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Reflections on the Hindi Film Train To Pakistan

The 1998 Hindi film Train to Pakistan, an adaptation of Khushwant’s Singh’s novel, is perhaps the most celebrated of director Pamela Rooks’ three major films. The film depicts the confusion, mayhem, and unrest that ensued in a Punjab village called Mano Majra during 1947, in anticipation of the partitioning of British India into two separate countries: Pakistan and India. The eve of the partition unearthed deep seated anxieties and tensions, otherwise relatively contained and managed among the Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, and Christians, leading to the displacement of families, the massacre of ethnic groups, the pillage of villages, the rape of women, and the corruption of justice. 

Exodus of Muslims from India During Partition

Train to Pakistan highlights the extensive disruption of families caused by the violence and separation leading up to partition. There is loss in almost every major character’s life. The magistrate has lost his wife and daughter. Jagga has no father. Noora, the daughter of the village mullah, has no mother. Haseena only has her grandmother. These family disasters, placed against the background of the wider societal suffering and carnage, feed the film’s melancholy.

The Ethnic Violence from Partition

The film also foregrounds the fragility of justice and the arbitrariness with which the legal authorities administered law and order during partition. The most vivid portrayal of this came with scenes that showed the baseless arrest and imprisonment of Jagga and Iqbal for the murder of Ram Lal, a local businessman. The contrasting characters and backgrounds of the two accused are significant: they suggest that nobody was immune or insulated from these types of judicial indiscretions. When the police inspector ordered the cosmopolitan Iqbal to remove his pants to ascertain his identity, it mirrored the humiliation and ignominy that many innocent civilians suffered at the hands of paranoid, agitated, and, unscrupulous law enforcement personnel.   

Jagga Under Arrest

The local magistrate, Hukum Chand, represents the conscience of the law and reifies the mediation of the moral judgments of modernity and Eurocentrism on rural and traditional India. He is a dichotomy, symbolizing the nation’s epochal uncertainty, colonial trappings, contradictions, and anxieties. He quotes Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and gives English commands; yet, he is in touch with the heartbeat of his district, sensitive to the implications of the unfolding catastrophe. Unfortunately, he is baneful and mechanical in his arbitrations, with little compunction for human sufferin. This is most evident in his distortion of the arrest of the social worker, Iqbal; however, when tensions between the police and military over jurisdiction and authority begin to transform the district into near anarchy, an overt commentary of the realities of the pending partition, Chand becomes self-reflective if not contrite.

Chand in a Deep Muse Over Rising Tensions

For me, the significance of the role of the blind Mullah, Noora’s father, inspires multiple readings. More literally, his blindness symbolizes the disfigured and dismembered body featured in many Hindi films portraying life of that period, which represent the extent of the corporal suffering endured during the partition. On a deeper level though, it speaks to the relative ignorance and naiveté of many Indian citizens of the toll that the partition took on their lives and their future generations. They may not have known much, but they knew that life was being disrupted; indeed, the Mullah seemed confused about much of what was going on around him, but he did notice the anomaly of the trains’ inconsistent and tardy schedule

Mass Murder on The Train to Pakistan

The frolicking in bed between Muslim Noora and the Sikh Jagga was the first time that I had seen early Hindi film present lovemaking through considerable physical contact. Even then the lovers’ touches are contained and smothered by their full attire and playful youthfulness, thus framing their actions as amoral, renegade, and out of sync with the village’s conventional values and mores.

Rear Love-Making Scene in Traditional Hindi Cinema

Unlike Raj Kapoor, Rooks struggles to create intimacy between her key characters, although she allows for more sexual touch between them. She establishes Jagga and Noora’s relationship on a foundation rooted in flirtatious and lustful encounters, but when Jagga is imprisoned their relationship unexplainably metamorphizes into an intense romantic affair, with Jagga shedding his established roguish character to perform a melodramatic emotional transformation, pinning uncontrollably for Noora, which, in the end, leads him to Romeo-like martyrdom.

Jagga and Noora on thier Romantic Rendezvous

Rook’s ineptitude at portraying intimacy on screen also comes across in the relationship between the district magistrate, Chand and Haseena, a teenage Muslim girl used by her grandmother as an escort or prostitute. If Rook intended their interaction to establish a complex relationship, inspired by the grieving of Chand for his deceased wife and daughter, and Haseena's corrupted innocence, she may have succeeded more at short-circuiting the development of their bond, for their exchanges are often clumsy, jolting, and bland.

Chand and Haseena in Emotive Exchange