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Ramchand Pakistani, Khamosh Pani andthe traumatic evocation of PartitionHumaira Saeed aa English and American Studies , University of Manchester ,Manchester, UKPublished online: 17 Dec 2009.

To cite this article: Humaira Saeed (2009) Ramchand Pakistani, Khamosh Pani and the traumaticevocation of Partition, Social Semiotics, 19:4, 483-498, DOI: 10.1080/10350330903361166

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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Ramchand Pakistani, Khamosh Pani and the traumatic evocationof Partition

Humaira Saeed*

English and American Studies, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

(Received 17 July 2009; final version received 3 September 2009)

This article will address the themes of partition, gender and trauma within twoindependent films from Pakistan, Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani (2003) andMehreen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani (2008). The article will consider howthe events of 1947 � partition of India and creation of Pakistan � recur within thefilms as disruptive trauma. The article will consider what an engagement with thecharacteristics of trauma such as involuntary recall and disruption can bring tomy readings of the films. Connections are established between women’sexperiences of ethnic tensions within the contemporary settings of the filmsand the gendered experiences of 1947. These are expressed in distinct ways,however; the prominence of the themes of trauma within both work to create apowerful presentation of women’s subjectivity in Pakistan. Further to this, theydraw attention to the possible inevitability of trauma being central identities andlocations forged out of a partition that entailed border creation, large-scaledisruption, and violence. The article will conclude that close readings of bothfilms highlight the role of the traumatic in the formation of gendered nationalidentities.

Keywords: trauma; Partition of India; nationalism; women’s experience ofpartition; borders; Pakistani cultural production

Introduction

Any discussion of the contemporary cultural production of South Asia recalls its

recent turbulent history of border demarcation and establishment of independent

nation-states. The 1947 Partition of India was a time of mass displacement, sexual

violence, abduction, assault and disappearance. As such, it is not difficult to refer to

this time as a traumatic one. This article will consider how the impact of traumatic

events is dealt with within contemporary cultural production, looking specifically at

two of the recent films of the burgeoning Pakistani independent film industry by

women directors, Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani [Silent Waters] (2003) and Mehreen

Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani (2008). These films provoke a parallel reading as not

only do they deal with trauma both thematically and structurally, they also express a

preoccupation with the gendered dynamics of trauma and experience. This article

will focus on the particular schism of the Punjab as it is evoked and recalled within

the two films to analyse the corresponding concerns that are being addressed in

cultural production by women from Pakistan.

*Email: humairazsaeed@gmail.com

ISSN 1035-0330 print/1470-1219 online

# 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/10350330903361166

http://www.informaworld.com

Social Semiotics

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The ongoing effects and impact of partition on women have been widely

discussed through memory and history work (Butalia 1998; Menon and Bhasin

2000). This article will extend this discussion to the realm of cultural production to

consider how we can engage with these ongoing effects as they are articulated and

commented on within film. This engagement broadens discussion to women’s

responses to Partition and national history through the medium of cultural

production, juxtaposing both expression and remembering. Recent collections

such as Filming the line of control (Bharat and Kirmal 2008) are also beginning

to discuss the India�Pakistan border as it is represented in film; my argument here

takes both these fields as a point of departure to discuss how experiences of the

India�Pakistan border are explicitly gendered, in history and memory as well as in

more contemporary engagements.These films provoke us to consider trauma, through their deployment of

cinematic devices as much as through their reference to traumatic events. My

engagement with trauma here is to take it as the results of an event that is so

overwhelming that the mind cannot engage with it as it happens. As the mind cannot

engage, the event or characteristics of the event repeat on the mind, through

unconscious recall or memory flashbacks, that are indicative of the mind trying to

grasp what it could not at the time. In this sense, trauma makes itself known through

disruption. Cinema becomes the ideal medium through which to consider the

challenges and possibilities if utilising trauma as both an analytical tool as well as an

experiential engagement. Through making use of visual and audio devices to both

refer to traumatic occurrences and create a disruptive viewing experience, cinema can

generate a multi-layered engagement with trauma. In other words, as well as

representing a narrative of events that can be understood as traumatic, the filmic

medium can undercut the cohesive narrative in order to create trauma in the viewing

process, thus emphasising this focus on trauma.

In their book Borders and boundaries, Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin claim at

the outset that:

As an event of shattering consequence, Partition retains its pre-eminence even today,despite two wars on our borders and wave after wave of communal violence. It marks awatershed as much in people’s consciousness as in the lives of those who were uprootedand had to find themselves again . . . Each new eruption of hostility or expression ofdifference swiftly recalls that bitter and divisive erosion of social relations betweenHindus, Muslims and Sikhs, and each episode of brutality is measured against what wasexperienced then. The rending of the social and emotional fabric that took place in 1947is still far from mended. (2000, 3)

Here partition is shown to exist as both a watershed of traumatic experience and a

time that created a wound that has not yet healed � a concept I wish to explore

further. I want to argue that the Partition created geographical borders generating a

subsequent schism of consciousness that is continuing to impact on both individual

and national psyches. This continuing impact can best be understood as the repeat or

recall of a traumatic event. The films that I discuss here reflect on how these

traumatic occurrences coincided with, and were symptomatic of, the creation of

borders demarcating two distinct nation-states. In this sense, trauma and nation are

inextricably linked and demonstrated through the complex and layered evocation of

the Partition in both films.

