A Long-Awaited Journey: Locating Home and Nationhood in Mammo and Ramchand Pakistani
摘要
This chapter critically examines the fate of displaced minorities caused by the partition of 1947 through two films—one each from India and Pakistan—Shyam Benegal’s Mammo (1994) and Meereen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani (2008). In these movies, the characters feel the ripple effects long after the partition of the Indian subcontinent which criss-crosses across gender, religion, caste, and age. The movies also explicate the alienation and rootlessness of minorities who chose to stay back in their birthplaces. Marianne Hirsch calls this kind of cultural work, “Postmemory” which “describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before”. The chapter attempts to bring forth the conflicts—internal as well as external—which the female characters are forced to go through multiple times to call a piece of land their homes. Both the directors through the character of Mammo and the Dalit father-son duo in Mammo and Ramchand Pakistani, respectively, provide a strong commentary on the sense of belongingness that comes with the idea of nation and nationality. Being a minority in another country which overnight became the “enemy state” holds no sanctity for the protagonists. For them, physical displacement does not equate to an emotional one. The chapter contends that the state played an active role on both sides of the border to deny the minorities to stay back or return to their homelands. Upon close reading of both the movies, the chapter argues that the trials and tribulations of the minority communities and their fates are worsened by their placement at the bottom of the social ladder.