Kashmir Affairs - Security & Conflict Analysis of Kashmir

not the cinematography style at all in the Lahore setting. There is one part, nearing the end, where a long and very slow moving scene of about 10 minutes is continuously shot, showing the gradual transition of one of the actors (Roshan Seth) from a politician in Delhi to a lunatic in Lahore. At the finale the film closes with the shattering of a mirror in the asylum preceded by the words (recited by Segal) of the great revolutionary Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz;

What is broken is broken
What is broken in shattered
It can not be mended with tears;
The broken mirror has no saviour
So why are you sitting there full of hope?

Manto’s tale illustrates how the torment, confusion and lunacy of the inmates at the asylum are a reflection of the happenings of Partition. The film embellishes this effect by juxtaposing the scenes in the asylum with the Delhi scenes and snippets of original footage of the events surrounding Partition which are nearly always seen through the superimposed bars of the asylum. The torment is demonstrated explicitly with Jaffrey’s poignant speech in the asylum; “What have you done to my world? ... for six months, quietly, I’ve been listening to your crimes, I’ve heard the sound of your knives slitting throats, ... and the sudden silences of abandoned infants. What have you done to my world? Bastards! Criminals ... Even the monsoon this year is evil ...” and also immediately after in Delhi in his emotionally constrained conversation with the British official where Jaffrey challenges the British official’s statement of a successful handover to India on their departing.

Another explicit example is the confusion of the inmates regarding the idea of Pakistan and the newly independent India which is illustrated with proclamations such as “Pakistan is in India” and “Why are we being sent to India? We don’t even know the language they speak in that country.” Uncertainty which evidently the millions of those uprooted from their homes and separated from their family and neighbours must have also faced. The incoherent speeches of the inmates, particularly of the crawling one dressed only in a short nappy-like dhoti in response to Toba Tek Singh’s question of where is ‘Toba Tek Singh’; “... so far we have issued no decision in this respect ... all I have decided so far is that the Mullahs must stop falling in love with goats ... I have received delegations of sheep, goats, and donkeys . They want to have a special round table discussion.” also reflects the madness of the official discussions on the partitioning of the Sub-continent.

In all this, the sweeping and polishing gestures of the cleaner lady endeavours to clear the confusion and enable the officials to self-reflect clearly on their actions, but the futility of polishing an already spotless mirror and sweeping dust onto dust reflects the futility in trying to make any sense of the madness of the mass slaughtering and exodus of human beings that Partition saw, and to put any sense into the deluded (both the inmates and the officials).

However, ‘Partition’ portrays much more than how the asylum is a reflection of the futility, anguish, bewilderment and madness of the historical event; it also philosophically and psychologically addresses and challenges complex and intertwining notions such as power, identity and ‘a nation’ in the context of political conflict.

A sovereign state is defined in political terms (according to the Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States 1933) as an entity which must have a permanent population, a defined territory and a government capable of entering into relations with other states. Social scientists tend to see the concept of ‘nation’ as a social construct based on certain subjective shared values or notions which form a group and that there is no reality to ‘a nation’ except for its psychological reality. Benedict Anderson, for example, defines the nation as an ‘imagined political community’ conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship; a limited imagining which millions of people were willing to die for.

A nation, or a state, as a non-objective concept, but a psychological and philosophical one, is addressed throughout the film. The very question of “What is Pakistan?” by an inmate does it, so does the British official’s description of India in terms of space, sights, smells and sounds. Even the conversation between the officials of whether it is the inmates who need the asylum or the asylum that needs the inmates can be comparable to the question of whether it is India (or for that matter any nation) which needs people or is it the people that need India to make the nation?

The concepts of power and identity are very much intertwined and are addressed right from the start of the film which opens with Roshan Seth stating “For a hundred years the British held a veil between us and power. India and its realities appeared hazy, even to the likes of us.” These words sound over the image of the cleaner women polishing the mirror. In the next shot the same woman is seen through a veil sweeping a dusted patio as she walks towards the camera whilst the famous discourse of Nehru on independence is heard. Coinciding with the “stroke of midnight” that marks independence, she reaches the veil and pulls it down, revealing that the patio is of an asylum as its inmates enter into the frame and we hear their voices.

