Jis Lahore Nai Vekhya, O Jamya E Nai, the celebrated play by Syed Asghar Wajahat, arrives on screen as Batwara 1947, adapted by Rajkumar Santoshi. It is a film about Partition, but more importantly, it is a film about what survives after Partition has done its worst. In an age when communal hatred is too often packaged as patriotism and cinema is increasingly tempted to pick sides, Santoshi’s film dares to make a simpler, more radical argument: hatred is the real enemy.
The story begins in Lahore, in a house that has survived the madness outside. Mai (Shabana Azmi), an old Hindu woman, has been abandoned in the city she calls home. The house is now allotted to Sikandar Mirza (Sunny Deol), who has arrived from India with his wife Hamida (Preity Zinta) and young daughter Tanvir (Khushi Hajare). For the Mirzas, Mai is an inconvenience, a reminder of a past they would rather leave behind. They want her out. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, resentment gives way to affection. Mai stops being the unwanted occupant and becomes family. For Hamida, she becomes a mother. For Sikandar, something even deeper.
Then comes Javed (Karan Deol), Sikandar’s son, who has been left behind in India and arrives carrying something far more dangerous than luggage: rage. He has witnessed the brutality inflicted on Muslims fleeing to Pakistan and returns consumed by bitterness. His grief has curdled into communal hatred. Mai, to him, is no longer an old woman. She is the enemy. He wants her gone.
Enter Yakoob Pehelwan (Abhimanyu Singh), a local strongman-turned-politician who sees an opportunity in the haveli. He needs Javed’s anger and communal politics to do his dirty work. But every attempt to drive Mai out is thwarted by Sikandar, who has come to understand something Javed has not: vengeance cannot bring back the dead.
The film’s emotional destination is devastatingly simple. Mai dies of natural causes, and the entire locality turns up for her funeral. Sikandar performs her last rites according to Hindu tradition, as a son would. In that moment, the borders, religions and identities that have divided these people become meaningless. What remains is love. A Muslim man in Lahore gives a Hindu woman the farewell she deserves. It is the film’s most powerful answer to Partition’s legacy.
There is an undeniable irony in casting Sunny Deol as Sikandar. Here is the same actor who crossed the border for love in Gadar, bellowed patriotic dialogue and took on an entire Pakistani army, now playing a Muslim in Lahore who stands between his family and communal goons. Thankfully, the performance is far removed from the bluster that has defined some of his recent screen appearances. Apart from a handful of ludicrous fight scenes, Santoshi keeps him remarkably restrained.
And Deol gives the role his heart. He makes you feel Sikandar’s anguish when he discovers that his relatives have been killed in India. More importantly, he allows us to watch a man evolve. Sikandar begins as someone carrying his own prejudices and ends up recognising that the enemy is not a religion, a country or a community. It is hatred itself. Deol and Santoshi have always brought out something special in each other, and their reunion after several years makes you wonder why they stayed apart for so long.
Preity Zinta is equally effective as Hamida. She quietly charts her character’s transformation from someone who resents Mai’s presence to a woman who cannot imagine the house without her. There is warmth and dignity in the performance. Zinta also reminds you why actresses of her experience are so valuable opposite senior male stars: she brings an emotional weight that prevents the relationship from becoming merely functional.
Karan Deol has some difficult emotional terrain to navigate as Javed. The performance is uneven in places, but he manages to hold his own, helped considerably by Santoshi’s direction and his father’s presence. Ali Fazal, as Habib Anwar, a poet and voice of reason, brings much-needed sanity to the proceedings. One wishes the film had given him more to do. Abhimanyu Singh, meanwhile, plays Yakoob as a more overtly filmi villain than the material really requires.
And then there is Shabana Azmi.
Mai is the soul of Batwara 1947. Azmi speaks impeccable Punjabi and looks every inch the woman who has been battered by history but refuses to surrender her humanity. There is something deeply moving about the way she plays Mai’s gradual rediscovery of belonging. After losing almost everything, she finds a family in the very people who initially wanted her gone. Her chemistry with Deol is extraordinary, and the climactic sequence between them is almost impossible to watch without reaching for a tissue.
The real hero, however, is Wajahat’s writing. The dialogue hits hard. It carries the flavour of the great Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s, when dialogue did not merely move the plot forward but spoke directly to the audience’s conscience. Wajahat’s own background makes the point even sharper. He is not a Pakistani Muslim romanticising Lahore from across the border; he is a scholar and professor of Hindi, born in Fatehpur, Uttar Pradesh, with a substantial body of literary work behind him. His contribution to the story and dialogue gives the film its moral backbone.
Santoshi and producers Aamir Khan and Aparna Purohit deserve credit for making a film like this in today’s poisoned environment. At a time when cinema can so easily become a megaphone for propaganda, Batwara 1947 chooses the harder road. It does not deny Partition’s horrors or sanitise the violence. It looks directly at the bloodshed and then asks what we choose to do with that memory. Do we inherit the hatred of our parents, or do we break the cycle?
Santosh Sivan’s cinematography gives Lahore a haunting, lived-in quality, while the production and costume design convincingly recreate an era torn apart by history. A.R. Rahman’s music, too, remains rooted in the period rather than overwhelming it.
The film may stumble when it reaches for conventional heroics, but its heart never does. And that heart matters. Batwara 1947 arrives at a time when we desperately need to be reminded that the people on the other side of a border are not abstractions. Partition divided a country. Hatred divided human beings. The film’s final image offers a quiet, almost defiant possibility: perhaps humanity can still put us back together.
Also Read: Sunny Deol and Karan Deol Visit Partition Museum in Amritsar Ahead of Batwara 1947’s Release
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: filmfare.com
