Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga (I Will Return) offers a timely and thoughtful counter to the spate of hyper-jingoistic films currently flooding Bollywood. When history’s borders are being redrawn in the heart, Ali has made a film against the current—one that seeks to remind people that a collective trauma demands contemplation, not a justification for renewed hatred.
It is a pleasure to see Naseeruddin Shah as Ishar Singh Grewal, a man abandoned by fate and history. His family did not understand his idiosyncrasies because they were unaware of the wounded flower in his heart. Grewal is torn apart, like millions of others, by the Partition of 1947. Heartbreakingly clueless Muslim and Sikh characters from Punjab hear about Partition in the film like a storm brewing from the political centre, one that will soon engulf them. Even if they were among the apolitical elites, they appear more humane than the elite political class that orchestrated the communal carnage and the subaltern foot soldiers who carried it out. History does not always conform to neat moral divides and ideological correctness.
It was largely Jinnah and the Muslim League’s gift of death to the subcontinent. Holding political formations responsible is separate from blaming communities. Everyone knows Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were all guilty of gruesome violence. Main Vaapas Aaunga is a great reminder that if communities lose their moral compass and commit brutal violence against each other in the name of nationalism, they legitimise state power and allow it to control and manipulate this communal pathology. The actual event of Partition—and who was primarily responsible for it—must be separated from the longer narrative. Hamid Dalwai made the point in Muslim Politics in India that Jinnah did not fight Savarkar and Golwalkar, but rather “accused Gandhi of being a Hindu communalist”.
When the Sikhs in Main Vaapas Aaunga come to know that India is going to be divided, their central bewilderment says it all: how can neighbourhoods comprising all communities suddenly become inhabitable for some? The Partition of India was the ruthless destruction of the neighbourhood. I have argued in my book on Gandhi that a nation at war is understandable, even if tragically and reprehensibly so. As a territorial idea, the nation is open to the possibility of war. But if a neighbourhood goes to war, it goes against its own existence. The neighbourhood is the moral fulcrum of human society. Gandhi mourned the death of neighbourhoods when he walked through the devastated streets of Calcutta, Noakhali, and Bihar. It was necessary for the League to destroy neighbourhoods in order to justify and fortify the discourse of Partition. Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs played into this logic.
A nervous Sikh character in the film says, “Refugees don’t have the right to be angry.” I felt the same sense of frustrated vulnerability as a traumatised adolescent in Assam after being designated a “foreigner”. Refugees are people who are exploited and harmed due to their displaced political status even if they have citizenship rights. Having lost their original neighbourhood, their lives and livelihoods are at the mercy of ethnonational majorities.
The ninety-five-year-old Grewal is battling stroke-induced delirium akin to dementia. It has paradoxically intensified his memory of his lost love. The understanding of dementia from Aristotle and Galen to Alois Alzheimer, and current neurological diagnosis, all point to progressive loss of short-term and long-term memory in this form of mental illness. In witnessing my late mother’s succumbing to dementia, I noticed that past memories come alive, albeit in a confusing way where the sense of past and present collapses. But the thinkers and experts on dementia did not point out this paradox in relation to memory: that the person suffering from memory loss makes a valiant attempt to recover it before losing it forever.
In Grewal’s case, the return of the past—or his return to it—is a source of trauma. In his vocabulary, “the people of Mars” attacked the “moon” during Partition. The image of an idyllic neighbourhood tells us what social history doesn’t: spaces that allowed people to fall in love. Metaphor is Grewal’s unconscious linguistic strategy to grapple with the unspeakable memory of horror.
Naseeruddin Shah plays Ishar Singh Grewal, a man abandoned by fate and history. | Photo Credit: IMDB
My paternal uncle, a Partition refugee from Kishoreganj, Mymensingh (like my father) in erstwhile East Bengal, is a retired professor of physics who lives on the outskirts of Kolkata. His daughter informed me two years ago that uncle is suffering from acute dementia. Sometimes while watching television, he suddenly blurts out the names of friends from his old hometown, pointing to people on screen. It made me conclude, in my recent book on my mother’s dementia, that uncle is finally able to overcome his lifelong trauma by crossing the line of control at will. His memory helps him reconcile with the violent artifice of national borders.
Memories of all hues
Grewal travels across the borders of time—and land—to name old associations and streets. I used to wonder why my late father, at the slightest opportunity, parroted the names of twelve thanas of Kishoreganj district in erstwhile East Bengal. Partition was a loss of names that were part of your everyday life. Names turned into objects of memory, something the writer Aanchal Malhotra has detailed in Remnants of a Separation. I am reminded of my visit to the residence of a retired Sikh lawyer in Delhi ten years ago. His address was uncannily the same as mine. I wanted to know if a letter I was waiting for had been accidentally dropped at his place. The mild-mannered man offered me Rooh Afza. I disliked the fragrance of the drink and refused. The Sardar seemed pained, and insisted: “This is a special drink we serve guests. We only get it from Karachi.” I was moved by his sentiments and gulped down the drink with an outward show of pleasure. The incident revealed un-partitioned nostalgias.
Grewal remembers his past, his Muslim beloved, against the fossilisation of memory. He wants to leap out of his bed, his physical limitations, even the opaque window of time, to touch what he has lost. It appears like a last effort at keeping a failed promise, to diminish his guilt, and heal. This is the central theme of Ali’s film: Partition can only provoke the sentiment of reconciliation.
Ali does not hesitate to show the ugly, masculine face of the horror and the fact that Partition was a locomotive of history that ran over the bodies of women and children. Yet, through Naseeruddin Shah, the dependable Vinod Nagpal as Shah’s younger brother, and a sincere Diljit Dosanjh as Shah’s grandson, Ali has tried to bridge the gap between generations by telling his audience to confront the bitter past rather than escape or fuel it. There are glitches in Ali’s penchant for stylised romantic scenes and dialogues. The theatrical flourishes often disturb the film’s more realistic scenes, creating an awkward cinematic imbalance. Overall, Ali has made an honest film.
On a personal note, I was thrilled to spot my recent book on Gandhi and Partition on the shelves of Bahrisons when the camera panned through the bookshelves.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Gandhi: The End of Non-violence.
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