Paradesi : Review

the absurd drama of history revisited

re-viewing paradesi

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’d 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.

A potential theme ineffectively executed, that is Paradesi. When the director’s concern for the audience (read, economics of the film) exceeds his concern for the film itself, he is forced to fill up the film 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. As a person not competent enough to comment on the economics of cinema, I am not sure in what way the ‘commercial elements’ imposed on the film would have helped it. The loud background score and some of the songs, which appeared untimely and unnecessarily, to borrow Adoor in his book on cinema, are like “un-boiled vegetables in a curry.”

The director’s concern for making the film ‘politically correct’ he makes the 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.

A film made on a ‘social issue’ will definitely help a viewer getting informed about that particular issue. But a good film should transcend the issue on which it is made and should take the viewer to the core of all the issues, the basic human problems. Because, a shallow work of film made on a social issue obtains only a ‘news value’, which has a short life, till the next ‘news’ replaces it, while an in-depth study of human problems would be long lasting, but which may not, sadly, reflect on the box-office collections.

Even then, may be due to the extraordinary theme of the film, Paradesi becomes a film not for just watching and forgetting.

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