A still from 1974 film Garam Hava.
Dec 10, 2024 14:47 IST First published on: Dec 10, 2024 at 13:52 IST
In November 1946, as the Subcontinent was burning in violence, Garhmukteshwar, a village in district Hapur, saw the mass murder of Muslims and became one of the ugliest chapters of our history, “…a metaphor for the atrocities of Partition,” as historian Gyanendra Pandey describes it. My maternal great-grandfather and his entire family were killed. My Nana – a young boy at the time – was studying in Rampur and rushed to Garhmukteshwar, only to find his family massacred and to make graves for what he could find of their bodies.
I have visited those graves and the ancestral house twice so far. The story is now hazy and after the death of my Nana, slowly fading from our memory. Nearly half of those who survived the violence left for Pakistan, most of those who left are dead, and with travel becoming impossible, familial relationships have evaporated. It seems like the dismemberment of the Subcontinent, of those bodies, and of our families has been lost to memory and with the passing of the generation that lived through it, the stories of Partition are also disappearing. The Partition, however, has undertaken a toxic afterlife.
Fifty years ago, Garm Hava, in Shama Zaidi and Kaifi Azmi’s screenplay and MS Sathyu’s direction, articulated the Partition as lived experience. Based on the life of a Muslim family in Agra, the film tells the story of a community living through dispossession and decline. A community whose trade, property, and dignity are snatched overnight as British India is divided into a “Muslim” Pakistan and a “Hindu” India. The film showed how the Indian Muslim experience changed from belonging to alienation, strength to weakness, social respectability to stigma, safety to criminalisation and from a life of dignity to a life of abjection.
My Nana and his family suffered the rupture of Partition, and I was born in 1992 – when the domes fell – to live through its afterlife. For us – Indian Muslims – this afterlife is characterised by a constant denial of belonging to India in all aspects of living, such aa employment, housing, politics, and cultural expression. We offer a resistance to this erasure in death by a constant reminder that we belong to this land because our ancestors are buried here. This is a ubiquitous sentiment across all Muslim protests such as the Shaheen Bagh sit-in against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA).
Garam Hawa captured the false binary of Muslim-ness and Indian-ness and half a century later, in today’s majoritarian politics, the film remains eerily relatable. In Garm Hava, Salim Mirza’s family loses its sense of belonging to Agra and their epicentre is displaced – against their wishes – to a new geopolitical marker called Pakistan. The film shows that for the Muslims who “stayed back” and struggled with the basics of life and dignity of living, migrating to Pakistan for better prospects had become a frequently offered suggestion.
The majoritarian imagination of India still locates the centre of belonging for Muslims in Pakistan. Pakistan, today, is a proxy for Muslims in dog-whistle anti-Muslim speech and the creation of Pakistan is posited as a historical crime that Muslims must bear the guilt of. In more explicit realms, Muslim ghettos in many Indian cities like Ahmedabad are called “Pakistan” and legislation such as the CAA declare, in principle, that Muslims have no inherent right to the land of India.
The majoritarian politics of India denies ontological belonging to Muslims in all aspects of life – public and private. We struggle with search for housing and employment, boycott in trade, cultural erasure, political untouchability, de-facto disenfranchisement, historical antagonism, crippling securitisation and damning criminalisation. The message seems to be that Muslims are not ontologically Indians. That they are not Indians just by existing but become Indians merely in the legalities of the nation-state such as passports or Aadhaar cards.
Indian Muslims resist this denial of their sense of belonging in life by seeking belonging in death. The fact that Muslims have buried their ancestors in this land is a recurring premise in the Muslim claim to India’s geography. In Garm Hava, Salim Mirza’s mother confronts the proposal to move to Pakistan with exactly this argument. “The bones of my ancestors are buried in this soil,” she exclaims. After the massacre of Garhmukteshwar, my Nana also denied the offer to move to Pakistan, arguing that his ancestors were buried in India. Like Salim Mirza’s mother, my Nana also wanted to die here and be buried in the same soil as his ancestors. And like her, he also did. “We have buried our ancestors here” is a claim that echoes from the massacre of my forefathers in 1946, through Garm Hava in 1974, to the CAA protests in 2019.
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Living is political and so is death. Life creates graves, and graves are rooted in soil. Graves cannot be sent to Pakistan. Unsurprisingly, with deeply corporeal meanings, that the soil of India was once alive Muslim bodies, Muslim graves are a recurring motif of resistance every time our sense of belonging to India is challenged. As even graves face bulldozers today, the Muslim claim to the land, in the face of alienation in our lifetime, still premises itself on the dust that was once the bodies of our ancestors. If, despite birth and memory, socio-politics deny Muslims a rightful belonging to the Indian land, graves and the act of burying root us to this geography. If, Partition begot a displacement of topographical anchors, graves are the literal and metaphorical markers of our equal claim to the nation, its politics and its resources.
Garm Hava reminds us that in the last 50 years, the Indian state has failed its Muslims, that Partition continues to shape lives, and that Muslims are still the “other” of the nation. Our experience is characterised by a constant denial of belongingness in life through cultural and political disdain, and we offer a perpetual resistance to it by invoking graves as ancestral markers – the bodies that we buried here and that became soil. In this duality, Garm Hava remains painfully relevant today.
Zuberi is a Doctoral Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology