Meenakshi Bharat on how Hindi cinema has portrayed Partition | Off the Beaten Track

Cinema has long shaped how Indians imagine their neighbours, their history, and themselves. To understand how partition, Pakistan, Kashmir, and communal tensions have been depicted on screen over the decades, The Federal spoke to scholar Meenakshi Bharat, who examines the deep cultural and political imprints of these themes on Indian cinema. Excerpts from the interview:

Cinema has been integral to India since Independence. When you look at the immediate post-1947 years, what stands out to you in how films addressed partition and the birth of Pakistan?

Let me begin by placing myself in relation to partition and the identity of Pakistan as a nation. I’m a post-partition child and have never directly experienced what Pakistan is. I’ve never visited Pakistani space or seen what erstwhile Pakistani regions looked like.

Yet the partition lived inside my subconscious because of my village’s name: Hardo Khanpur. The name itself tells you who the original denizens were. Although it later became a Hindu village in my childhood experience, a ruined mosque next to my grandparents’ home remained an everyday reminder. This was in Punjab, near Hoshiarpur.

As a child, I didn’t recognise partition or Pakistan as concepts. But with time and training as a postcolonial theorist and cultural critic, I began to understand what my village, my family’s past, and the partition truly meant.

How did Hindi cinema process that trauma?

Hindi cinema — the national cinema of India — initially approached partition with confusion. It didn’t want to recognise Pakistan as an entity. Instead, early films focused only on the trauma the division brought.

Films like Firdous or Apna Desh spoke about the immediate repercussions of the Holocaust of 1947, but not about Pakistan itself. It was almost as if not naming Pakistan could make the pain go away. With time, however, filmmakers began recognising partition as a political event with long-term psychological impact.

Gradually, cinema began portraying not only confusion and pain, but also the violence of partition. That’s when the “partition film” emerged as a powerful representation of what it meant to be Indian in the aftermath of a nation torn apart.

You’ve written extensively about 1950s–60s cinema. How did these themes seep into mainstream films—even ones that didn’t explicitly mention partition?

The old separation between “mainstream” and “parallel” cinema is now redundant. That erasure began in the 1980s and 90s. So even films that might earlier be labelled art cinema—like Earth 1947, Begum Jaan or the satirical Filmistaan—now sit firmly inside the mainstream.

Mainstream Hindi cinema has always swung between jingoism and empathy. Whenever India-Pakistan relations worsen, chest-thumping rhetoric rises on screen. But simultaneously, there has always been another current that sees Pakistan not only as an unsettling enemy but also as a kindred culture—one that shares language, pain and historical wounds.

Let’s talk about Garm Hava, a landmark partition film. Why did it take so long for Indian filmmakers to directly confront the subject?

The gap between 1947 and Garm Hava happened because partition was a reality people didn’t want to recognise. Many believed their move to India was temporary. The violence was too horrifying to process, let alone portray through cinema—a medium that represents reality visually and starkly.

Early films simply avoided Pakistan. They focused on pain without naming the cause. It was only someone like M.S. Sathyu—politically alert, shaped by IPTA, trained through films like Haqeeqat—who could finally face the subject head-on.

He chose a Muslim family as the centre of the story, based on a short story by Ismat Chughtai. That itself required courage at a time when the silence around partition was overwhelming.

But even after Garm Hava, there was a lull. It took years before partition films became a recognised sub-genre. Today, however, we see the partition referenced even in films that aren’t about 1947—because the event continues to shadow India-Pakistan narratives.

Kashmir is another integral aspect of India-Pakistan cinema. How did its depiction evolve?

In the 1960s and 70s, Kashmir was the romantic backdrop of Hindi cinema—its “Haseen Waadiyan” symbolised paradise. Bobby in 1973 was the peak of this aesthetic.

The beauty of Kashmir helped cement it in the Indian imagination as the paradise that belonged to India. Pakistan, of course, claimed it with equal intensity. Both nations drew different maps, fought wars, and saw Kashmir as central to their identity.

From the late 1980s, with terrorism and the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, Kashmir became a ravaged paradise. Films like Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider explore this haunting reality. Today, Kashmir on screen is always tinged with loss—its pristine past cannot be depicted without acknowledging the conflict.

Another important genre is the India-Pakistan love story and the interfaith romance. How do films like Veer-Zaara or Bombay fit into the larger cinematic context?

Cross-border romance carries all the tensions of India-Pakistan ties. Veer-Zaara, though deeply romantic, critiques the division of the subcontinent. It reminds us that Indians and Pakistanis share language, clothes, emotions—without the labels, they could be from the same place.

Romance becomes a metaphor for a shared cultural memory and for longing—a longing for what was torn apart.

Bombay does something similar within India itself. It asserts that Hindu-Muslim couples are not inherently different. Love becomes a way to confront communalism head-on.

Recently, I watched a Pakistani rom-com, Bachaana, where an Indian woman and Pakistani man fall in love—not in India or Pakistan, but in Mauritius, a diasporic space where such love can be imagined freely. That itself is revealing.

In today’s political climate, do interfaith marriages and India-Pakistan romances face a new kind of pushback?

Yes, it has become more difficult. Even marriages that are decades old—like Shah Rukh Khan and Gauri Khan’s—come under scrutiny. They become subjects of commentary simply because of the current climate.

It’s not that such relationships don’t exist or flourish; it’s that the space to represent them publicly, or celebrate them, has narrowed due to political pressures and rising intolerance.

The content above has been transcribed using a fine-tuned AI model. To ensure accuracy, quality, and editorial integrity, we employ a Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) process. While AI assists in creating the initial draft, our experienced editorial team carefully reviews, edits, and refines the content before publication. At The Federal, we combine the efficiency of AI with the expertise of human editors to deliver reliable and insightful journalism.