( Note to the reader: I wish to thank Rinku for sharing this film with me. Rarely do I get teared up when I watch a film. With this short film, I did. I am often emotionally moved by a great story, but it takes something special to let the emotions flow out as tears. Considering all that is happening between the Hindus and the Muslims in India in recent times, I felt this film touched upon something deep and true, something that really cannot be expressed, but only felt and experienced. Sometimes, we have to let go of words and labels and look behind them. This beautiful short film nudges us to do that.)
The euphoria of India’s emancipation from British rule in 1947 will always remain darkened by the clouds of India’s partition soon thereafter. The reverberations of that division, made in a hurry, are felt even today, permeating, channelizing, and corrupting everything that is vital in both nations. The division also triggered one of the biggest exoduses ever recorded in history. Men, women, and children left their homes overnight, carrying with them whatever they could. They walked, ran, crawled, and hung on trains to escape the violence. Millions on both sides lost their lives – in transit, at home, and in the bloody civil unrest that followed. Families were mercilessly orphaned, ontologically erased, and the psychological scars of the rift still continue to haunt us. We are yet to reconcile ourselves to our decisions and fate.
Conventional history is always a study of the past from a comfortable vantage point of the future. Its sweeping generalizations often fail to capture the living reality of the individual whose life it chronicles. For instance, a statement such as “Millions were uprooted during India’s partition”, fails to capture the emotional and existential poignancy of the moment for an individual who has had roots in the soil for hundreds of years. It doesn’t capture the cataclysmic displacement, the strong attachment, the agony of severance, and the love they may have had for the homeland. Every so often, an Amrita Pritam’s couplet or a Gulzar’s verse stunningly brings out the intensity of the partition as perceived through an individual’s eyes. Heavy tomes on partition can only present facts, numbers, and dates, but it takes a rare historian, a sensitive poet, or a perceptive filmmaker to get into the skin of a man in the throes of such an experience and bring out the poignancy of the moment and the times they lived in.
“The miniaturist of Junagadh”, a short film (twenty-nine minutes) written and directed by Kaushal Oza, and streaming on YouTube crystallizes the emotional pangs of partition in an unusually sensitive narrative that illuminates the pain of ostracism and can bring tears even to the most hardened nationalists on either side. Naseeruddin Shah gives us a vintage performance as the blind Muslim miniaturist, who treats his exile from Junagadh as a short sojourn away from home, and the beautiful gift he leaves behind for the new Hindu occupant of his ancestral home touched a deep chord within. It juxtaposes the twin issues that played such a key factor during the partition (and even today!): The question of what it means to be a native of a land? And what is religion? These are answered, quite beautifully, and with profound dignity, in this short epic. Yes, it is an epic because these thirty minutes are bound to linger for a long time in our hearts and minds.
Husyn Naqqash, the miniaturist is seen for the first time as a reflection in the mirror by Kishori Lal, the Hindu, as he waits for the home papers to be signed. That shot by itself is visually poignant – one sees as a reflection, the other. There is no difference there, except those that we have created in our minds. The mellowing light from candles, and the caressing silhouettes that dance around the walls of Husyn’s home, speak of a long love affair the family has had with the home they have lived in. Naseeruddin Shah as Husyn is the master of focussed emotions. The far away look he brings to Husyn’s tired eyes, the immediacy of his little joys, the trembling yet firm voice in immaculate Urdu that holds the listener spellbound and sensually satisfied, the complete absence of malice, the enormous pride in his craft, the felicitous rendering of Indian history in few dancing phrases, the unassuming gait of a man who is in no hurry to leave, and the beautiful parting with Kishorilal with a promise to return home once Jinnah and Patel have settled the differences – are signs of a master in the full control of his craft. Only Nasruddiin shah could have brought such intensity to Husyn’s role. I can’t think of any other actor, except Amitabh perhaps, who could pack a lifetime into twenty-five minutes of screen time.
Kaushal Oza adapted the story from Stefal Zweig’s, a sensitive viennese writer of the 1930s. In the original, Vienna was the homeland, in Kaushal’s hands, it became India. This short film fills all the senses. There is this aromatic and lip-smacking cup of tea, the vibrant colors of paint, the celebration of touch, and most importantly, the haunting background score from the strings that laps every frame, accentuating and enriching the deep emotions played out on screen. Seventy years after independence, we are still grappling with our identities. The chasm, the void, the partition left is still festering, infected, and eating into the core of what we are as a nation. Our news headlines continue to fight the battle, with the same vitriolic fury and division. In the milieu, “The miniaturist of Junagadh” comes a breath of fresh air, asking us to rethink, and awaken to new possibilities. There are no hard-hitting patriotic slogans, or breast-beating nationalism on display in the twenty-nine minutes of the film, instead, it gently points out the humaneness of the human heart, and what it takes to shift one’s perspective and embrace the differences, and move on. This short film gently turns the viewer’s gaze from what separates us to what binds us together. That is a crucial change, much needed in these troubled times.
Pls, do watch this short film.