Batwara 1947 — Partition is not a balance sheet
Partition was not a cricket match. There was no toss, no scoreboard and certainly no winner. There were only corpses, burning homes, refugee trains and millions of people who went to bed in one country and woke up in another. That is why a film about Partition cannot afford to treat history as a balance sheet. "Batwara 1947", released on Partition Horrors Remembrance Day, presents itself as a story of love, brotherhood and communal harmony. There is nothing wrong with that. After 1947, we could use more brotherhood and less communal arithmetic. My difficulty begins when the film appears to balance the violence of Partition — Hindus and Sikhs suffered here, Muslims suffered there, therefore both sides are equally accounted for. History is rarely so tidy. There was a sequence. On August 16, 1946, the Muslim League called for Direct Action Day. The violence that followed in Calcutta was devastating and spread into Bengal. In March 1947 came the Rawalpindi violence, with large-sc...
