As the summer heat makes way for a pleasant seasonal interlude, more and more NGOs would be staging peace talks, workshops, etc across the borders.

I have been participating in the preparatory talks — mostly about logistics — of one of the groups although the familiar names of invitees to the panels are enough to put me to sleep. I offered a suggestion that we should do less talking and savour more movies, plays, music from each other's countries, visas permitting. And if we feel impotent and we can't move our governments to allow our friends and comrades from across the borders to visit us then we should stay home and perhaps do something more agreeable, like bringing down the rogue governments. There is enough good work waiting to be done at home.

Anyway, the suggestion to watch Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian movies on Partition was killed in no time. But that was in a way inevitable. NGO budgets are packaged to keep a balance between the very limited attention span of the fund providers and an impressive list of talking heads. That's the usual format.

History moves in a tight spiral and so it does in the Indian subcontinent too. Just as you can't un-ring the bell of history you can't wish away the partition of India first and Pakistan subsequently. Moreover, what is considered by a large number of Indian peace wallahs to have been a tragedy in 1947 is for many, possibly most, Pakistani peace wallahs a celebration of their new homeland, even if the quest was spiked with the blood of countless innocent lives.

Likewise, who in Bangladesh would rue the independence they got in 1971 even though the cost was prohibitive in terms of human suffering?

Sanitised peace talks pose no threat to our governments. The more inane and clichéd NGO-sponsored talks are, our governments would be that much more pleased.

Movies are a different kettle of fish. They tend to worry the establishment because of their enormous reach. This is ironical since many of the films we get to see are status quo-ist when not reactionary in their social message. The fear lurks perhaps in the few good ones that manage to catch the censor sleeping.

I read an interesting discussion on the theme of Indian and Pakistani films about Partition in a recent edition of the Economic and Political Weekly. Gita Viswanath an Indian researcher and Salma Malik of the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad are its authors.

In their joint paper — Revisiting 1947 through Popular Cinema A Comparative Study of India and Pakistan — they look at the 'memorialisation' of Partition through popular cinema. By offering the potential for public mourning in a public space such as a theatre, cinema confronts the trauma of that cataclysmic event.

According to the authors, the recurring themes of separated lovers, feuding families and the brothers lost in a mela or the well-known lost-and-found theme resonate with memories of the partition of the subcontinent. 'Besides, the film industries of both India and Pakistan are replete with people — actors, producers, directors, scriptwriters and technicians — who are Partition victims. Hence, the partition looms large over the thematic and ideological concerns of their oeuvres.'

The authors list around a dozen Pakistani movies that have been made on the issue of partition. They include Kartar Singh (Saifuddin Saif, 1959), Khaak aur Khoon (Masud Pervaiz, 1979), Tauba (S.A. Hafiz, 1964), Lakhon Mein Ek (Raza Mir, 1967), Behen Bhai (Hasan Tariq, 1968) and Pehli Nazar (Islam Dar, 1977).

All these movies fared well on the commercial and trade circuits, with Kartar Singh being a record breaker and very popular in India as well. The latest in the genre of Partition movies is the fairly recent Jannat Ki Talaash (Hasan Askari, 1999), which failed to do much business for two reasons.

One was that cine-goers preferred light entertainment over serious movies. For the Indian cinema the initial 15 years after Partition (1947-62) formed the first phase. The common narratives in this phase were those of migration, abducted women and their recovery. Yash Chopra's Dharamputra (1961) was the first movie that addressed the communal crisis as well as Partition as a social and political reality. The film addressed the issue of Hindu fundamentalism in Partition which was for its time quite radical.
'The archival footage of Partition caravans and trains added to the impact generated,' say Viswanath and Malik. 'Indian, Pakistani as well as Bangladeshi filmmakers have very effectively used this visual technique alike. This technique held enormous melodramatic potential and was capitalised by filmmakers.'

The authors categorise the second Indian phase as that of the 1970s, 'the period which gave space for the surfacing of concealed emotions by dealing with repressed issues in society.' Amongst these was Partition and communal conflict. Giants of India's parallel cinema movement such as Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, M.S. Sathyu, Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani dominated this period. Two of the best known Partition films came out of this period M.S. Sathyu's Garam Hawa (1977) and Govind Nihalani's television serial Tamas (1989).

The third and last phase of Partition films in India is that of the 1990s with the demolition of the Babri Masjid followed by the Bombay riots, which negotiated issues of identity, secularism and citizenship.

I was disappointed by a reference to a campaign by leading members of Pakistan's film industry to stall the screening of Indian films in their country. The campaign became known as the Jaal Movement of 1954.The story went like this since the partition of India and Pakistan, movies made in Lahore as well as Bombay were being released and viewed in both countries. But in 1954, leading film personalities were arrested in Lahore agitating at Regent Cinema against the release of the Indian film Jaal on July 9, which was licensed by the Pakistani government for import only to East Pakistan but not West Pakistan.

The agitation was led by leading figures in the Pakistani film industry such as W.Z. Ahmad, Shaukat Husain Rizvi, Saifuddin Saif and Sibtain Fazli and actors that included Madam Noor Jahan, Naina, Santosh, Sudhir, Bibbo, Allauddin, M. Ismael.

The demand was accepted by the government and a film-to-film exchange agreement was made with India — separate for East and West Pakistan until the war of 1965. Since then Indian films were totally banned in Pakistan.

Let's try to reverse this collusion between some of the best of us and our governments. Let's show more movies — progressive and reactionary — to a wider audience on both sides of the border. Our people know how to handle choices.