Struggling for an identity (Column by Aseem Chhabra)

Struggling for an identity

Aseem Chhabra
May 02, 2010

The Film Society of Lincoln Center will screen Garm Hawa for the public as part of a series, Social Dramas and Shimmering Spectacles: Muslim Cultures of Bombay Cinema, that runs from May 19-27. The program is packed with old and new Bollywood, including Chaudhvin Ka Chand, Mere Mehboob, Pakeezah, Mughal-e-Azam, Jodha Akbar, and films based on Khalid Mohamed’s writings – Mammo, Sardari Begum and Fiza. But it is remarkable that Garm Hawa – a radical departure in language and style from most of the other films – is included in this series.

I felt a thrill to watch a film that I remembered vividly from my teenage years. I recalled how the film moved my parents, who during the partition, were uprooted from their birth places in Kashmir and Punjab that is now part of Pakistan. My parents considered Garm Hawa an important history lesson. After their personal traumas they found the film to be a validation of their faith in the secular post-independence India. But I understand all of that a lot better now.

After the screening, I wrote an email to Richard Allen, the curator of the series and the professor and chair of the films studies program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

“Garm Hawa depicts with startling realism the trials of a middle-class Muslim family as it confronts communal hostility and economic boycott from the Hindu community,” Allen wrote in response to my email. “Garm Hawa served an important purpose in a Hindu majority India in the manner it asserted the value of a cultured and civilized way of life for the Muslim community, and the constitutive importance of that community in the identity of the post-independence nation.”

These are important words to remember in the current times when the likes of Shiv Sena and its offshoots question the Indianness of celebrities such as Shabana Azmi and Shahrukh Khan. Azmi’s parents were a part of the Garm Hawa team. Her father Kaifi co-wrote the screenplay and dialogues of the film and her mother Shaukat played the wife of the film’s lead character Salim Mirza (Balraj Sahni). Like Mirza and his immediate family – the Azmis and Khan’s parents chose to stay back in independent India – a secular nation promised to them by the country’s founding father. And it is regretful that every so often divisive forces demand prominent Muslims to prove their loyalty to India.

Garm Hawa is a special gift that, 37 years after its initial release, does not look dated. I do hope many more people will come for the rare screenings of this film and it will not get lost in the shuffle of the other popular entries in the program. The film was out of circulation for a while. Allen and his co-curator Ira Bhaskar got a negative of the film from Sathyu and they struck a new print and newly subtitled it.

In a couple of months, a theatrically restored version of Garm Hawa, with a cleaner print, will be released in movie houses and later on DVD in India. The company behind the project – IndiKino – will also release the haunting qawaali from the film Maula Salim Chisti by Aziz Ahmed Khan Warsi along with a companion book. Like the film, the qawaali had also been lost for a while, but it should resonate with the audience in India.

Politics and issues of Muslim identity aside, Garm Hawa is a beautifully told story, often funny, with heartaches and elements of other life struggles. At the core of the film is the remarkable performance by Sahni with his gentle face and kind eyes. May 1 marked the 97th birth anniversary of Sahni. Garm Hawa was one of his last films and definitely his career-defining performance. He was a rare talent who brought a humane quality to Sathyu’s film.

http://www.mumbaimirror.com/article/54/2010050220100502021839332a4c825 c7/Struggling-for-an-identity.html