Silence and the uncanny_Partition in the soundtrack of Khamosh Pani

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Silence and the uncanny: Partition in the soundtrack of Khamosh PaniPavitra Sundara

a Liberal Studies, Kettering University, Flint, MI, USA

Online publication date: 05 November 2010

To cite this Article Sundar, Pavitra(2010) 'Silence and the uncanny: Partition in the soundtrack of Khamosh Pani', SouthAsian Popular Culture, 8: 3, 277 — 290To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2010.501546URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2010.501546

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Silence and the uncanny: Partition in the soundtrack of Khamosh Pani

Pavitra Sundar*

Liberal Studies, Kettering University, Flint, MI, USA

This essay analyzes the soundtrack of Sabiha Sumar’s Punjabi film Khamosh Pani(2003). Lauded for its trenchant critique of religious fundamentalism and its sensitiveportrayal of women’s experiences of social and political violence, Khamosh Pani offersa feminist intervention into the historiography of Partition and the discourse on traumaand testimony, both fields that have historically disregarded the particularities ofwomen’s lives in South Asia. This essay argues that sound and music are key to thefilm’s critical project. Khamosh Pani articulates the dangers of censorship and thepower of women’s silence as a mode of protest using a range of formal devices(musical, verbal, visual, narrative, and figurative). The film also evokes the violenceand trauma of Partition through its use of ‘distanciated sound.’ This Brechtian strategyproduces a visceral experience of the uncanny that forcefully challenges extantaccounts of time, history, and communalism in South Asia.

Introduction

In the late 1990s, as India and Pakistan celebrated five decades of independence from

colonial rule, there emerged several films that probed the dark side of freedom: Partition.

In the mass migration and civil war that accompanied the division of British India into two

nation-states, 12 million were displaced and over one million lost their lives. As many as

75,000 women were abducted and assaulted. Sixty years on, this foundational trauma

continues to shape domestic and international politics in South Asia. The resurgence of

religious nationalism in the last 20 years indicates that the communal tensions that tore

apart Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim communities in 1947 are still alive in both India and

Pakistan. This was and is the charged political context out of which films like Train to

Pakistan (1997), 1947/Earth (1998), Hey Ram (O God!, 2000), Gadar (Revolution/

Rebellion, 2001), and Pinjar (Cage, 2003) emerged. While these films differed widely in

their cinematic style, politics, and targeted audience, not to mention their critical and

popular appeal, together they marked an important moment for South Asian cinema.

Never before had there been such a sustained cinematic dialogue on the issue of Partition

and its relationship to contemporary communal politics.1

This essay focuses on the soundtrack of Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters, 2003), a

Punjabi film conceived and directed by the Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar. Produced

with private funding from Pakistani, French, and German sources, Khamosh Pani is

widely hailed as a tour de force. It won 14 international awards, including the Golden

Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival. The film’s reception in South Asia has

been limited but equally positive. Unable to find a distributor willing to risk investing in

such an alternative film, Sumar organized a ‘traveling cinema’ that screened the film for

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q 2010 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14746689.2010.501546

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South Asian Popular Culture

Vol. 8, No. 3, October 2010, 277–290

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free in 41 locations across Pakistan (Sumar ‘Talking’). The film was also very well

received at the Third KaraFilm Festival, where it won the Best Screenplay award, and in

commercial venues all over India.

What I find most remarkable about Khamosh Pani is the way it uses sound and music to

write the history of religious violence from the perspective of women survivors. In its

self-conscious thematisation of silence, the film underscores the violence women continue

to endure in the name of religious and national identity. In so doing, it simultaneously

complicates South Asian historiography and cautions against insensitive, knee-jerk attempts

to ‘break the silence’ on matters of social and sexual violence against women.

Partition historiography and cinema

There has been no dearth of writing on Partition. What is disconcerting is that official and

nationalist narratives typically cast the ‘other’ country as the problem and Partition as

an inevitable step in the march to freedom. Moreover, prior to the work of Urvashi

Butalia, Ritu Menon, and Kamla Bhasin (in the Punjab context), and Jasodhara Bagchi,

Subharanjan Dasgupta, and Gargi Chakravartty (who examine the lives of Bengali

women), there were few accounts of how this political event affected people’s daily lives.

When the rampant violence against women was discussed, it was primarily framed in

terms of izzat, familial and communal honour. This paternalistic attitude shaped efforts of

the governments of India and Pakistan to ‘recover their women’ from the other country.