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The central problematic being explored by both films is that discussions of the

Partition are inescapable when discussing Pakistan and the subjectivities within this

nation-state. It is no surprise then that these two films hold the border as their

central preoccupation; I argue that it is an engagement with the notion of borders

that emphasises the pre-eminence of the Partition in both films. Larry Ray has

argued that:

the problem is not so much being condemned to relive the past because of failing toremember it � more that the way of remembrance involves a compulsive attachment tounrelieved trauma. (2006, 54)

In this sense I propose that performing nationhood requires evoking Partition and its

associated traumas, as the nations themselves are dependent on the border-lines of

this time for their existence in their current form. In other words, performing the

nation and remembering/evoking Partition recall each other, both articulating an

attachment to the traumas of the 1947 moment that holds both Partition and nation

creation within it.

Considering the India�Pakistan border and therefore Pakistan,1 as being created

through a traumatic moment allows us to formulate the border as a schismic wound

on the Indian subcontinent.2 That this wound continues to enact its effects on

identities and lives, and is in fact the condition of these lives as they are being lived,

means that the wound cannot be escaped from or disregarded. The India�Pakistan

tensions that are enacted on and through the border highlight a compulsive

attachment to the wound-as-border, evoking the moment of the Partition in terms of

this inter-nation tension as well as the fact of the border being a symbol of the 1947

moment. Formulating the wound-as-border also means we can consider how, even

when the border is not specifically acknowledged within day-to-day life, this does not

diminish its impact on this day-to-day life, or its relevance to how it is being enacted.

In my discussion I will consider both the Punjab border of Pakistan that defines

the nation in cartographic terms, and also the nation’s symbolic border, whereby

nationhood is policed and enacted through performance of identity. This dual

application, through both the ‘‘national’’ and the ‘‘individual’’, highlights how

borders demand to be engaged with on multiple levels. That is to say that borders not

only make themselves known through cartographic effects, but also via their impact

on the range of subjectivities being enacted. When we are looking at partition � a

time when the cartographic effect of border creation also provokes gendered

experiences of violence � we need to consider the continuing implications for

gendered subjectivities within the cartographically-defined nation. An engagement

with the gendered ways nationalism and nation are enacted in the films prompts us

to look at how engagements with borders are consistently gendered. In turn, this

leads us to look at traumatic element through the ‘‘repeat’’ of this gendered

dimension.

Traumatic tools

Both Khamosh Pani and Ramchand Pakistani deploy a variety of cinematic tools in

order to disrupt the comfort of conventional narrative cinema and provoke us to

consider their traumatic elements. Khamosh Pani utilises sepia flashbacks to draw

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attention to communalism, gendered violence and identity. Ramchand Pakistani

makes direct reference to the border to make comment on legal and symbolic

policing of this space. Sepia flashbacks and use of the border place emphasis on the

effects of the past that are ongoing in the present: past events that disrupt the present

through flashbacks, and the past imposition of the border that remains in place as a

line of control.Khamosh Pani is set in a small village in Pakistan in 1979, at a time when

President Zia’s regime has begun to instigate Sharia law in an attempt to further

Islamicise the country. The film focuses on Ayesha (Kiron Kher) and her son Salim

(Aamir Malik), who gets increasingly involved with religious extremist politics

during the film. Although the film begins its narrative in 1979, from the start of the

film Sumar deploys cinematic techniques such as small intermittent sections in sepia

rather than the full colour of the main story. These sections run alongside the main

narrative of the story, each one incomplete, slowly building a fragmented insight into

Ayesha’s experiences of 1947. These sections interrupt the main narrative of the

present, a tool to represent the past, but also to show how the past is disrupting and

interrupting the present. This cinematic formulation of the past as disruptive frames

this history as a traumatic one; pointing to a traumatic past that is making itself

known in the present.

These flashbacks incorporate signs that refer to the Partition and specific tropes

of violence at the time. Sections feature running feet and the sound of trains, bothsuggesting the movement and escape that was prevalent in 1947 and directly

connected to communalism and violence. More specifically the flashbacks, and

indeed contemporary moments that provoke them, refer to the well. The well is a

recurring sign of gendered violence in narratives of the Partition, a site where women

were coerced to jump, or did so of their own accord. The Partition was a time of

rising communal violence, where the honour of the nation and community was

symbolically located in women’s bodies. To avoid sexual violence, abduction or

forced marriage by men from ‘‘other’’ religions and communities, there were repeated

cases of women taking their own lives through jumping into wells. The image of the

well has come to hold much within it due to these associations and repeated

reference to it within Partition narratives. Not only does the image confront us with

communal violence, it also provokes us to engage with the gendered dimensions of

this violence.

Voice-overs accompany the first two sepia sections of the film; these address the

viewer directly regarding the Partition. This address implicates the viewer in the

processes of the film and simultaneously demands that the recall of the Partition beengaged with.

