Going to Pakistan: How Indian filmmakers, writers and artists are re-engaging with our neighbour

There’s a scene at the halfway mark of Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis (2026) that encapsulates the film’s pacifist mindset. It’s 2001, just a couple of years after the India-Pakistan war in Kargil. Retired Brigadier Madan Lal Khetarpal (the late Dharmendra) is in Pakistan, having made the journey seemingly to visit Sargodha, his hometown. But he has another motive as well, to see the place where his son Arun Khetarpal was martyred during the 1971 India-Pakistan war. Khetarpal, relaxing with his hosts, is rudely interrupted by a disabled Pakistani ex-soldier named Jahangir (Deepak Dobriyal), who calls him an “Indian dog”, ranting about his entire regiment being killed by the Indian Army.

Khetarpal gets up and embraces Jahangir, insisting that he too is a fauji (soldier) and knows the unvarnished horrors of war intimately, a powerful reminder of Jahangir and Khetarpal’s shared humanity.

Ikkis isn’t the only recent Bollywood film to invoke Sargodha (in Pakistan’s Punjab province). Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaungaa (2026) is about Ishar Singh Grewal (Naseeruddin Shah) whose grandson Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) helps him reconnect with the Sargodha of his childhood and youth, especially his first love, Afsana (Sharvari) and the long-repressed memories of the losses his family suffered during the communal violence of August 1947. Both Ikkis and Main Vaapas Aaungaa involve an emotional journey to Pakistan, one that brings about catharsis. Their protagonists have to visit the land of the Other to find themselves, to acknowledge a part of themselves that usually stays hidden for familial or sociopolitical reasons.

In recent years, a number of books, films and plays have approached Indo-Pak engagements in this humanistic, compassionate vein, where the journey to Pakistan brings closure and/or significant personal growth. This includes Geetanjali Shree’s International Booker-winning Hindi novel Ret Samadhi (translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand), Sachin NG’s novel Dear Zahira, With Love, and Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel Absolute Jafar. The upcoming Rajkumar Santoshi film Batwara 1947 too is based on a classic of the subgenre, Asghar Wajahat’s play Jis Lahore Nahi Vekhya O Jamya E Nahi.

These are works of art in the Dhurandhar era where the dominant expression is one of paranoia and conspiracy theories, of deep and abiding enmity. When viewed in this context, the cultural importance of a Tomb of Sand or an Ikkis is further enhanced. These stories are potent reminders of an alternative vision for India-Pakistan engagement, one marked by mutual respect and forgiveness.

THE NATION AND THE SELF

“I think one of the most impressive things about the screenplay of Ikkis is how it humanises the Pakistani soldier,” says Vivaan Shah, who played Captain Malhotra aka “Mallu” in the film. “If we look at the recent history of Hindi cinema, there is no shortage of films where Pakistani soldiers are just evil caricatures, with no depth or nuance or character evolution. Captain Malhotra, however, does not have a personal hatred of his counterparts, he is just doing his duty for his country.”

Shah observes that since Veer-Zaara (2004), Bollywood had practically stopped making films that expressed anything other than naked military aggression towards Pakistan (a notable exception is the 2015 Salman Khan film Bajrangi Bhaijaan, directed by Kabir Khan). In that same time-frame, however, practically every leading man in Bollywood has notched up at least one gung-ho nationalist war drama apiece. When you consider those two facts together, the ardent pacifism of Ikkis feels like even more of an outlier. And it’s worth noting that the film achieves this with a symmetrical approach. We mourn Khetarpal’s loss. But we also feel for Jaideep Ahlawat’s character, the Pakistani Brig. Jaan Mohammad Nisar, when he loses a young officer called Altaf; Nisar had promised Altaf’s father that he would protect the boy. For a film depicting a soldier’s ultimate sacrifice at age 21, Ikkis never allows the nation-state to overwhelm the self.

In Main Vaapas Aaunga, the nation and the self are pitted against each other from the first act. Towards the beginning of the film, we see Ishar (young Ishar is played by Vedang Raina) watching Afsana recite Premchand’s Hindi-Urdu short story Duniya Ka Sabse Anmol Ratan, at a college event hosted by the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), an anti-imperialist, left-leaning writers’ movement started by Sajjad Zaheer, Mulk Raj Anand and other major writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Premchand translated their manifesto into Hindi and delivered the historical presidential address at its inaugural meeting in Lucknow in April 1936.

