Halfway through Batwara 1947, bored out of my mind, I started to wonder how the film might be if instead of Shabana Azmi playing the old homeowner it was Naseeruddin Shah channeling his Ishar Singh from Main Vaapas Aaunga. It’s not that Azmi isn't effective, just that Mai—a Lahori Hindu who’s lost her family in the tumult of Partition and whose house is allotted to Muslim refugees from India—can only ever be an object of pity. On the other hand, a cranky, rude old timer who resents the Muslims occupying his home… now that might be a challenge to the audience.
Rajkumar Santoshi’s film isn’t interested in challenges. It wants to appear bold without actually being bold. It’s adapted from a broad, didactic play by Asghar Wajahat, Jis Lahore Nai Vekhya, O Jamya E Nai, and the film ends up even more of a sermon. Aamir Khan, co-producer with Aparna Purohit, has never stopped lecturing viewers since the 2000s, but at least he usually does his own preaching. Here, confusingly, it’s Sunny Deol, who’s calling for universal brotherhood one minute and horse-whipping a dozen men the next.
From the start, there’s a careful balance of inhumanity on both sides. The film opens in India, in the days leading up to and just after independence. With Hindu rioters closing in on their home in Meerut, businessman Sikandar Mirza (Sunny Deol), his wife, Hamida (Preity Zinta), and their daughter, Tanno (Khushi Hajare), are forced to flee for Lahore. They barely make it out alive; a mob attacks their train at the station and their son, Javed (Karan Deol), is left behind in the chaos. Later, we see Javed’s memories of the carnage that unfolded. We also get the mirror image: a Muslim mob burning a Hindu family alive, two Pakistani rioters boasting about their brutality during Partition. What annoyed me is how sanctimonious Batwara is about this equal distribution. I know times are bad and Hindi cinema is worse, but surely we can’t be handing out medals for not demonizing any one particular religion.
When Sikandar is allotted the haveli, he doesn’t know that its owner, an old woman who goes by Mai (Azmi), still lives there. He and Hamida try to get her to leave, but she stubbornly refuses—and eventually grows on them. But her presence enrages Yaqoob (Abhimanyu Singh), a bigoted strongman standing for local election. He keeps sending thugs to evict her, and every time he does Batwara remembers it’s a Sunny Deol film and they get puréed.
It’s mild whiplash seeing Abhimanyu Singh play a Muslim extremist in a manner not dissimilar to his Hindu extremist in L2: Empuraan last year. But his gang is what caught my eye. It’s straight out of an pulpy ‘70s movie: one man has a huge scar, another one good eye, another lipstick and a mole. Ali Fazal’s gentle poet flits in and out of the film like the reanimated soul of the Muslim Social. Everything points to this being the work of an ageing collective. Deol, Khan, Santoshi, Wajahat, AR Rahman, Javed Akhtar, Santosh Sivan: an illustrious group, but the youngest has been working since the mid-80s. The result is a film that feels stiff and more than a little out of touch.
A related problem is Batwara on screen still feels like a stage play. There’s little effort made to open up the production, no license for Sivan’s camera to roam. When we do venture outside, it’s onto a palpably artificial-looking approximation of 1940s Lahore. This is an entirely textual work, everything explained, nothing shown. Worse, there’s no sense of life in Pakistan then, no music, food, sports, cinema, politics. The performances are stagey in the literal sense; in a scene with Sikandar, Habib and a government official, I was distracted by all three actors waving their hands as they spoke.
In theory, it would seem subversive that Sunny Deol, former BJP MP and strident nationalist action hero, is playing a Muslim man who takes it upon himself to protect a Hindu woman. But how much of a stretch is his Sikandar? He and Hamida speak in Hindi, with only a smattering of Urdu (if you’ve always longed to hear Deol say “Fuzūl ki baatein na karein, begum”, you’re in luck). There’s one mention of cooking meat, but we never see it. Sikandar quotes the Quran in a town hall, yelling at the congregation like he’s at the border and they’re a trigger-shy Akshaye Khanna. Yet, it’s only late in the film that we see Hamida and him offer prayers. Recent Hindi films have been guilty of making Muslim characters egregiously Muslim; this is too far in the opposite direction. Mai, meanwhile, gets a mandir, a devotional song and a tulsi plant.
There have been an inordinate number of Hindi films and series this year that are preoccupied with Pakistan. Ikkis considers it with warmth, Border 2 and Dhurandar: The Revenge with disdain, Main Vaapas Aaunga with wistfulness, Operation Safed Sagar with curiosity. Batwara alone has nothing to say—about Partition, about everyday life, anything. “If we can live in the same house as Mai, why can’t Hindus and Muslims live together? Why was Pakistan created?” Tanno wonders. “Ask your father,” Hamida replies.
A reversed version of Wajahat's story—refugees from Pakistan in India allotted the house of a Muslim being hounded by Hindu extremists—might’ve been more thought-provoking. The Pakistan of Santoshi’s film is too removed and too vague to speak to the India of today. “No religion is bad,” Habib says. “Good, bad, that’s people.” Batwara so wants to be praised for its noble intentions. Myself, I’ll take mixed intentions over safe nothings.
‘Batwara 1947’ is in theatres.
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