Ramchand Pakistani deals with the accidental border-crossing from Pakistan into

India of eight-year-old Ramchand (Syed Fazal Hussain) and father Shankar (Rashid

Farooqi). The film shows us their experiences in prison alongside the parallel

narrative of wife and mother Champa (Nandita Das), who is left behind waiting for

their return. The film demands engagement with its themes through presenting them

within the realm of real life. It opens with a voice-over in Urdu with English text on

the screen stating that the film is adapted from real-life events. This is followed by

another section giving information of the geographical location in which the film will

begin, the desert border region of Thar. This method introduces a fictional film with

facts and uses real-life experience as the base for this fictional narrative. As such it

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juxtaposes fact and fiction, challenging the notion of these as polar opposite forms

of representation. Thus we cannot engage in the film simply, and the inclusion of

material facts creates the film as having a direct relevance to lived experiences

through being a representation of reality. The plot itself, of imprisoned border-crossers, is one that is strong within the public imaginary. India�Pakistan relations

are often discussed in terms of prisoner release and accidental border-crossings by

young people and fisherman, for example. Ramchand Pakistani utilises these

connections, both with the voice-overs and through framing the moment of prisoner

exchange in grainy shades that suggest a news report. This moment of the film is thus

created as one that is worthy of being broadcast. The suggestion of transmission here

also suggests that the border-crossing is something that a wider public need to know

about. This emphasis highlights the main project of the film in which drawingattention to the effects of the border is integral. The effect of this is to make our

viewing have more implications; we are provoked to engage with the narrative as

though it is real and are denied the comfort of escapism held in a linear narrative.

A shift in the film’s visuality is also used in Ramchand Pakistani to represent a

dream sequence of Ramchand’s as well as a hallucination of Champa’s. These

moments again use shifts in filmic portrayal to disrupt the viewing experience and

subtly provoke us to question what we are seeing. We are at times watching a story, a

true story, a news show, a dream or fantasy.This play with cinematic tools that we see in both films shows them subtly yet

consciously engaged in disrupting the central narratives and viewing experience. It is

these moments that are interesting when considering the engagement with trauma by

both of the films. If involuntary recall and disruptive memories are characteristics of

trauma, then these moments of disruption are directing any analysis towards the

traumatic event. Therefore it is pertinent to examine what is being represented at

these moments of disruption, what provokes them and what they point towards.

The films are interesting to compare for what is brought out in each of themthrough a consideration of the other. What one film creates as its traumatic focus,

the other engages with subtly � and as such these readings benefit from a

comparative approach. The explicit border-crossing that takes place in Ramchand

Pakistani alerts us to the tropes that are being subtly incorporated in Khamosh Pani.

Similarly, the more direct engagement with how women were and are used as

emblems of honour at the time of Partition in Khamosh Pani provokes us to engage

with the ways in which we can read gendered honour in Ramchand Pakistani.

Past-in-present of trauma

One characteristic of trauma is the repeat of past-in-present, a symptom of the mind

constantly trying to grasp an experience that was too overwhelming to be grasped

and fully understood in all its complexity as it actually happened.3 The experience of

the viewer following the narrative of Khamosh Pani is constantly disrupted by the

sepia sections. Each sepia section ends without fully establishing what exactly

happened to Ayesha, but as the parallel stories develop we slowly glean moreunderstanding of her trajectory. The development of both stories reveals her

subjectivity as it is formed and challenged by aggressive engagements with religious

nationalism in both 1947 and 1979. In 1947, through the establishment of national

borders in the name of a Muslim homeland, and in 1979 through the push for

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Islamicisation and introduction of Sharia law through General Zia’s regime. In both

timeframes we see how the politics of the nation have a direct impact on Ayesha. As

we are required to engage with both the fragmented past and turbulent present

simultaneously there is an active past-in-present formation in which we are

partaking, unable to follow her story in a linear narrative sequence. In this sense

the film approaches trauma in two different ways, both through its expression of

Ayesha’s experience but also through establishing a viewing experience that is both

ruptured and dual. Here we see the composition of subjectivity being constructed

both at the level of character and the level of form.

As outlined, the Partition is evoked explicitly through these flashbacks; the first

two of which have voice-overs, happen in the first 10 minutes of the film, and are the

only two to speak to the viewer directly. This direct address and communication to one

who is outside the film’s narrative trajectory set up the timeframe of ‘‘1947’’, and direct

the viewing experience in a particular and specific way. The voice-over begins: ‘‘In the

summer of 1947 the days used to be warmer. We used to run about a lot. What did we

know that we would keep on running?’’ Although the film has been established with its

contemporary moment, which we learn is 1979, this framing of 1947 in the flashback

both evokes and centralises the Partition within it. This incorporation of 1947 within

1979 makes the past co-existent with the present of the film.

The second sepia section hones in on gendered violence, starting with a well

almost obscured by whirling dust while the voice-over starts: ‘‘two nations were born.

There was an ocean of people who were leaving everything behind and going . . .’’.In particular, this voice-over makes the experiences of women central: ‘‘[P]eople

started taking other’s wives. And cutting their own daughters. They say they were

doing it to save their own dignity. Some girls were killed. Some were saved’’. The

flashback is prompted by reference to the village well from a friend of Ayesha’s, and in

turn the voice-over is connected with the image of an obscured well, making both well

and the discussions of violence central and intertwined. As such, this section calls on

known tropes of the Partition to link the contemporary moment both directly and

indirectly to what happened in the past.

