Review of Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters)

 Little seems to affect a village in Pakistan's Punjab. The world seems to pay scant heed to the little town of Charki and it does not seem to mind, going about its business with cheer and bonhomie. Saleem, a man barely out of his adolescence lives with his mother Ayesha and has gentle designs upon a neighbour Zubeida, who returns his attentions in like measure, observed and approved by Ayesha. All seems picture-perfect, down to the setting of the town, when three events of moment occur. Former Prime Minister Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto is hanged at the behest of military dictator Zia-ul-Haq, two radical Muslims come to town to effect a sense of Islamic identity where it has appeared less than fervent, and in the wake of a window of opportunity resulting from a breakthrough in India-Pakistan relations, Sikh pilgrims are permitted to visit holy shrines near Charki. The denouement is catastrophic - the rise of fundamentalism meets the unwitting pilgrims in a wash that consumes the passions of the young men in the town, not least Saleem. And memories, painful and raw are uncovered - one of the pilgrims has a quest to find a sister who ran away rather than submit to an honour death with her mother and sister - drowning in the village well in 1947 even as the carnage between faiths over Partition is in progress. That sister is Ayesha, a woman who has been rescued and brought up a Muslim in the village of her birth. So feelings are raised, incendiary and torching, until Ayesha, trapped in two worlds that she cannot escape, finds release in the self-same well 32 years after she chose life on such terms as she could find it. When the moment occurred, sans effect or musical interlude, there was an audible cry of shock in the viewing audience at the Harvard Film Archive - a shared sense of loss that reached far beyond any considered disquisition on the subject. This was the film's impact, this its lasting achievement and we were held in a collective remembrance of a history whose ravages are with us still.

Sabiha Sumar was present for a question and answer session and spoke simply and effectively to the motivations for her film. The story she depicted is all too familiar - it forms, with some creative departure, part of the narrative found in Urvashi Butalia's seminal work, 'The Other Side of Silence - Voices from the Partition of India.' Sumar also spoke of meeting with a woman she believed was abducted. The anthropology of kidnapped women has only recently become the subject of inquiry, now that ghosts too long concealed are finding their moment of exorcism. At such a time, Sumar's effort is both timely and poignant.

There is, from the perspective of aesthetics, a danger in the depiction of such a fraught subject of demonising one sex – in this case, men. It is not difficult to do this, particularly when the insidious hand of patriarchy continues to dominate in the region. To Sumar's credit, she has not sought to create merely a place of victimhood for all the women in the film (surprisingly few, with only Ayesha and Zubeida occupying central roles), though the telling of the story cannot but leave the viewer with a sense of outrage and powerlessness alike. Likewise, there are sympathetic men - the barber who stands up to the fundamentalists and arranges for a Sikh pilgrim to be given tea, and another townsman who helps to mediate the meeting between that pilgrim and Ayesha, his long-lost sister. They stand as decent exemplars of humanity in a place where humanity is suddenly up for ransom. In what has been hailed as a pivotal moment in Pakistani cinema, Sumar has made a film, she says, that speaks to the dangers of fundamentalism. This she has done, and in powerful simplicity through the recounting of a tale that recurs time after interminable time, and in its heartbreak calls to us to be more than witnesses - it calls, no demands that we respond, such that where we are, we can give truth to our own yearning plea, 'in our time at least, please, never again.'

John Mathew, with input from Tatiana Chaterji

Cast: Kirron Kher, Aamir Malik, Arshad Mahmud, Salman Shahid, Shilpa Shukla, Sarfaraz Ansari, Shazim Ashraf, Navtej Johar, Fariha Jabeen, Adnan Shah,

Directed by: Sabiha Sumar
Written by Paromita Vohra
Country: Pak/Fr/Ger

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