002 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1394313/His-HonourChristopher- Beaumont.html. Accessed 22 June 2017.

9. India's Social Customs and Systems. The University of Missouri-St. Louis https://goo.gl/WFqlkR. Accessed 12 June 2017.

10. Jamil Dehlavi. Directors Directory. British Council http://film.britishcouncil.org/jamil- dehlavi. Accessed 5 feb. 2017.

Volume XII, Issue X, October/2020 Page No:1428 The International journal of analytical and experimental modal analysis ISSN NO:0886-9367

11. "Partitioning India over Lunch." BBC News 10 August 2007 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6926464.stm. Accessed 26 May 2017

Web Links:

h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garm_Hava#References

h ttps://www.academia.edu/7988482/Garam_hava h ttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/280101645_The_Identity_Politics_of_an_Indian_Muslim_in_M S _Sathyu's_Garam_Hawa_1973

h ttps://www.thehindu.com/features/friday-review/garm-hava-1973/article6107337.ece

http://www.the-criterion.com/V8/n1/114.pdf

Volume XII, Issue X, October/2020 Page No:1429