Shadows in the Dark

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
1999

Karvaan | Shadows in the Dark
Pankaj Butalia
INDIA/FRANCE, 1999
105 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Vital Films/NFDC/ JBA Productions
Executive Producers: Anil Pandit, Pankaj Butalia
Producer: Pankaj Butalia
Screenplay: Pankaj Butalia
Cinematographer: Ranjan Palit
Editor: Sameera Jain
Production Designer: Aradhana Seth
Sound: Indrajit Neogi
Music: Susmit Sen
Principal Cast: Naseeruddin Khan, Kitu Gidwani, Subrata Dutta, Srivardhan Trivedi, Ikhlaque Khan
Production: Vital Films

Quite a few films have addressed the harrowing events around the partition of India and Pakistan recently. This may well be the best of them. It resolutely anchors the horrors of the time, which included mass slaughter and the largest migration of people ever recorded, in a remarkably personal and multi-layered treatment. Director Pankaj Butalia has an eye for the details of personal devastation; he especially addresses the less well-known after-effects of partition—particularly focusing on the lives of women and sexual non-conformists—and shows how the psychological damage of the time still resounds within the sub-continent today. For those who have seen Butalia’s previous work, especially his lyrical, exquisite documentary on Bengali widows, Moksha, this profound sensitivity to the mechanisms of oppression will come as no surprise. But this accomplished documentarian’s ability to craft a complex and satisfying narrative marks a new and very welcome voice to the feature film world.

Lajma is a middle-aged woman living in present-day Pakistan. She was raised during the fifties and sixties in India and only now has decided to revisit her former home there. She finds little trace of the past; her only surviving relative is an aunt. But returning evokes a deluge of memories, and the film then unfolds in a series of flashbacks.

Lajma’s uncle escaped from Pakistan to Delhi and was forced to live alongside a resentful Muslim family under siege, while Lajma and her mother moved in with him a few years later. Her uncle promptly engineered her mother’s admission to an asylum, a fate not uncommon for women drummed out of either India or Pakistan after the rest of their family had elected to leave.

At the same time, Lajma’s cousin, Gautam, begins acting on his attraction to the Muslim neighbour’s son, Jamal, an alluring, reckless young man. Their nascent, taboo affair is nipped in the bud when Gautam discovers that Jamal has started an affair with none other than Lajma. This, and Lajma’s continuing demonstrations of independence from her oppressive uncle and a society smothering her inner desires for love and work, get her expelled from the house, leading her to make a new life for herself.
—Noah Cowan