We learn through these flashbacks that Ayesha escaped honour-based violence, at

the site of the well, from her father at the Partition. The 1947 that is being revealed to

us is a time when Veero becomes Ayesha, from Sikh to Muslim, at the time that the

nation’s parameters are being drawn. Thematically this past is made to exist in the

present through these tropes of identity becoming paramount due to General Zia’s

push to instigate Sharia law. As Ayesh’s Sikh ‘‘past’’ is discovered, it disrupts the

present, both highlighting the disruptive potential of identity and bringing with it the

conditions that led to her religious identity changing. Simultaneously this highlights

the contemporary as a site with similar conditions of rising communalism and

violence to 1947. What we see in terms of past-in-present, then, is the multiple ways

in which this is being enacted by the film.

Trauma of border-crossing

The border as a site of past-in-present

Ramchand Pakistani engages with the concept of past-in-present through the

centrality of the border in the film. The events of 1947 show us that the imposition

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of a border has effects, in this case of mass migration, disappearance, and so forth.

What the film emphasises is how the border creates traumatic effects on the family

through their engagements with it. This in turn evokes 1947, in that the border

created the effect of the Partition at that time. A past-in-present formation is created

through the border’s traumatic connotations in the contemporary recalling its

traumatic construction in the past.

Both Ramchand Pakistani and Khamosh Pani present a gendered engagement

with the border, through the main women characters. Champa has her life altered

immensely by people crossing borders but she herself has not crossed a border. In

both cases these women do not need to be the agents that are actively moving across

liminal borders for their lives to be profoundly affected. They do not engage in the

action yet the ramifications are on them. In the scene where Champa realises that

Ramchand and Shankar have border-crossed, she runs to the border to chase after

them, held back by family members she cries out and struggles to be released. Her

next engagement with the border shows her leaning against one of its posts, gazing

wistfully into the distance: whether into India looking towards her lost son and

husband, or towards Pakistan and her slow rebuilding of her life, we do not know.

The difference between these two engagements is stark: where at first she is fighting

the authority of the border to keep her from her husband and son, she is then

resigned to it, acknowledging the border as something not there for her to cross. The

limits of it for her have been understood. It is not for her to actively cross the border

but rather to remain and deal with the consequences of others crossing.4 As well as

understanding the authority of the border here, Champa is also realising the limits of

her gender in relation to the border. It is not just that she cannot cross, but that she,

as wife�mother�woman, cannot cross.

Ayesha also does not cross an actual border as she escapes her father, yet with

each step she takes she is moving from India to Pakistan as border lines are

established. The village where she lived in 1947 is the same as the one where she lives

in 1979; although she ran away from her family, she has not crossed any

cartographically physical border. However, the effects on her are as though she

had. Where a border can be seen to be the parameters of the nation, it follows that

moving from one nation to another, even while staying still, is a form of border-

crossing, and more specifically migration. Away from her family to start a new life, in

a new country, with a new husband and new identity � both religious and national

demonstrates the multiple ruptures being encountered at the time of partition.

The visual element of Khamosh Pani’s first sepia section closes with a shot of feet

running on a path and the sound of a train in the background, both steps and sound

referring to movement. This train sound is something that is repeatedly utilised in the

sepia sections, especially evocative considering the iconic role the train plays in

narratives of the Partition. As well as the obvious representation of movement that it

provides, the train figures frequently as the site of mass murder and the vehicle by

which many migrated at the time. This suggestive sound holds a lot within it,

equating running with migration. Sara Ahmed discusses how:

The experience of leaving home in migration is hence always about the failure of memoryto make sense of the place one comes to inhabit, a failure that is experienced in thediscomfort of inhabiting a migrant body, a body that feels out of place. (2000, 91)

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Ayesha becomes out of place without moving, because of the imposition of borders.

As such she can be seen to inhabit a migrant body without having undertaken the

processes of migration. This also highlights the crisis of partition, an event that was

ostensibly meant to create space for bodies to fit is shown to have maintained bodies

as out of place.

In terms of movement it does not seem that the family in Ramchand Pakistani

border-crossed at the time of the Partition. They live close to the border, and as a

Hindu family they would have migrated into India at the Partition. As with Ayesha,

their identity would have shifted from Indian to Pakistani without them having

moved at all. Indeed the significance of Pakistan to Ramchand is questionable until

it is made significant to him through the act of border-crossing. When caught, the

border guards ask him where he has come from; he points and says, ‘‘my house is

over there’’, to which they say, ‘‘where, in India?’’ He does not reply to this. It is only

when his father is also caught by the guards that the clarification is made as he states

they are from Pakistan. Even when Ramchand prepares to leave the Indian prison

and tells the guard Kamla that he is going home, it is she who iterates: ‘‘You mean

Pakistan’’. Each time, it takes insistence by national authority/security figures to

confirm the national identity of the places being called home by Ramchand and his

father.What both films allude to in this expression is the lack of significance borders

have to the subjectivities in the films, except for the way in which nations are

compelled to make themselves known through other forces that rely on these borders.

This is achieved through the border police and prison establishment in Ramchand

Pakistani and through President Zia and Islamic extremism in Kahmosh Pani.

