Earth

May 23, 2007 /

I finally watched Earth the other night.  If you haven’t seen this film yet, it is the story of the partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947, at the end of British rule there.  The story takes place in Lahore, in the Punjab region of India, where many cultures come together.  The picture above is of Lenny, the little girl who tells the story.  The woman next to her is her ayah, or nurse.  The men are the ayah’s admirers, and they include Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims.  They are a group of friends who all get along very well, until the divisive power of partition takes them over, and blood begins to boil.

It was hard to watch some of the scenes in this film.  One of the friends waits for his sister to arrive by train.  A train that is 12 hours late.  A train that arrives, full of tragedy and pain so raw that it makes you want to cry.  The Muslims, angered by the events on the train, take their anger out on a Hindu man in the street, quartering him while Lenny and her ayah watch, horrified.  The director, Deepa Mehta, never shows the graphic violence, but the lead up is horrible, and the hatred in the people’s faces will stay with you much longer than you might like.

I studied India during my undergraduate days as an International Relations major, so I was aware of the hatred among these groups for each other…but I have never seen it represented so well on film.  It made me wonder what would have happened if India had not been torn in two?  Certainly the various groups would have been vying for power, but perhaps not along ethnic and religious lines…perhaps more peacefully along political lines.  It’s hard to say.  Certainly India was not a unified country before the British came along.  But did the partition need to happen?  Did it need to be as brutal and bloody as this?  Who am I to say.  What I can say is that Ms. Mehta is a gifted filmmaker.  I saw Water last year, and it broke my heart.  I’m kind of afraid to see any more of her films.  They are so honest, so unflinching in their glimpse into the brutality that we are capable of, and it scares the crap out of me.

8 Comments

  • Beenzzz

    May 23, 2007 at 8:34 am

    This was the hardest of Mehta’s movies to see. The last movie of her trilogy, Fire, isn’t as bad as the other two. It’s frustrating because of the inequality these women suffer, but it is a movie about love.

  • Lotus

    May 23, 2007 at 10:38 am

    THe movie “Earth” is a must-see,not just for the cineaste, but for anyone that loves history. You ask a very good question, J…did the partition need to happen? I don’t have a very thorough grasp of Indian history but I think Nehru (India’s first Prime Minister) insisted that Muslims be given equal rights in independent India which the right-wing Hindu revivalists didn’t want. I guess the only alternative was to create a separate homeland for India’s Muslims which came to be known as Pakistan. So you can say the Partition was made along religious grounds. Why it had to be so violent, I don’t know, but I guess when people are forcibly displaced, it leads to a lot of anger,fear and hate. My father was on one of those trains…his family moved from Lahore (which became a part of Pakistan) to Dehradun in India because they were Hindus.

    Sorry for the long comment.

  • J

    May 23, 2007 at 11:20 am

    Lotus, I love getting long comments like that, with so much depth. 🙂 I have a friend who used to live in Lahore, but they moved back to the states when Pakistan started getting more fundamentalist. She lived there for a few years in the early-mid 90s.

  • lalunas

    May 23, 2007 at 4:45 pm

    Hate, it really spreads like wild fire. Love, which is so beautiful, takes a long time to evolve.
    Even here in this country among the Indians there is not much civility. I cannot understand why.

  • Michelle

    May 23, 2007 at 8:50 pm

    All I’m hearing about is India lately. With my parents moving to Bangalore they’re constantly talking about it. Sounds like a great movie to see.