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In Firaaq of justice
Nandita Das
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Cinema
has often been a powerful medium to speak truth to power. Amu
told a tale of Sikh genocide and Ram Ke Naam told us about Babri
mosque demolition and the rise of the Hindutva agenda. Parzania
left a powerful message to those who sing hosannas to
India’s rise as a major economic power. Firaaq once again shows
ideological poverty and human response to mental bankruptcy
blessed by the establishment. |
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 ‘Firaaq’
is an Urdu word which means both separation and quest. I chose to
call my film on the aftermath of the Gujarat riots that, because it
reminds us that we have a choice over how we want to see what is
around us — a world rife with separation and division, or a quest
for peace and justice. In fact, the one choice we can make is to
choose our own response to violence. And I intended Firaaq to be a
small mirror that shows us not only who we are, but also who we can
be.
Now that I look
back on my directorial debut feature, I realise that making the film
was only half the journey. Taking it to audiences is the second half
that requires not just promotional skills but also the perseverance
to peel away the layers of misunderstanding and resistance towards
the ‘other,’ and questioning anything under the surface of our
‘civilised’ lives. While I have enjoyed taking Firaaq to festivals
abroad, what I was really waiting for was its release in
India. I felt
that it was here that people would relate most to the context and
understand its nuances.
 Cinema,
unlike poetry or painting, is not a personal art. You make it to
share it with people and engage with them. As an actor, I resolved
the dilemma of wanting to be part of stories that need to be told
even if not many people actually wanted to hear them, by choosing to
do those roles. But as a director, I also wanted to reach out to as
many people as I could, of course with the story I so wanted to
tell.
For those who
have still not seen Firaaq, it is set a month after the
Gujarat carnage
of 2002 and deals with five different relationships and the impact
of violence on their lives. Firaaq is about how fear, prejudice,
guilt and violence linger on much after their obvious manifestation
is over. In fact, there is hardly any violence in my film and yet
the fear and tension are palpable. The story traces the emotional
journeys of ordinary people — some who are victims, some
perpetrators and some who choose to watch silently.
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I did want
it to be true to the context of
Gujarat,
which sadly, was a carnage and not a riot. So if the reality
itself is skewed, it would not be correct to balance it
artificially. The blame belongs not to artists who represent
that reality but to those who created that imbalance in the
first place. |
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It was not my
desire to direct that led me to these stories. Instead, the stories
that were festering inside me compelled me to direct. It had to do
with waking up to newspapers full of violence, getting into
conversations about religion and identity that would turn into
polarised debates on “them versus us,” meeting victims of violence
at the relief camps, interacting with young college students who
were finding their faith and idealism fading away, and many such
life experiences that I needed to express. For me, making Firaaq was
cathartic.
The film has
been made against all odds but the responses I have been getting
have more than compensated for all the challenges I have faced since
its inception. The film has no overt message that it hammers or
prescribes. Its intent is best captured by one of the reviewers who
titled his piece “Firaaq holds a mirror to national healing.” With
sectarian divisions on the rise, what we need is not just protest
but also healing and that takes time. One of the viewers from
Bangalore
emailed me, “Not often does one come across a story that so subtly
drifts inside you and raises questions you have been afraid to ask.”
That is all I have attempted to do. Or as somebody said, “you gave a
voice to so much that remained silent.”
 There
are emails, calls and SMSs from people I have known and not known
and none of them stops with a congratulatory note. What has
overwhelmed me is their need to engage with their observations,
share their stories, go into the depths of their feelings, question
their own prejudices, surface their own fears, so much so that
people wanted to reconnect days after they had seen it, to express
the complex emotions that the film evoked in them.
Of course, the
film has also evoked other sorts of reactions. There are some who
feel that it is a “one-sided story,” that it is “pro-Muslim” or that
it is “not balanced.” It clearly states at the beginning of the film
that Firaaq is a work of fiction based on a thousand true stories.
And I did want it to be true to the context of
Gujarat, which
sadly, was a carnage and not a riot. So if the reality itself is
skewed, it would not be correct to balance it artificially. The
blame belongs not to artists who represent that reality but to those
who created that imbalance in the first place.
In any case,
Firaaq is not about pointing fingers. It looks at the tragedy from
the only perspective that is morally valid — the victims — and
doesn’t revel in the heinous crimes of the perpetrators, even though
they did occur. Above all, I wanted to evoke empathy, an emotion
that we are fast forgetting.
 I
have also been asked the predictable question “why
Gujarat and why
not Kashmir?” As a storyteller, I wanted to respond to the world
around me. The
Gujarat
carnage happened and affected me at a stage in my creative life
where I could respond to it directly. Had I been at the same stage,
say, when the Sikh genocide happened in
Delhi or when
the exodus of Pandits from the
Kashmir
Valley
was forced through terrorist acts, I probably would have made films
concerning them. But there is a more fundamental issue at stake
here: Muslims in Gujarat, Sikhs in Delhi and the plight of the
Kashmiri Pandits are not competing tragedies over which sympathies
must be traded. Worse still are those who try to use the suffering
of one set of victims to justify or rationalise the suffering of
others. Two wrongs don’t ever make a right.
A feature film
needs a context, a setting, but it doesn’t mean that it cannot go
beyond the context. In fact, the reason why people have been able to
connect with Firaaq in different parts of the world is that it has
resonated with their contexts. I met a Sri Lankan Tamil who said
this was a film about the Tamils and the Sinhalas. A woman from
Cyprus
that I met in Greece said it was about the people of Turkey and
Cyprus and a man in Korea could see it in his context and shared his
grandfather’s stories of the Japanese and the Koreans.
Human emotions
and predicaments are universal, and it is not just a lest-we-forget
film, but there is no shying away from the fact that it deals with a
deep-rooted divide that is surfacing more than ever. With elections
round the corner, the use of violence and religion for political
ends is not new to us. So now it is the choice we all need to make
between the walls of separation and the quest for peace. Firaaq is a
means to an end, a journey that began seven years ago. Making sure
it reaches its end is for all of us to decide. (The author is an
actor and director. This piece appeared in The Hindu and is beinbg
published courtesy that newspaper.)
8 April 2009
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