While indexing a book on Partition Cinema, I came across a discussion of the film Naseem directed by Saeed Akhtar Mirza. Reading about the film compelled me to watch it.
The film mixes the personal and the political. It renders history through a caravan of personal memories and asks the audience to remember it alongside the pedagogical official histories.Tracking the everyday life of a Muslim household in Mumbai around the time of communal tension in 1992, the film with great nuance through each small incident/altercation makes one ponder over one's perspectives/views.
Watching Naseem, it is impossible not to note where films like Gadar and LOC go wrong, unleashing as they do at times a pornography of hypermasculinist(ic) violence to drive home messages, which seem to be limping over (secondary as they become to) the specter of high pitched rhetoric and bombardment at the audience of spectacular scenes.
Naseem portrays issues relating to religious conflict/amity, class conflicts, rewritings of history, and about a past which saw many futures for itself. This is the politics of the film (and it is wise in refining (and not prescribing) ways of coming to terms with trauma). The film also has an affective dimension.
In the film, Grandpa (played by Kaifi Azmi) tells stories to grand-daughter Naseem. While Naseem's brother and his friend continue to belligerently contend that the time for Grandpa's stories has come to an end in the midst of such communal strife, Naseem however, retains the innocence to imbibe the stories. Such an innocence means to understand the value of laughter while being told (so what if unscientifically so? that) the sky is blue because one painted it so and not yellow.
The main pivot of the film rests on these conversations between Naseem and her grandpa. Grandpa's stories are of those of his pre-Partition everyday life lived in Agra. Around the spectacle of the build-up to the Babri Masjid demolition, in a dim-lited room, dawn-fresh Naseem (the name translates as "morning breeze" in English) listens to her grandpa as he fades into the dusk.
On a personal note perhaps all of us start loosing our innocence when our grandparents' stories stop making sense. Rationality of "the history" which preaches the either/or logic needs to be seen alongside histories of Grandparents' stories. We need to re-member those stories.