However, as Sara Ahmed reminds us, ‘‘the work of the nation is done as much

through everyday encounters in public life, as it is done through the political

machinery of the nation-state’’ (2000, 98). In the cause of the nation we see Ayesha

and Champa used repeatedly in the policing of its borders, through their daily

encounters that have nothing to do with the cartographic border but are integral to

the maintenance of the symbolic border.

The symbolic border

John Armstrong has discussed the role of the symbolic border guard (1982, 6), a

system by which the mythical divide between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ is maintained. I take

Nira Yuval-Davis’ point that the specific role of women as border guards is

demonstrated through the importance of women’s culturally appropriate behaviour,

which is integral to the upholding of a particular culture (1993, 405). Armstrong goes

on to elaborate:

The primary characteristic of ethnic boundaries is attitudinal. In their origins and intheir most fundamental effects, ethnic boundary mechanisms exist in the minds of theirsubjects rather than as lines on a map or norms in a rule book. Both of these secondaryeffects are, as symbols, major indicators of boundaries. (1982, 8)

The everyday encounters Ahmed refers to are synonymous with the attitudinal

ethnic boundaries Armstrong outlines. These arguments focus on how day-to-day

interactions between individuals do the border work of the nation-state without

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engaging directly with cartographic border lines. They also emphasise that this is a

gendered engagement where the boundaries of a nation rely on and enforce specific

roles from women. The role of Ayesha and Champa as mothers becomes the prime

route through which demands are made on their actions, and their actions are

policed.

This is exemplified when Champa stands on the edge of a well, ready to jump in.

At this moment she hallucinates the return of Ramchand and Shankar and runs

towards this vision before collapsing. Her hallucination and collapse are induced as

much due to lack of food and water as to her grief. This scene that takes place at the

site of the well alludes to gendered violence and honour, specifically the role of

women as bastions of honour. Champa is prevented from taking her life through

hallucinating her husband and son, which realigns her within the trope of honour.

Where suicide in 1947 was enacted as preservation of honour in case of violation by

the ‘‘other’’, here suicide would be a form of desertion. This is what her hallucination

reminds her, that her role of wife and mother requires she continue to live with the

intention of performing these roles again.

Champa, then, can be seen to be taking her lot of violence and abandonment as a

duty to her country, keeping the symbols of nationhood strong for the men’s return.

She is portrayed as a strong women and an active agent. This echoes a sentiment

central to Indian independence tropes: the need for women to be strong in order for

the nation to be strong, yet this must uphold particular gendered expectations. As

Partha Chatterjee has argued regarding the development of Indian nationalism as a

resistance to colonialism:

the crucial requirement was to retain the inner spirituality of indigenous social life. Thehome was the principal site for expressing the spiritual quality of the national culture,and women must take the main responsibility of protecting and nurturing this quality.(1990, 243)

Champa’s role as mother and indeed wife is made to be the focus of her existence. She

may be in some senses a body out of place � she is lower caste (Dalit) and Hindu in

Pakistan � however she exists within the limits of what is expected of her gender. She

does not fight the (cartographic) border again, she does not jump into the well, and she

does not explore the potential romantic relationship between herself and the jeweller,

Abdullah. All of these decisions are shown to be justified when her son and husband

are returned to her and she is thus rewarded by the narrative for remaining dutiful.

As Ayesha’s son Salim becomes increasingly involved with extremism, he begins to

make demands of her in terms of identity. The discovery of her having a Sikh past

creates her as a suspicious figure in the village; close friends can no longer have her at

their daughter’s wedding, no-one will bring her water from the well that she takes pains

to avoid. Further to this, Salim requests that she declare her commitment to Islam in

the public square to satisfy other extremists and ensure that he will not be doubted in

the future. These repeated demands and refusals of Ayesha show a punishing of her by

performative guards of the nation. The disciplining procedures emphasise her past

border transgressions as problematic in the nation space of Pakistan.

However, although her religious integrity is challenged, she herself is left alone by

extremists aside from the demands for a public declaration. However, her brother

Jeswant (Navtej Singh Johar) who comes to look for her when on a Sikh pilgrimage

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is chased down by a mob of young Pakistani men, demanding ‘‘who is the unbeliever

who dares to look at our women’’. Here Ayesha, although having her integrity

challenged, is used as the justification for hunting down another. Her role as bastion

of the nation is working on two levels here: she is required to declare her religion so

she can be believed to be more cohesive in the space she inhabits. Simultaneously, an

unbeliever man who engages with her is violating the nation’s symbol and must be

hunted down. In both situations it is Ayesha’s role as a symbolic border guard that isbeing emphasised.

As the sepia sections continue, we learn that the well was the site and symbol of an

attack on the women in her family. Her mother and sister jumped into the well but

Ayesha ran away before she was made to jump. Ayesha’s identity and the use of this for

honour is repeated within the contemporary, highlighting how women’s subjectivity is

utilised in service of the national and religious identities. In one voice-over we are told

that some women ‘‘were killed’’ and some ‘‘were saved’’ � the action of killing and

saving does not belong to the women, they are actions that are enacted upon them. As

an introduction to the time of 1947, this framing is clear in its articulation of how

women’s subjectivity was exploited at the time of communalism to preserve the dignity

and honour of a community. The focus in 1979 that is being placed on her identity by

extremists and her son and family friends make the bold point that the tropes of

partition are ongoing and continue to impact violently on women.

