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rajmohan A couple of years after the Partition of the country, it occurred to the respective governments of India and Pakistan that inmates of lunatic asylums, like prisoners, should also be exchanged. Muslim lunatics in India should be transferred to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums should be sent to India. During the journey to their respective destinations, the lunatics reach the Indo-Pak border. At the border, a lunatic suddenly climbs up a tree and starts delivering a two hour-long speech on the delicate Hindustan-Pakistan issue. When the guards asked him to come down, he climbs up even higher. When threatened, he says, “I want to live neither in Hindustan nor Pakistan, I would rather live on this tree”. So goes Saadat Hasan Manto’s powerful satire on Partition, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, which questions the absurdity of Partition. Even lunatics, or rather only they, could see the contrast between the public and private madness.
What else can it be other than pure absurdity when an English lawyer, Sri Cyril Radcliffe was summoned from England to India and was allotted just 36 days to draw a line between India and Pakistan? Radcliffe did his job perfectly within the stipulated time, drawing a line that divided not only the country, but also millions of families, more or less 50:50 between India and Pakistan. The wound thus created remains unhealed even after 60 years. P T Kunhi Mohammed’s Paradesi focuses on the desperate plight of the dispossessed people from the Malabar Region of Kerala. Those unfortunate individuals, who had gone to cities of Pakistan in search of jobs, when India was still undivided, were by default awarded Pakistan citizenship after the Partition, while their family members and relatives still lived in Kerala. Paradesi revolves around Valiyakathu Moosa, through three stages of his life, at his 30s, 60s and 80s. Moosa too faces the unfortunate situation of being a ‘foreigner’ in his own land of birth, where his wife, children and grandchildren live. Whenever he come to India with official documents, which allows him only few days of stay in India, he tries to extend his stay by hiding from the State machinery of the Indian government; the Police. On expiry of his visa, the police start their search for Moosa, suspecting him a Pakistani spy. Moosa manages to escape from them for quiet some time by bribing them, but finally ends up with his arrest and his deportation, only to come back after a few years. There are other people too who share the same fate of Moosa, Abdul Rahman, Usman, Mustafa and also Khadeeja, Moosa’s first love who was married to a Pakistan citizen. Some of them, like Usman, slips into complete lunacy and other like Abdul Rahman and Mustafa walk on the thin line between sanity and insanity, unable to withstand the mental and physical torture imposed on them by the ruling class of both the Nations. We find Moosa at his 80s making his final efforts to get an Indian citizenship, with the help of his lawyer and a freelance journalist, Usha, who is preparing a feature on these dispossessed individuals. The film’s narrative in fact progresses through the investigation done by her. Moosa starts slowly loosing his inner strength, which helped him withstand his agony and ecstasy all these years; when he find his own children trying to avoid him, as his Pakistani citizenship becomes uncomfortable for their own smooth living. The absurd drama of history makes a full circle, when the talks between the Pakistan-born Prim Minister of India and the Indian-born President of Pakistan fails and its reverberations pushes away an 85-year-old Moosa once again from his homeland. In the final sequence we see him toddling towards nowhere through a desert. An absurd drama of history created by the excessive greed of our politicians mixed with religious blindness transforms the very identity of an ordinary individual overnight. He possesses an identity imposed on him by the political incidence happening around him, probably something that he never even understood. This newly possessed identity starts haunting him throughout his life, for again reasons never understood by these individuals. The character of Moosa could have been as strong as a character from a Kafka story. May be the director could have felt that the topic of the film has no potential to win popularity, he makes a film filled with elements traditionally believed as ‘pleasing’ for the audience. The film thus becomes a story filled with drama, sentiments, humour, romance and many other such ‘essential’ elements, which may entertain the audience, but would fail to evoke any deep feelings. The director’s concern for making the film ‘politically correct’ makes the Muslim characters again and again reiterate that the Muslims of India love India, that they are truly patriots, whereas the film conveniently misses out the point that this false sense of nationality mixed up with religious pride was the core of the entire tragedy of the Partition. Even with its extraordinary theme, Paradesi thus reduces to a very ordinary Indian film that discusses a social issue very superficially.
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