Few scholars or government officials thought to ask what Partition meant for women’s

relationships to their families, particularly to the men in their lives, many of whom had

been perpetrators of violence.

While recent studies have gone a long way in correcting the blindspots and orthodoxies

of extant histories of communalism and nationalism, some important problems persist.

Neeladri Bhattacharya argues that the narrative containment of religious discord is a

favourite strategy for secular historians writing on South Asia. Scholars often cast the

history of Hindu-Muslim relations on the subcontinent as one of accommodation and

syncretism in order to disabuse the Indian (Hindu majoritarian) public of its stereotypes of

Muslims as aggressive and predatory outsiders (Bhattacharya 57–61). Veena Das and

Ashis Nandy raise more fundamental concerns about the ability of the social sciences to

grasp the mythic dimensions of Partition violence. For them, it is literature – Saadat Hasan

Manto’s short stories in particular – that points the way out. Literary language, they argue,

can express the personal, psychological effects of trauma for ordinary men and women

(Das and Nandy 187–194). Priya Kumar affirms this position, arguing that in returning to

and viscerally restaging the scene of trauma, Partition literature and some Hindi films of

the late 1990s allow us to reimagine the relationship between self and other (in chapters 3

to 5). Ananya Jahanara Kabir casts considerable doubt on this formulation. Narrative, she

argues, inevitably demands closure and is thus inadequate to the task of collective, cross-

regional mourning and reconciliation. Music may offer a way out because it is a ‘non-

narrative’ form (Kabir ‘Gender, Memory, Trauma’ 190). While I disagree with Kabir’s

claim that music is inherently non-narrative, I do appreciate her call to explore the

interpretive and affective possibilities enabled by a medium other than language.2

Cinema, unlike literature, is said to have shied away from representing Partition for

several decades.3 Ritwik Ghatak is considered a prominent exception in this regard as the

refugee experience is central to his oeuvre. In his recent book Mourning the Nation,

Bhaskar Sarkar argues that Partition is not absent so much as displaced and allegorized in

1950s and 1960s Indian cinema (Sarkar 30). Nonetheless, the film typically regarded as the

278 P. Sundar


first on Partition, at least on the Indian side of the border, is M. S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa

(Hot Winds, 1973). If it was India’s involvement in the 1971 Bangladesh war and the

national soul searching occasioned by the twenty-fifth anniversary of independence that

allowed Sathyu to address the Muslim experience of Partition directly, it was the anti-Sikh

violence of the mid 1980s that resurfaced public debates about Partition and inspired

Govind Nihalani’s Tamas (Sarkar 170, 233). A five-part television series based on the

writings of novelist Bhisham Sahni, Tamas (Darkness) was screened on the Indian state

channel Doordarshan in 1987–88. Although it eschewed the glitz and glamour of

commercial Hindi cinema, Tamas was no less dramatic in its cinematic language: heart-

rending screams, claustrophobic shots of stairways and corridors, foggy night scenes, and

the stark contrast between light and shadow together produced a powerful ‘sense of

experiential terror’ (Mazumdar 319).

Some of the expressionist visual and aural strategies Ranjani Mazumdar identifies in

Tamas and the linguistic and narrative strategies Kumar finds in Partition literature and

‘Muslim minoritarian films’ are also at work in Khamosh Pani. This influence may be

explained in part by the porosity of artistic and cultural borders between India and Pakistan,

and the dominance of mainstream Indian cinema (and, to a lesser extent, television) in the

region. Thus, while there are films that portray Hindu-Muslim relations and the legacy of

Partition without recourse to Bollywood’s Manichean and melodramatic tropes – e.g.,

Mammo (1994), Chitra Nodir Pare (Quiet Flows the River Chitra, 1999), and My Brother,

My Enemy (2005) – Bombay cinema remains an important reference point for South Asian

filmmakers. I argue below that Khamosh Pani strategically mobilizes some musical

conventions of commercial Hindi cinema in order to critique censorship and communalism.

