Reflections on Earth, 1947- Bianca Quintanilla

Bianca Quintanilla

Reflection on Earth, 1947

                                 Foreshadowing Violence Through Visual Differences

          The film Earth, 1947 explores how the partition tore families and communities asunder. On the other hand, this week’s reading in Modern South Asia provided scholarly perspective on the events, which focused on the power dynamics among government officials and of the individual’s role in perpetrating violence.  In addition, Barenscott’s article, “This is our Holocaust” underscores the importance of learning about the partition as an Indian event and to be wary of comparing it to Western tragedies such as the Holocaust.  Earth, 1947 depicts a tightly constructed scene of division among cultural groups  at the beginning of the film to illustrate widespread tension, which is only partially defused in order to foreshadow the upcoming violence.

     Within the first five minutes of the film, Earth, 1947 depicts a structured portrayal of partition.  There are many facets of division in the dinner scene which emphasize conflict, not unity, in India. Generational difference is the first type of division introduced. Lenny and a little boy are playing underneath the table. However, even in this supposedly safe, enclosed space, the theme of partition still exists in the gender difference.

      The appearances of the dinner guests constitute the most stark evidence of difference among groups and a consequently violent partition. In this scene, an Englishman, Sikh, Muslim, and Parsi woman are seated. Each dinner guest seems to represent an ethnic/cultural group in India, and their respective appearances highlight those differences. The camera flits on their faces for a second faces until it moves above the table, examining the dinner scene. The camera make circular motions, suggesting the unity of each group, of the all-India entity the text argues would have been needed to accommodate a Hindi and Muslim state, around each dinner guest. However, camera quickly alternates between the Englishman and the Sikh man’s perspectives they begin to argue, again giving the audience the sense that this was a battle to attain top group status.  For example, the Englishman wears a tuxedo, the Sikh man wears a turban, and Lenny’s father wears a light-colored suit, and Lenny’s mother wears an elegant sari. Not only do the dinner guests look different, they also speak in different languages, communicating in Hindi and English. The community division that these individuals signify, not wholly based on religious identification, corroborates the segmented community violence the readings depict.

           This scene presents so many examples of partition and then proceeds to break through these divisions through physical conflict. The verbal argument between Englishman and the Sikh culminates into a violent one, and everyone else, joins in and tries to break up the fight. However, the fistfight seemed liked an underwhelming climax to the visual and verbal tension, foreshadowing more violence to come. In addition, the following scene is much less structured, contrasting with this tightly constructed to scene, urging the reader to keep this tense moment in mind.

        While the film shows how religious identification was falsely understood to be the principal reason for partition and how that impacted so many individuals, the readings shed light on the lack of cohesiveness within these communities. Still, as Gita Viwsanath’s and Salma Malik’s “Revisiting 1947 through Popular Cinema: A Comparative Study of India and Pakistan” points out, viewers should consider film’s place in representing historical narrative. The reading’s emphasis on the individual’s perpetration of violence, not one of community vs. community raised the following question: how does one define a community? Is a community a city, a neighborhood spanning several blocks, or is a group of people brought together by important similarities such as religious or cultural identity? The film gave me the impression was a neighborhood, in the way that Lenny’s family voices concern about a family living nearby. The film also implicitly defines community as a group of people brought together by cultural identity through the dinner table scene. 

         Earth, 1947 illustrates the personal havoc that the occurred in the partition of 1947. The dinner scene displays many types of division but does not immediately quell the tension in order to foreshadow the violence to come. In contrast to the film, the readings contend that the violence was not a fight of Indian versus Muslim, or necessarily a war among communities, but rather one of individuals, leading the audience to reconsider the layman’s role in propagating mass violence.