Locating trauma

Both films engage with temporality to address where the trauma lies within their

narratives. In both films there is an interesting dual traumatic temporality at play �we are shown an obvious trauma and invited to read the more subtle ways in which

trauma is referred to. What emerges through this discussion is that trauma does not

lie in obvious places. The cinematic tools that generate a moment of traumatic

disruption locate trauma in unexpected places.

In Ramchand Pakistani, Ramchand returns home at the end of the film and

Shankar soon follows, creating what is ostensibly a happy ending. However, the film

is disrupted at the site of the well with Champa’s hallucination of their return. This

moment, then, while suggesting the traumatic elements of waiting for her husband

and son, also hints towards the traumatic possibilities of their return. In waiting,

Champa’s life is on hold, she cannot engage herself fully until her family comes back,

yet this mode of being on hold becomes her norm. As they are away for six years, shedevelops an equilibrium of waiting. Their return, then, too, has a disruptive element,

a potentially traumatic element. Thematically, we view trauma in separation and

imprisonment; structurally, we are led to it in return and release.

We can read a delighted disbelief on Champa’s face when Ramchand comes back,

the film then ending with a close-up of Ramchand’s grinning face, centring on his

happiness in this moment. After six years in prison across the border he has made

the journey home due to a prisoner exchange agreement between India and Pakistan.

As Ramchand crosses the border again, the shot becomes grainy as though it is a

news reel that works to highlight the enormity of the moment. This scene again

disrupts the viewing experience to suggest that there is more to this moment than the

joy of return. We are provoked to consider how the return of Ramchand, as well as

being a moment of joy, it also a moment of disruption in Champa’s new life that

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restores her to the role of mother and the associated expectations of this role. That

the film ends on Ramchand’s face also highlights how his elation takes priority over

any difficulties or feelings of Champa.Again the film is evocative of Partition tropes in not considering the difficulties of

what comes next in relation to women’s experience. In particular, this alludes to the

discussions around the return of abducted women. The official concerted efforts of

the governments of India and Pakistan to ‘‘return’’ the ‘‘other’’ women to where they

belonged was created as a restorative endeavour. However, the common story of

women then being rejected by their families was not considered by the official

reports, nor was the possibility that women may have been happier where they were.

This analysis is not to equate the experiences of Champa with those of abducted

women, but rather to highlight the crisis for women as the return signifies a second

disruption and trauma. Reunion, as an ostensibly positive proposal, was considered

to be the ideal goal and end of the story yet did not engage with the complexities of

women’s trajectories at this time. The trauma of return, then, is a specifically

gendered trope of partition that warrants engagement.

This crisis of what comes next is also embodied by Ayesha in Khamosh Pani. We

expect trauma to lie in fleeing the intimate site of family that becomes a site of

violence, and expect it to lie in being caught by a group of men from another religion

during a time of communalism. However, it is not just the violent happenings of then

that contain the traumatic for Ayesha. Indeed these tropes are inverted, in that she is

‘‘saved’’ by one of the ‘‘other’’ men and the affection she displays towards her

memory of her husband is testament to a closeness between them when he was alive.

However, the treatment of her within the film’s present provokes us to see her

identity as traumatic in 1979. This also highlights that escaping and being saved do

not signify the end of trauma for her � indeed, they have created the conditions that

cause her to be marginalised by close friends and family in the present.

The films highlight both a traumatic repeat of Partition through evocation, and

the parallel repeat of trauma. The effects of the films, then, have wider ramifications

for, although the films end, they do not suggest an end to these traumatic echoes.

Identity as traumatic

At the time of the Partition, fear and threat of the ‘‘other’’ led to communal violence.

As discussed, there are still traces of this in the contemporary. Symbolic and

cartographic establishments of borders between ‘‘them’’ and ‘‘us’’ become the

method by which nation and identity are maintained. However, these borders do not

maintain themselves and require guarding and policing, suggesting that the criteria

for fitting as ‘‘them’’ or ‘‘us’’ does not work. Film-maker Javed Akhtar articulates the

problem created here thus:

When there is a threat of violence against you because you belong to one or the othercommunity, then in sharing the same threat an identity is engineered and created. In thatmoment of experiencing a threat, you become limited to a single identity. (Alagh 2008,190�191)

Identity that is created out of fear becomes a limited sense of identity. I follow

Adrian Athique’s lead when he argues:

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The need, five decades after Independence, to continue striving for a clear boundary interms of political and cultural identity is a visible reminder . . . of the impossibility of apurely cartographic expression of cultural differences. Paradoxically, the India�Pakistanborder . . . emerges not as a physical location, but as a psychological conditionunderpinned by a regime of violence. (2008, 39)

This limited identity that is created out of fear and communal violence cannot be

contained within borders, both physical and psychological. To maintain these

borders, then, requires violence as something that does not work is being enforced.

What we see in both films is a determination to secure the nation’s others that

becomes more intent as the crisis of identifying these is exposed. This highlights the

violence of limitation and categorisation that were created at the time of Partition

and are maintained in the contemporary. This traumatic repeat and insistence of the

border reminds us of the formulation of the border as a wound that continues to

make itself known on the subjectivities it contains.

