Train to Pakistan

I finally got around to seeing this film the other day, and it was worth the wait. It tells the story of a small town on the border of India/Pakistan just as partition is ripping the cultures apart. Singh's novel of the same title came out in 1956, and was probably the first English language novel to deal with this traumatic historical event, which saw nearly 10 million people rendered homeless, and perhaps 1 million murdered, raped, and kidnapped. Rooks takes Singh's social realist narrative and faithfully transcribes it to the screen, with the allegory of India's tragic fate still bitterly intact. Hopefully, this film will gather a wider audience later in its life than it had upon release when it was all but ignored, in India and abroad. It has an important message to us all about the reality of cross-cultural harmony being destroyed by desperate and ignorant ideologues. Unfortunately, the current political climate in India and Pakistan seems largely uninterested in such a view right now.

Rooks's 'Train to Pakistan' tells the story of a small Punjab village during the partition in 1947. There have been several movies on this subject but Rooks takes a different turn. I liked her direction and she really put effort into presenting the time and the horror of the war without flooding the film with graphic images and sounding preachy. Even if there are few such scenes they are used minimally. In one very effective scene we see corpses float on a river as the villagers silently stare. None of the bodies are shown from close range and yet the scene is so impactive. Some viewers have disapproved the use of foul language. However, I think it adds to the rawness of the hot-headed villagers. I haven't read the original novel (I didn't know it was an adaptation until afterwards) but many are disappointed mainly due of the lack of development). At some point, the film seemed to move at a sluggish pace until it swiftly picks up in the last half hour. Some characters did require development, especially Iqbal. Mohan Agase as the ignorant head of the village conveys the complexity of his character with complete ease especially in the scenes where he reflects himself as the man he he has become compared to who he used to be. Nirmal Pandey provides some comic relief. He's a little loud with dramatics but overall it's a good effort. Sadly, Rajit Kapoor's Iqbal suffers even though the actor makes the best of what he has. He seems to have taken his pants off for no significant reason as his character isn't given much scope. Divya Dutta does alright but the dubbing (clearly someone else's voice) does hinder the acting (as the voice sounds too childlike for a professional prostitute). Smriti Mishra is adequate. Much of the supporting cast were a little too dramatic. Comparisons have often been made between books and movies and usually books win. But, having not read the book (which I intend to) I was generally pleased by 'Train to Pakistan'. It could have been better but it's not bad. I liked the powerful ending as, without derailing from the main story, it avoided the 'cliched art-film' ending (I thought it would end with graphic images of the bloodbath).

The script is full of foul language, even if it is Punjabi (which is to indicate that the village is in Punjab). It feels as if the director is patronising you, and that the viewer has to be reminded again and again that the villagers were uneducated. The acting, especially that of Nirmal Panday, is simply awful; which is confusing as the actors are very capable and some even distinguished. They are directed to soap opera standards. Nirmal Panday leaves a lot to be desired; it feels as if he has just walked his character off of the sets of Bandit Queen and into Train To Pakistan. The crudeness and cackling is still all there! Since 1946, Punjab was suffering from communal violence all over as individual sides were carrying out 'eye for an eye' killings and looting by mostly gangsters. They looted villages and carried onto the next; Punjab was a bloodbath and vultures circulated the area for years (the North Western Frontier violence was ongoing since 1946, just as in Calcutta, Bihar, Bengal and Bombay). So it is confusing at how relaxed the villagers are before the trains come in! The film fails to capture Kushwant Singh's emotions and human tragedies. To pitch this film against Deepa Mehta's 1947 Earth, there is no comparison. Deepa Mehta probably unintentionally paid more homage to Kushwant Singh than Pamela Rooks has, and it's a shame, as the novel readers probably already know.