Khamosh Pani: Plot summary and questions

Khamosh Pani narrates the story of Ayesha (Kirron Kher), a middle aged Muslim woman

who lives in Charkhi, Pakistan, with her son Salim (Aamir Malik). The otherwise peaceful

village is caught in the nationwide swing to the right in the late 1970s, during General Zia

ul-Haq’s regime. Salim joins the political organizers who arrive to recruit young men. Life

in Charkhi gets increasingly restrictive and unbearable, especially for Ayesha, who we

learn was once Sikh. No one in Charkhi speaks of Partition. Ayesha’s traumatic experience

is conveyed through a series of memory fragments. We see her escape ‘honour killings’ –

suicides and murders of women committed in the name of ‘protecting’ the family and

community from assault (thus, dishonour) by ‘enemy groups’ – only to fall into the hands

of Muslim aggressors. She eventually converts to Islam and settles into a happy, married

relationship with one of her abductors. Ayesha’s old identity as Veero (her birth name)

becomes most public when her brother Jaswant comes to town on a pilgrimage and begins

looking for her. Ayesha is gradually abandoned by Salim, her best friend Shabbo, and

the entire village. The film ends linking the violence of 1947 and 1979 to events in

contemporary Pakistan, more precisely in 2002 Rawalpindi, where Salim’s childhood

sweetheart Zubeida (Shilpa Shukla) lives as an adult.

As invested as Khamosh Pani is in bearing witness to and memorializing Ayesha’s

story, and, by extension, that of her real life counterparts, it is very cognizant of the

dangers of unearthing the past. The film shows us just how sharply Ayesha’s troubles

escalate when her neighbour breaks the village’s code of silence and tells her long-lost

brother where to find her. Given that both maintaining and breaking silence entail potential

violence against women survivors, it is worth considering the role of sound in expressing

the unspeakable truths Khamosh Pani strives to expose. I am guided here by the

South Asian Popular Culture 279


knowledge that songs in mainstream Hindi cinema have historically been used to articulate

things that could not be included in the primary narrative due to cultural and censorship

constraints. While Khamosh Pani is not a product of the Bombay (Mumbai) film industry,

it certainly draws on and explicitly refers to the musical culture of commercial Hindi

cinema. Given this connection and the broad capacity of sound and music to invoke

feeling, I ask what work the soundtrack of Khamosh Pani performs. What are the cultural

tropes and ideologies – about gender, religion, and sexual violence – on which it draws?

How does a film that is in part about the silence surrounding Partition deal with the issue in

its soundtrack? Does the narrative’s ambivalence about giving voice extend to the musical

domain – if so, how is that ambivalence expressed? And how does the film soundtrack

negotiate the dangers inherent in representations of trauma?

Silence and the present

When I speak of silence in this essay, I do not mean a complete absence of sound. As

filmmaker and theorist Michel Chion reminds us, only rarely does one hear ‘blankness’ on

the auditory track. Such a technique, which audiences would perceive as a technical break,

can be used for critical effect. But typically, silence is evoked in cinema through other

sounds (a ticking clock, for instance) or the use of ‘ambient silence,’ silence particular to,

and recorded at, a specific set or exterior location (Chion 57). Here, I want to outline four

other ways in which Khamosh Pani registers silence. Spanning the musical, verbal, visual,

narrative, and figurative realms, these devices together articulate the dangers of silencing

(and censorship, more broadly) as well as the power of silence as a mode of critique. The

first such device is the substitution of music with words, particularly political slogans and

speeches. The second is the substitution of music with images. The disavowal of music

is so strong that all that remains at the end of the film are visual traces of music. The third

representation of silence I identify in Khamosh Pani is figurative: the ‘silent waters’ of

the village well. Finally, the film strategically silences Ayesha as narrator to pass on

her critical perspective and courage to Zubeida. Ayesha’s story thus lives despite, and

through, silence.

Political rhetoric and censure

Counter-intuitive though it may seem, words play a critical role in representing silence in

Khamosh Pani. When we are first introduced to Charkhi, radio and television ad jingles,

film songs, and traditional compositions constitute the backdrop of the villagers’ daily life,

especially the men’s social interactions at the dhaba (tea shop and eatery) and the

barbershop. As markers of postcolonial modernity and the shared culture of India and

Pakistan, these musical fragments represent a vastly different set of values than the

religious extremism of Rashid and Mazhar, the political organizers who help radicalize

Salim. Little wonder then that Rashid repeatedly attempts to shut down the music and

direct the villagers’ attention to political newscasts.

This kind of censure – replacing music with the language of politics – also occurs

around the political rally that Salim and his friends attend. The men’s rowdy shouting

drowns the celebratory music played on the village buses that their truck overtakes. In the

rally scene, interior shots of the meeting hall are intercut with images of a young girl on a

bicycle. As the girl steadies the unwieldy bicycle and pedals away, the soft melody that

accompanies her also fades. A strong, increasingly fervent percussion segment enters and

the camera pans quickly past posters of Zia ul-Haq before landing on an overhead banner

280 P. Sundar


with his portrait. We then cut back to the meeting, where the leader continues his rousing

speech. The little girl and the accompanying string motif are thus completely framed

within, and overpowered by, the jarring sounds of fundamentalism. What persists

throughout the scene and beyond is the extremist leader’s loud, scratchy voice.