The violence of the border is brought to the fore in Khamosh Pani through the

policing of Ayesha in the film’s contemporary time. For the extremists’ refocus of

Pakistan as an Islamic state, her sympathy towards Sikh pilgrims and more liberal

ways of teaching Islam suggest she does not have the religious integrity that they

require. The discovery that Ayesha is actually someone who was ‘‘left behind’’ at the

time of partition and has a Sikh past, sends this further into crisis as her identity

within itself does not have a cohesive history. When Salim defends himself and

Ayesha to the extremists, he declares ‘‘all I know is that we are Pakistanis’’, and while

this may be true, it does not seem to be enough as this time of increased

Islamicisation requires adherence to Islam as the only way to be a true Pakistani.

Religious and national identities are thus enforced as being one, the national identity

of Pakistan is a religious identity. This is both a recurrence of communalism within

the film and a reminder of the arguments for Pakistan’s creation as a homeland for

India’s Muslim minority. Nation and religion at the time of the Partition were

intertwined, and the reinforcement of Islamic nationalism emphasises the Partition

as not only being evoked by Ayesha’s experiences, but also as certain events and

situations happening again.

Ayesha’s religious history is not cohesive with her religious present due to her

religious and national identity shifts. This again highlights the traumatic rupture

created at Partition, demonstrating that the trauma of the time was not isolated in

terms of violence and dislocation but was also enacted in the realm of identity.

Khamosh Pani exemplifies this succinctly as it is framed within another time of

extremist and sectarian violence; we see scenes of mobs going to chase down ‘‘non-

believers’’, and the building-up of communal violence. The violence itself evokes the

Partition, as do the identity tensions that are called on to provoke this violence;

where it is preservation of identity that causes Veero’s (as Ayesha was then called)

father to want her to jump, it is the impossibility of identity that causes Ayesha to

return to the site of the well and jump in at the end of the film. Not only has the well

returned as a place of violence against her, this time she completes the moment of

threat by ending her life. That she does this out of choice highlights that there is no

other way for her. It becomes an inevitable choice within the context she is in, and

emphasises the impossibility for certain subjectivities to exist within limited and

violent borders.5

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Trauma as unknowable

The need to establish clear lines between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ is demonstrated in

Ramchand Pakistani through one scene in particular. After Ramchand and Shankar

have been caught by border guards, both have their trousers pulled down by officers

in order to identify them as either Hindu or Muslim. This moment is interesting as it

calls on the connecting tropes of nation and religion whereby circumcision is the

marker of association with Islam, and therefore Pakistan. This embeddedness of the

two tropes within one another recalls the Partition and indeed the specificities of

communal partition violence, which required methods of identifying the ‘‘other’’ in

such ways where violence in the name of the religion was enacted. Ramchand

Pakistani, from border-crossing through religious and national identification to

incarceration and separation from family, thus creates a direct echo of the tropes of

partition, in that these are belated effects of the 1947 moment being acted out on

their bodies that create their bodies as out of place.6

Ramchand and Shankar, both having uncircumcised bodies, should be at place in

India and out of place in Pakistan in terms of religious nationalism, but this is

subverted. Whereas in Khamosh Pani the two are intertwined, here they are

responsive but separable, and national identity is seen to supersede religious identity.

It is the cartographic violation of the state’s borders that are the main focus here. As

such, it is unclear why their religion needs establishing at all, as discovery of them as

Hindu does not seem to affect their treatment, and they are placed in a cell with

people from both countries and of varying religious allegiances. Establishing this

difference is highlighted as arbitrary, yet the imperative to establish difference and

the other remains paramount, the desire to categorise along certain lines that were

reinforced at Partition remain, even if once established this information is not

relevant.

This identification of the other is shown in both films to be part of policing the

nation’s borders, both symbolically and geographically. As argued by Athique, this

maintenance is underpinned by a regime of violence that can be seen enacted in these

films through the power of law as well as individual interactions. Borders are thus

shown to be paramount, the borders need to be policed as they cannot exist without

this policing. In turn, the identities that exist within these borders are also

maintained. One scene in Ramchand Pakistani shows cell mates talking about the

border, one man speaking up for it as without these borders no-one would be

Pakistani, Hindustani, Bengali. The national identities, which rely on cartographic

borders informing the symbolic, are given pre-eminence. These films, taken together,

can show the complex ways that the India�Pakistan border and identity of the

nation-state is established and maintained through the distinct spheres of law and

individual.

The need for the Islamic nationalists to have ‘‘pure’’ Pakistanis only in their space

is offset and troubled by Ayesha. Her trajectory highlights how her identity can never

be clear-cut and pure within her location, expressed through dislocation and violence

endured at the time and her multiple transgressions of identity borders. Similarly, the

need to define Ramchand and Shankar as either Hindu or Muslim is shown as

necessary but to no end as their transgression is a purely national one rather than

religious. The needs of the distinct nations are thus shown to have different priorities

in identifying its others, through a particular religious nationalism or complete

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national adherence. In both cases, the subjectivities being expressed by the characters

are shown to not fit, to be out of place, provoking the viewer to consider the specific

criteria being set in order for one to fit within these agendas. The distinction itself is

evocative of the mechanisms of partition, the tropes of Indian nationalism that were

prevalent at the time, alongside the Pakistani Independence movement that was

established through the centrality of a religious minority through the Muslim league.