Duniya Ka Sabse Anmol Ratan is framed as a love story in which Dilfigar is madly in love with a beautiful woman named Dilfareb, who demands that he bring her “duniya ka sabse anmol ratan” (the world’s most precious gem). At the conclusion of the story the lovers agree that the world’s most precious thing is “the last drop of blood that spills to protect the nation”. Premchand and the PWA famously championed social-realist literature that was supposed to aid the ongoing freedom struggle. Premchand’s efforts towards imposing a common, unified Hindi register (khari boli) across the publishing world, for example, served the needs of Mahatma Gandhi’s national movement.

By the end of Main Vaapas Aaunga, however, Ishar and Afsana have chosen themselves over nationalism, much like the young Gandhian lovers of the R.K. Narayan novel Waiting for the Mahatma (1955). The poetry that the duo recite to each other is pure escapism, blatantly and unapologetically sentimental, everything the PWA abhorred in a work of literature. Shortly after the day of Partition, Ishar promises Afsana, “main vaapas aaungaa” (I shall return). He therefore commits to a subversion, a reversal of Premchand’s call-to-sacrifice.

Unlike Dharmendra’s Brig. Khetarpal in Ikkis, Naseeruddin Shah’s older Ishar in Main Vaapas Aaungaa is physically too frail to make the journey to Pakistan himself—so his grandson Nirvair does it for him, staying in touch via video calls. This serves a dual narrative purpose because both grandfather and grandson end up experiencing their own respective catharses. Watching his grandfather holding on to the hope of seeing Afsana again, the commitment-phobic Nirvair is inspired to mend fences with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Kaveri (Banita Sandhu). In the 2019 Salman Khan-starrer Bharat, directed by Ali Abbas Zafar, there is a similar subplot where a TV channel run by the character Kumud (Katrina Kaif) uses video calls to reunite long-lost relatives separated during Partition.

In Ikkis and Main Vaapas Aaunga, the Indian protagonists travelling to Pakistan are helped by well-intentioned Pakistani characters throughout their journeys. This is not just crucial to plot progression, it is also designed to show the audience that “regular” people on both sides of the border are likely to value humanity over aggression and military posturing. In 1998, the New Delhi-based Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) commenced a Partition-related study called Reconstructing Lives, led by political psychologist Ashis Nandy and historian Rajmohan Gandhi. The CSDS team interviewed over 1,300 survivors of Partition violence and over 40% of them shared stories of somebody from “the other side” helping them at a time when they needed it the most. Nandy later drew upon this research in a 2002 essay called Death of an Empire (published in The Sarai Reader 02) in which he identified repressed trauma as a significant factor shaping South-Asian societies, especially India and Pakistan.

The older Ishar (Shah) in Main Vaapas Aaunga constantly speaks in a kind of coded nonsense, talking about Martians and Adolf Hitler and Kapil Dev while also describing the old-fashioned pleasures of Sargodha. It’s a memorable delivery style, reminiscent of the gibberish spoken by Manto’s immortal character in his 1955 short story Toba Tek Singh, who is confused whether his hometown Toba Tek Singh is in India or Pakistan. For Harshul Kaul, who plays the role of Aftab Ahmedzai, the best friend of young Ishar (Raina), Ishar’s mindful-drivel was reminiscent of a poignant family memory. “Naseer sahab is obviously one of the best actors we have ever seen,” says Kaul, who belongs to a Kashmiri Pandit family. “He really makes you feel the pain of a person who has been uprooted from their home overnight. It reminded me of my own grandmother who would usually avoid talking about the past. But in her last days, when her mind was declining, she would talk about her childhood all the time, wanting to go back to places she hadn’t been to in decades.”

Nandy’s Death of an Empire also describes the friction among families affected by Partition. Building on the work of American sociologist Stephen Keller, Nandy wrote that survivors of Partition violence are “not only more aggressive in their professional and public life, but also within their families.” Indeed, when we are introduced to the various members of older Ishar’s family (like his son Iqbal, played by Rajat Kapoor), we immediately see how cruel and secretive they can be with each other. And this is another narrative purpose of the journey-to-Pakistan: addressing familial and personal dysfunction. By the end of the film, Nirvair has mended fences with his father Iqbal. He has also overcome his commitment issues to Kaveri.

TO ILLUMINATE BOTH SIDES

All of these narrative strands—Partition, Pakistan, secret past lives, border brinkmanship—find elegant and impactful expression in Tomb of Sand. In this novel, we meet the octogenarian, recently widowed Ma who’s determined to cross all kinds of borders. She turns her back on her son and his family, quite literally, for extended periods of time. She eventually moves into her daughter’s house, befriending a trans person named Rosie, who sometimes also appears as the male-presenting Raza. Following Rosie’s tragic death, Ma takes it upon herself to fulfil her late friend’s request: to carry chironji seeds across the border to someone Rosie knew back in Pakistan (like Ma, Rosie too crossed over to India during Partition). Ma’s daughter, referred to only as Beti (daughter) across the book, takes Ma to her old Pakistani abode, and it is revealed that she was once married to a Muslim man named Anwar.