Khamosh Pani thus opposes the villagers’ peaceful, musical world to the realm of

religious extremism that shuns music and embraces political rhetoric. Eventually, the

political din of Salim’s party manages to erase the joy not just of the present but also of

the past. Some memory fragments depict one of Veero’s abductors putting an end to

the physical violence inflicted on her. He reaches out with food and words of comfort,

and eventually proposes to marry her. During these brief moments of compassion and

reciprocal love we hear a woman’s voice singing an alaap in the north Indian classical

style.4 Overlaid with the sounds of violence, this melodious alaap reminds us of the

complex emotions and attachments that shaped people’s actions during, and in the

aftermath of, Partition. By the end of the film, however, (inter-communal) romance all

but disappears as a source of strength and joy, and as a means of combating religious

extremism. When the aforementioned alaap returns (this time in the diegetic present) it is

overwhelmed by the extremists’ loud and aggressive slogans as they march through the

streets demanding that the Sikh pilgrims leave Charkhi.

From music to the visual

The second technique Khamosh Pani uses to depict silence is to shift from the musical to

the visual. Early on in the film, we hear a calm, meditative rendition of ‘Alif Allah’ rising

from the local Sufi dargah (shrine). Sufism is the religious philosophy that most vividly

represents syncretism and tolerance in the popular cultural imagination of South Asia. The

traditional composition by Punjabi poet Sultan Bahu thus casts Charkhi as an idyllic place,

a space of both intense faith and tolerance. As Salim rehearses the Sufi melody on his flute,

Zubeida follows the sound to locate him. Thus, ‘Alif Allah’ also links the Sufi notion of

sensual, transcendental love to the young couple. As Salim falls under the influence of the

extremists, his relationship to both Zubeida and his music becomes increasingly strained.

During one argument, the once soft and charming Salim raises his voice and declares that

he does not want to sit at home playing the flute, waiting for his wife to return from work.5

He then throws his flute on the floor and storms off. In what turns out to be the lovers’ final

rendezvous, we hear the same song, ‘Alif Allah,’ but this time Salim does not follow the

Sufi tune. For the rest of the film, we do not see Salim playing or even carrying around his

cherished instrument. Such is the distance that Salim eventually puts between himself and

music that the only trace of his musicianship by the end of the film is a visual one, not an

aural one: it is a photograph that hangs on Ayesha’s wall of a young Salim playing the

flute. The complete absence of music in Salim’s new life is a marker then of his gradual

rejection of his old ways, and of all the things and people that once represented pleasure,

love, and tolerance.

The censuring is so powerful and complete that at the end of the film, in 2002

Rawalpindi, we hear and see nothing in the public domain but religious and political

extremism. This omnipresence is represented visually by the multiple television screens in

an electronics store, all broadcasting an interview of Salim, now a high-ranking leader of a

radically conservative political party. The streetscapes contain larger-than-life posters of

General Musharraf, the military ruler of Pakistan in 2002. The popular and spiritual sounds

that dominated the first part of the film are replaced by the sound of city traffic and political

news on the radio in Zubeida’s apartment.



Silent protest

The third of Khamosh Pani’s ‘silent’ representations comes when Ayesha throws herself

into the well that was the site of the 1947 honour killings. In her essay ‘Translating

Silences,’ Priya Jaikumar argues that Ayesha’s suicide can be read as a principled refusal

of the limited choices offered by religious nationalism. This is how Kirron Kher, the

actress who plays Ayesha, understands her character’s final act (Jaikumar 221). I would

add that Ayesha’s suicide must also be read in the context of the soundtrack’s critique of

censorship. Such a connection is imperative given the film’s title (‘silent waters’) and the

general association of death with silence, with the literal and figurative loss of voice.

Khamosh Pani shows us how alienated and isolated Ayesha becomes once her past is

made public. The problem is not so much that Ayesha’s old identity is revealed – that is an

open secret after all – but that Charkhi has not come to terms with the terrible violence that

she and other women endured at the hands of friends and family. None of the villagers

discuss how Partition changed their lives; the few oblique references to the past are either

ignored or quickly silenced. By shrouding the past in (discursive) silence and not speaking

out against the forces of communalism that threaten Veero/Ayesha (in 1947 and then again

in 1979), the villagers are complicit in the violence directed at her. Ayesha’s suicide thus

excoriates both the aggressive rhetoric of the religious extremists and the cowardly silence

of the villagers.