It is no coincidence, then, that the needs of India and Pakistan in policing theirborders are distinct, as this alludes to the distinct developments of both nations as

independent entities.

Conclusion

This continuous impact of the Partition is expressed through different levels of

evocation within the two films. The themes of trauma such as involuntary repeat,

recall, and disruption allude to tropes of Partition. Further to this they point

towards the crisis of the moment of the Partition, its successes and coexisting

failures. The last sentences of one sepia voice-over in Khamosh Pani declare: ‘‘there

was an ocean of people who were leaving everything behind and going. Broken

memories! Incomplete dreams! To the house of the lord!’’ As the words lead us back

into technicolour, the film shot pans over the village in which the film is set, focusing

on the mosque before fading out. This combination focuses on the film’s themes, offorced rupture, dissatisfaction, religion and dislocation, simultaneously alluding to

the failure of the dream of Pakistan for which Partition happened. The country was

established as a Muslim homeland but with a secular dream. When the Partition is

evoked, then, we have to address the implications of Pakistan’s success as an

established state and simultaneously as its failure as a dream. Also embedded within

this is the failure of the dream of India as a unified independent state.

Decades on from the Partition, religious and caste identity are shown to be

central and paramount in these cinematic representations. Not only is religion still of

prime importance and conflict, but the tensions between India and Pakistan show

that both inner and outer relations are fraught. The border not only has traumatic

repeat on those who have a memory, or experience of it from 1947, the imposition of

this border continues to repeat on the nation and on the distinct subjectivities within

this.

The structures of the films create the contemporary moments they portray as

having a traumatic root7 both in terms of identity and in terms of movement.Ordinary existence in these national terrains, in particular for women, is shown to

recall and evoke the traumatic time of the Partition. To add to this the role of women

as symbolic guards of the nation creates a situation where any expression of borders,

nation and identity will produce gendered responses. That this time was also one of

specifically gendered experience and trauma does suggest an inevitability in the

resulting nation-states performing gendered inequalities. This compulsion is yet

another characteristic of trauma, and the route towards overcoming this on national

and individual levels is something neither film has an answer to.

Reading the films in relation to each other and through the lens of trauma brings

persistent themes of the Partition to the fore � those of border-crossings, increased

religious identification, dislocation and separation from family. This emphasises that

any discussion of Pakistan must refer to the Partition whether directly or indirectly.

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These films remind us that the creation of borders will inevitably have far-reaching

effects, and further to this that times of disruption have particular impact upon

women. These crucial overlaps between two distinct films demonstrate a referential

loop whereby cultural representations of Pakistan constantly recall the Partition.The persistence of the Partition insists it has not been resolved, questioning whether

the nation and the gendered subjectivities within it can be anything other than

unsettled when such a turbulent past continues to repeat on and within cultural

production.

Notes

1. I focus here on Pakistan as it represents a new nation created at this time, and within this liethe implications of a new national identity created out of the Partition moment. AlthoughIndia in its current form was also created by this border demarcation, the names India andIndian remain the same even though referring to different geographical spaces since 1947.

2. See Wendy Brown’s (1995) States of injury for a discussion of wounded attachments,whereby identity is reliant on the wound.

3. Cathy Caruth’s (1996) analysis of Freud highlights how trauma causes a break in the mind’sexperience of time. Freud refers to traumatic experience as something that produces anoverload of stimuli that consciousness is unprepared for, as such it is too quick or intense tobe engaged with as it happens. Resultantly, traumatic experience is processed a moment toolate and one is not fully conscious during the experience itself. This results in a latencywithin experience, a time when the effects of the experience are not apparent. In this sense,it is first experienced through a gap, or through forgetting. Before it is registered, it isforgotten. The return of experience then, in the form of flashbacks and hallucinations, isthe mind’s attempt to grasp what it could not grasp at the actual time of occurrence.

4. Champa’s lack of border-crossing is mirrored by actress Nandita Das’s successful border-crossing in order to play the part. The only non-Pakistani actor in the film, she wasrequired to obtain permission from the Pakistan government in order to star in the film.

5. Although the story for Ayesha is a sombre one, more hope is given in the narrative throughthe character of Zubeida, Salim’s one-time girlfriend. She is shown to embody a strong andindependent femininity that is successfully combined with her religious beliefs. She is alsothe one person in the village to stand by Ayesha.

6. This is also interesting as it represents an inverse gender experience, since in this case it isthe men of the family who are taken by the ‘‘other side’’. This is also emphasised throughthe invasion of bodily space � during the time of the Partition, the violation of women’sbodies was paramount; in the film, the violation of men’s bodies become the focus.

7. See Kathryn Woodward (2007) Ordinary affects for a discussion of how the traumaticcreates the ordinary.

Notes on contributor

Humaira Saeed is a third-year PhD student at the University of Manchester. Her thesis isconcerned with the representation of gendered national identities in Pakistani women’snarratives of the Partition of India, in fiction and film. Her research interests includepostcolonial feminist theory, queer theory and transnational sexualities in fiction. She alsoedits Race Revolt, a self-published journal on race politics by feminists and queers.

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