The Configuration of the Partition and the Self in Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth, and Kamal Hassan’s Hey Ram: A Study

The Partition of India in August 1947 created a new trend of archiving history where the documents tried to construct the notion that Partition and Independence happened together and to ignore the sufferings of millions of people across the border. “The political partition of India caused one of the great human convulsions of history”, writes Urvashi Butalia in The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (1998: 3). Regarding the sudden irruption of violence in Kolkata in 1946, Nisid Hajari in his book Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition writes, “Ultimately, it is not possible to assign blame entirely to one side or the other. What exploded so suddenly in Calcutta in August 1946 were the pent-up fears of communities convinced that they faced imminent subjugation by the other. Riot no longer sufficed as a description (2015: 34). Communal violence seems to be coterminous with Partition and the depiction of this violence in Bollywood movies is a relational negotiations in foregrounding its inclusivity in a problematic construct. In this regard Rachel Dawer opines in Bollywood’s India: Hindi Cinema as a Guide to Contemporary India, “Like other arts, cinema is about standards of behavior and their consequences, a way of understanding the self and the world which can be interpreted in many ways. However, the Hindi film is also a mighty cultural product, consumed by millions of people in India and worldwide as a global media form (2014:8). Deepa Mehta’s 1998 film 1947: Earth is set during the 1947 partition of India and is narrated by an older Lenny who remembers how a Parsi family gets embroiled in the violence as the tension of partition rises. Kamal Haasan’s 2000 film Hey Ram revolves around the issues of the creation of a separate country for the Muslims and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi who has been made accountable for the riots following the partition. In both these two movies there are attempts to fictionalize history and to showcase how the historical event of partition creates not only rifts in society but also attenuates the idea of selfhood.