But note that Khamosh Pani does not critique silence by just emphasizing its obvious

antonym, speech. Indeed, the film is deeply skeptical of the cathartic and redemptive

potential of the ‘talking cure,’ of speech as the antidote to past trauma. As argued earlier, the

film’s soundtrack demonstrates how the linguistic domain of Charkhi is taken over by the

extremists. Thus we learn that speech (of a certain kind) can elicit violence. Khamosh

Pani also casts doubt on speech by presenting us with two ‘muted protagonists’ (Sumar

‘Talking’). Ayesha never speaks of Partition to anybody in Charkhi; we only hear

her thoughts on the topic in the voiceover of some memory fragments. Once Ayesha

acknowledges her past verbally in the narrative present, she cannot go on living. She

commits suicide soon after she tells her brother to leave without her. Thus, like other

narratives about trauma, Khamosh Pani highlights the inadequacy of language in dealing

with extreme violence and loss. The film is also at pains to remind us that in a world

impassioned by communal identity and izzat, revealing past secrets about one’s body and

sexuality can have dire consequences for women. All this makes words, especially those that

are spoken out loud, rather dangerous.

In jumping into silence, Ayesha undercuts the perverse ‘epistemology of the closet’ (to

borrow Eve Sedgwick’s famous critique of coming-out discourse) that frames her life and

testimonial discourse in general. Her suicide belies the false choice between silence and

speaking out that confronts survivors of (sexual) violence. The notion that giving voice

is a necessary, and inevitably empowering, response to trauma is particularly strong in

Holocaust literature. Silence is anathema, something to be overcome so that the atrocities

of the past are not repeated and perpetrators are brought to justice. The challenge is to

overcome the linguistic impossibility of returning to trauma – given that trauma is often

characterized by the breakdown of language – and to tell one’s story. Such a public

rendition of one’s traumatic past is considered the only means of survival (Kumar

149–150). This imperative to speak disregards the value of silence as a psychological

strategy, a coping mechanism that may be necessary for healing and adjusting to life after

trauma. Director Sabiha Sumar became attuned to this problem while doing research for

Khamosh Pani. She decided not to make a documentary as originally planned ‘because

282 P. Sundar


it would mean scratching people’s wounds’ (Sumar ‘AsiaSource Interview’). While

Khamosh Pani sidesteps the difficulties of oral testimony by avoiding documentary

footage, it does not simply advocate a passive silence. To the contrary, Ayesha and

Zubeida attest to the critical power of silence in the face of religious chauvinism.

Once Ayesha commits suicide, we do not hear her voice again. What is interesting is

that having witnessed Ayesha’s confrontation with her brother, Zubeida too grows silent.

When we hear her (Zubeida) next, it is in the voiceover of the penultimate scene. In

replacing Ayesha’s voice with Zubeida’s – this is the fourth of Khamosh Pani’s ‘silent’

devices – the film indicates that the younger woman is in the same position as Ayesha. It is

a position of vulnerability but also of narrative power.

In her voiceover, Zubeida says: ‘I remember Ayesha chachi (aunt) very well. But think

about it, what is the point of remembering? It doesn’t change anything today, does it?’6 For

all her cynicism, Zubeida holds on fast to her memories of Ayesha and emulates her

refusal of religious zealotry. As she reminisces, Zubeida looks into a mirror and fingers the

locket she wears. It is an ornament that once belonged to Veero and encloses an image of

the young girl. As she prepares to leave her apartment, Zubeida turns off the radio, shutting

out the news report about politics. This action overturns the fundamentalists’ earlier acts

of censorship. Zubeida rehearses her silent protest against politicized Islam when she

encounters the many television sets displaying Salim’s interview. She pauses to take in the

images of her ex-lover and consider his ideological trajectory. Then, without a word, she

turns her back on Salim and walks away. This gesture of refusal with which the film closes

reminds us that silence – manifest here as an absence of words spoken out loud – does not

necessarily imply a lack of voice or of critique.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that Khamosh Pani advocates silence over speaking

out against injustice. My point, rather, is that the film and its soundtrack undermine any

easy recourse to speech in the face of trauma and the threat of religious nationalism.