The large mirror in the map room signifies the idea that power has of itself, that power apparently has the monopoly on the self image and identity of India and that those who hold this power know of it, vainly watching themselves as historical agents of the birth of the nations. This is contrasted with the absence of mirrors in the asylum. This can be related to the ‘mirror-phase’ theory of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (the strong psychoanalytic focus of both ‘Partition’ and McMullen’s previous movie, ‘Zina’, make it appropriate to mention Lacan here) which purports that a person begins to have an idea of ‘self’, and subsequently an identity, when he finds his own image in the mirror for the first time. The recurrent image of the cleaner women polishing the mirror can be seen as a futile attempt to clarify this self image.

There is a seemingly unimportant scene, in which the three principle politicians talk about the ‘problem of the lunatics’, but its underlying subject is actually power. At a certain point of the conversation, the Muslim politician talks about the mental institutions they had seen in England and describes its Panopticon structure which was invented in the late eighteenth century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. This structure consists of an annular building divided into separated cells with a tower in its centre; everything is set up to see the interior of the cells from the tower, but not the interior of the tower from the cells. To enforce discipline, the inmates have to know that they may be observed at all times, without ever being certain about it. In order to attain this, Bentham proposed to install venetian blinds in the windows of the tower.

For Michel Foucault, ‘panopticism’ is the basic structure of power, which is understood as the enforcement of discipline, since the end of the 18^th century in Western Europe and especially England. For him, the power of the Panopticon model rests on its “observational hierarchy”, as the Muslim politician puts it, and on the asymmetry of seeing everything without being seen as well as on the separation of the different cells. In ‘Partition’ this idea is applied to the mechanism of colonial power.

It is interesting to examine the composition of the scene of this conversation as it conveys its meaning as well as the dialogue; nearest to the camera on the left of the screen is the Hindu politician looking outside of the frame. Behind him is the large mirror in which the Muslim and Sikh politicians are reflected. The back of the Hindu is also seen in the mirror as is the map of India and the window with the venetian blinds. The Muslim politician and the Sikh seem to give their assent to this concept of power, and therefore are grouped together in the mirror. On the other hand the Hindu does not give such an assent and is the reason why he is outside the mirror, separated. The inclusion of the mirror and the blinds in one image serves to show that power, in its concept and the way it is exerted, also defines identity. A later shot of the cleaner women polishing the venetian blinds in the same manner as the mirror reinforces this association.

In contrast with this, the Hindu politician holds another idea of power, which was very well articulated by Hannah Arendt in ‘The Human Condition’; “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities ... The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people.” This is opposed to the separation and isolation of people used in ‘panopticism’ to assure discipline and therefore prevent the realization of their power. In this sense, perhaps is possible to look at the partitioning of India as a way of Britain to keep its power even after their departure.

After this scene follows another in the map room where the Hindu official looks at the camera and repeats what was said at the beginning of the movie; “For a hundred years the British held a veil between us and power. India and its reality appeared hazy, even to the likes of us. Now everything is stripped bare.” in realization that the people of India were never together; the ‘India’ projected by Ghandi and the Congress Party was an illusion. In this moment the camera follows him walking through a dark passage from which he finally emerges to the other side, the asylum, as one of the inmates. The shot continues as he walks away from the camera and lays down on the ground, like dead. At this juncture, the identity of the politician with the inmate is established through the continuity of the shot.

This continuous sequence also makes the connection between the madness in the asylum and that of the outside world. Jacques Lacan once defined madness as “the ensnarement of the subject by the situation”, a definition applicable “not only to the madness which lies behinds the walls of asylums, but also the madness which deafens the world with its sound and fury.” That is what seems to happen in the asylum, where the inmates seem trapped in their own traumas. Translated to the political sphere; the attempts to dominate history via a power designed to ‘freeze time’ are doomed to failure, ensnaring subjects in their own man-made situation.

The fundamental premise that the film (and the historical event of partition itself) subtly exhibits throughout its running is that nothing is eternal. Like a mirror everything, even nationhood, power and identity, is man-made and that like a mirror, at any given moment it can shatter, as vividly demonstrated at the finale of ‘Partition’. One may think except perhaps for the perpetual powerful identity of India, which is represented by the aged cleaner women, however, in the history yet to come, even She will die one day.

London, August 2007