“The bond between Ma and Rosie begins with their shared past,” says Shree. “But their friendship also grows because that shared past is a mostly buried one. There is nobody in their present lives with whom they can talk about this, and talking about it is the only way they can keep that past alive, in a way. So while I didn’t plan it that way, there is certainly a ‘mutual healing’ aspect between Ma and Rosie.”

A telling moment in the novel’s third act sees Ma at the Wagah border, being asked if her name is “Chandraprabha Devi” (the first time her name is revealed). She replies that her name is Chanda, reverting to her pre-Partition identity. She is a full individual again, a Chanda who once chose to be one half of the Anwar-Chanda love story. The whole interrogation scene, in fact, is a masterclass in dark comedy as Ma answers the relentless, pointless questions with wit and mischief. At one point, she invokes the writer Intizar Husain (author of the Partition masterpiece Basti), who was born and educated in Uttar Pradesh and migrated to Pakistan upon Partition when he was 22 years old. Is Intizar Husain yours or ours, Ma asks the Pakistani officer.

“The constant quarrel between India and Pakistan is sinister, and often leads to a lot of violence,” says Shree. “But it is also silly, it’s bewakoofi, like classroom bullying. When relations between the two nations were slightly better (during the “Aman Ki Asha” phase to promote relations between the two countries in 2010, for instance) there was a ton of visas issued, everybody was going to Pakistan. And the moment there’s even a slight skirmish at the border, all travel becomes very, very difficult. So with that interrogation scene I wanted to have elements of the sinister, alongside some silliness as well.”

The invocation of Husain in the interrogation scene is also significant because his novels like Basti and Aage Samandar Hai featured Indian-born Muslim protagonists who moved to Pakistan during Partition to ensure their physical safety. However, their cultural and spiritual selves are torn asunder, their plight demonstrating the impossibility of thinking about “Indian” and “Pakistani” as mutually exclusive psychological categories. In his 1992 essay On Serpents, Inevitability and the South Asian Imagination, Ziauddin Sardar wrote that South-Asian societies are fictitious entities shaped by popular myths about each other—he was making the argument in the context of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. When characters like Ma eventually make the trip to Pakistan, often late in life, the stories inside their heads are being “finished” by these cathartic journeys, bringing them closure-via-narrative.

One overarching theme in Tomb of Sand is the very idea of borders. Ma’s choices and her journey not only demolish the neat divisions and borders of her life (Indian-Pakistani, wife-widow), it also forces her daughter to look at her mother in an entirely new light. At one point, Ma asks her daughter: “What is a border? It’s something that surrounds an existence, it is a person’s perimeter. No matter how large, no matter how small. The edge of a handkerchief, the border of a tablecloth, the embroidery around my shawl. The edges of the sky. The beds of flowers in this yard. The borders of fields. The parapet around this roof. A picture frame. Everything has a border. However, a border is not created to be removed. It is meant to illuminate both sides.”

While Tomb of Sand’s “event zero” is a Hindu-Muslim, Indo-Pak marriage from the 1940s, Sarnath Banerjee’s graphic novel Absolute Jafar depicts the trajectory of a 21st century Hindu-Muslim, Indo-Pak marriage (a lightly fictionalised version of Banerjee’s own), and the raising of a child who’s both Indian and Pakistani. Banerjee’s longtime authorial stand-in Brighu meets, falls for and marries Mahrukh, whose family is from Karachi. The bureaucratic and sociopolitical blind spots that this unique marriage exposes in Brighu and Mahrukh’s worlds form the heart of Absolute Jafar.

One of the most memorable illustrations in the book is a full-page, full-colour painting of a large, comfy-looking jacket. Upon further inspection, you realise that the zipper’s teeth-like segments are actually human hands. Near the top, the hands are united in a firm grip but as we move towards the bottom, the hands slowly move away until finally, they are entirely disparate elements on the page. The painting is at the beginning of a chapter titled Aman Ki Asha, which pokes gentle fun at the eponymous Indo-Pak campaign from the 2000s.

Absolute Jafar wears its erudition quite lightly. I would recommend reading it in tandem with an earlier book that explores the same subject in prose, with a much wider lens — Amitava Kumar’s Husband of a Fanatic (2005), a book-length personal essay about Kumar’s own Indo-Pak marriage. The title of the book refers to the initial fears voiced by his mother who wondered if her new daughter-in-law was one of “those” Muslims.

Husband of a Fanatic is filled with startling, often cinematic moments involving the Kafkaesque absurdities of Kumar’s situation. A memorable essay titled Lunch with a Bigot (later reappearing in a 2015 collection of the same name) sees Kumar being lectured by an elderly far-right America-dwelling Indian man who grudgingly accepts the interreligious marriage. And why? Because to the old man’s eyes, such a marriage meant that Kumar was, in fact, “f***ing Islam”. Kumar also travels to Pakistan to meet his wife’s folks, and grudgingly accepts the fact that for them, religious identity was inextricably tied up with political identity.

Twenty-odd years later Kumar is a parent to Gen-Z children, and has taught at New York’s Vassar College for the last 20-odd years. I asked him if this generation of young people (whether diasporic or otherwise) is also likely to fall for the same phobias. “I remain optimistic,” Kumar says. “Among the American diaspora there is a segment that is quite hawkish, you can say, on Indo-Pak or Hindu-Muslim relations, and then there has always been a segment that is more openly bigoted. But I think that young people, whether in India or Pakistan or America, have started to realise the lies told to them by opportunistic politicians of their parents’ generation. Look at the recent student protests across India, I think it was remarkable, what those kids achieved.”

In some of the lighter moments in Husband of a Fanatic, Kumar writes about the frenzied nature of Indo-Pak cricket matches. In 2004, a year before the book was published, the Indian men’s cricket team toured Pakistan again after a gap of 15 years. The writer and journalist Rahul Bhattacharya accompanied the team and later wrote Pundits from Pakistan (2005). In the concluding chapter of the book, Bhattacharya was once again close to the Wagah border and noted that the surprisingly low fence before him appeared to be non-electric. This is confirmed in a rather amusing fashion when Sachin Tendulkar is given permission to pose for a photograph where he’s smiling with one leg on either side of the fence—an apt and arresting image to capture the “shared mania” of Indian and Pakistani cricketing fans.

WHY DON’T YOU GO TO PAKISTAN?

Last month, the BBC reported on how Pakistani 20-somethings were enjoying the visuals coming in from Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, of youngsters sporting cockroach helmets, T-shirts with memes and other kinds of flamboyant, theatrical protest techniques. A good story performed live just “hits different”, as the kids say. I was reminded of the time I watched Asmita Theatre’s production of the 1989 Asghar Wajahat play Jis Lahore Nai Vekhya O Jamya E Nahi (he who hasn’t seen Lahore hasn’t truly lived). It was performed in a mixture of Hindi and Urdu with smatterings of Punjabi. The play follows Sikander Mirza, a Muslim trader in Lucknow, who is expelled from India with his family during Partition. Upon reaching Lahore, the Mirzas are allotted a haveli only to realise that Mai, the Hindu matriarch of the family that owned it, is still living there. Slowly, the Mirzas strike up a rapport with the old woman and start considering her a part of their family—much to the chagrin of local fundamentalists.

“There are certain plays that really speak to the atmosphere that we endure as a society today,” says Asmita founder Arvind Gaur. “This is one of them. It stands firmly against hate. In the story we see characters changing their mindset, their preconceived notions. And more broadly speaking, I believe that art is the medium through which we can bring about a change in people’s thinking.” The name of the play refers to the fact that pre-independence Lahore was a unique and vibrant place. Back then, it was widely considered to be the cultural capital of the Indian subcontinent.

Lahore’s cultural status is precisely why the play’s villain feels even more egregious—Yakoob Pehalwan, an opportunist bigot with delusions of grandeur who sneers at the learned, and will stop at nothing to attain power and influence. Yakoob leads the propaganda efforts against the Mirzas, and insists that they expel Mai immediately. Some of the high points of the play occur during the verbal sparring between Yakoob and a character called Nasir Kazmi, a fictionalised rendition of the real-life poet of the same name. The half-crazed Kazmi has been expelled from Ambala and now wanders the streets of Lahore, spouting beautiful, sometimes disjointed pieces of poetry—between successive scenes, there are musical interludes featuring the real-world Nasir Kazmi’s verses set to tune.

“From the time I was doing lights on Habib Tanvir’s production of Jis Lahore in the early 1990s I found the Nasir Kazmi character to be fascinating,” says Gaur. “He is a man whose refined sensitivities are incompatible with the sociopolitical realities of the era he is living through. Being violently displaced from his home makes him vulnerable but also gives him a kind of poetic licence to say the things that others won’t say openly.” Jis Lahore is currently in the headlines because of Rajkumar Santoshi’s upcoming film adaptation, called Batwara 1947, slated for theatrical release on 14 August. Sunny Deol plays Sikander Mirza, Shabana Azmi plays Mai and Abhimanyu Singh plays Yakoob Pehalwan.

One of the many strands picked up by Wajahat in Jis Lahore is the many similarities (and minute differences) between the spoken Punjabi on either side of the border. Punjabis on the Indian side have always been heavy consumers of Punjabi-inflected Pakistani media. Pakistani comedians through the 1980s and 1990s like Umer Sharif, Amanullah Khan and Rauf Lala, were extremely popular in cities like Chandigarh and Patiala. Copied and bootlegged audio cassettes of their live stand-up shows were sold widely at music shops and even paan/cigarette shops. Comedic plays they acted in would be recorded and repackaged via VHS.

In 2006, Rauf Lala was invited to be a part of the popular Indian TV show The Great Indian Laughter Challenge’s second season—Lala ended up being a huge hit with audiences, eventually winning the Challenge via a combination of judges’ scores and audience polls. Conversely, in 2016, Indian singer Shilpa Rao recorded a song called Paar Chanaa De for the Pakistani TV show Coke Studio Pakistan, where artists record live versions of both classic and contemporary songs.

Since most people do not, in fact, get the opportunity to see Pakistan for themselves, media consumption functions as a stand-in, a metaphorical journey for a lot of Indians. A couple of months ago, the Pakistani actor Shahzad Nawaz revealed that Indian screen legend Sharmila Tagore had sent him a congratulatory message for his villainous character “Dr Shahnawaz” in the popular Pakistani soap Doctor Bahu. Tagore had asked a mutual friend to tell Nawaz, “Dr Shahnawaz mujhe itna naapasand hai ki aap please is actor ko mubaarakbaad denaa meri taraf se (I hate Dr Shahnawaz so much that I request you to convey my congratulations to the actor)”.

For Sachin NG, author of Dear Zahira, With Love, the moment of inspiration first arrived via the thrill of a live performance. The book is an epistolary Indo-Pak romance between Hawaldaar Ghulam Ali and Zahira Raza, a British Raj-era limb-fitter and an amputee, respectively. The two fall in love after he fits her with an artificial leg that gives her a new lease of life. After Ghulam Ali is expelled to Pakistan and is unable to return, the two begin writing letters to each other. It is a sweet, rather old-fashioned romance with all the underlying pathos of the Partition baked in. Sachin first encountered the story of Hawaldaar Ghulam Ali in a dastangoi performance called Dastaan e Taqseem e Hind—this was based on real-life correspondence found in museum archives.

“When I heard the story live, as told by Ankit Chadha and Himanshu Bajpai, I was mesmerised,” says Sachin. “It was such a classic, universal romance and yet, there were qualities to the story that make it distinctively Indian. The fact of Ghulam Ali’s vocation is also another added dimension to the story because he and Zahira end up making each other whole, in a way.”

Despite these books, films and plays, the journey to Pakistan remains a punchline in popular discourse, especially of the online kind. “Why don’t you go to Pakistan?” is a default right-wing riposte headed your way if you dare criticise any aspect of Indian society or polity. Conversely, a section of liberal commentators also routinely use “Pakistan” as a pejorative (“We are turning into a Hindu Pakistan” et al).

What lies beneath the taunt is no more than a deep-seated, niggling fear. Both Sudhir Kakar and Ashis Nandy have used the writings of Sigmund Freud to show how Pakistan functions as a psychological “double” for India—it is at once our twin and the vessel for our fears and insecurities. In his 1997 essay The Fantastic India-Pakistan Battle, Or the Future of the Past in South Asia, Nandy describes the “civil society” of both nations as impossibly dependent on each other. Their popular mythologies about each other fit together neatly, like the two halves of the yin-and-yang symbol.

Nandy writes: “Pakistan is many things to many people. But the mythic Pakistan I am talking about is, above all, a definer of Indianness. It is a means of self-analysis and self-intervention.”

When we consider the protagonists of these journey-to-Pakistan stories, the “self-analysis and self-intervention” Nandy is talking about comes to the fore. These characters are driven to undertake what is often a frowned-upon journey because their psychological landscapes are incomplete without it. And for them, “why don’t you go to Pakistan” isn’t even a taunt—it is a decision marked by psychological and narrative inevitability. They have to go to Pakistan not because their brains are telling them to, but because their hearts are.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.