Uncanny memories

My discussion so far has focused on how and why Khamosh Pani evokes silence. But note

that this silence is mainly located in the narrative present. The past is not characterized

by silence. To the contrary, Ayesha’s memories of Partition are filled with loud and

disorienting sounds. In what follows, I argue that the sound design, images, and editing of

the memory fragments amplify Khamosh Pani’s critique of both terms of the speech/silence

binary, and validate women’s experience and critique of religious chauvinism.

Distanciated sound: (Not) voicing trauma

As discussed earlier, we learn of Charkhi’s chequered past through the sepia fragments

interwoven with Ayesha’s life in 1979. At first, these sequences are so brief as to be

incoherent. Even Ayesha’s voiceover alluding to 1947 does not clarify exactly what

happened. The fragmentary nature of these flashbacks and the uneven, sometimes

repetitive manner in which they are incorporated into Ayesha’s present recall the operation

of memory – of traumatic memories in particular.

The content of the memory fragments is also terrifying. Sounds of a train and of heavy

breathing typically accompany shots of a young woman running (often we see only her

salwaar-clad legs). At times dialogue or a narrator’s voice provide clues to the action.

Other scenes are more obscure, giving us only distorted or muffled voices. Screams,

desperate chanting, the wailing wind, and the splash of water also find their place in the



memories. Together, these images and sounds disrupt the calm that characterizes Charkhi

in the opening scenes. Ayesha’s memories hint at, and eventually reveal, several unspoken

truths about Charkhi’s past.

Our first indication that Ayesha was raised Sikh, for instance, comes in the memory

sequences, in the chant ‘Sat naam waaheguru waaheguru’ (which roughly means ‘truth is

the name of god, the wonderful god’). Paired with images of water and a young girl staring

down from the edge of a well, this religious chant alludes to the honour killings executed

by Sikh families leaving Charkhi. Later fragments show Veero fleeing this scene of death

only to be faced with another kind of sexualized religious violence: she is abducted by

Muslim men, presumably men who know her family for they quickly identify her as a

kaafir, a non-believer. Given the unspoken consensus in Charkhi about not acknowledging

Partition violence, it is only in the fragmented memory sequences that Ayesha’s trauma

can be validated.

The sound design of Ayesha’s memories suggests a very different relationship to

questions of speech and silence than that which emerges in the narrative present. The

naturalistic sounds of scenes set in 1979 evoke a world ‘close to reality’ (Sumar ‘Talking’).

Thus, for instance, the courtesan’s set piece at the wedding party is not glamorized; it is

not presented Bollywood-style. Similarly, while the film uses Sufi music, a familiar

musical trope of love and tolerance in mainstream Hindi cinema, it carefully embeds ‘Alif

Allah’ in the diegesis to maintain a realistic feel. The sounds of the fleeting memories are

also designed to recreate the past. However, the emphasis in those sequences is not on

visual realism, but on representing the past as experienced and remembered by Ayesha.

Analyzing South Asian literary and cinematic narratives of trauma, Ramu Nagappan

notes that writers and filmmakers who work on social suffering emphasize sincerity or

‘truth-to-feeling.’ Accordingly, they often deploy melodrama to intensify affect and

‘maintain “faith” with trauma’ (Nagappan 14). Khamosh Pani’s commitment to Ayesha is

expressed not through melodrama but distanciation. I borrow the term ‘distanciated sound’

from Thomas Stubblefield, who uses it to describe filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak’s Brechtian

use of sound. In Brecht, distanciation refers to the use of formal techniques that foreground

the theatrical apparatus to prevent audiences from identifying mindlessly with the

characters. The aim is to get viewers to develop ‘a critical and questioning relationship’ to

the on-stage action and, by extension, to the world around them (Stubblefield 19). Like

other philosophies and artistic techniques borrowed from the West, the distanciation effect

undergoes a ‘vernacularization’ in Ghatak’s films. It is transformed and put to more locally

specific and meaningful uses. Pointing to Meghe Dhaka Tara (A Cloud-capped Star, 1960)

where the sound of a cracking whip periodically ‘punctures’ the tranquility of the image,

Stubblefield observes that Ghatak uses the ‘destabilizing properties of such a [Brechtian]

strategy in order to approximate the experience of the displaced post-Partition Bengali

refugee’ (23, 19). Thus, it is precisely the ‘unreality’ of the cracking whip sound that

enables the audience to grasp the upheaval wrought by Partition.

Khamosh Pani uses sound in similar ways in the memory fragments. Let us consider

for a moment the sound of the train, a consistent and critical element in Ayesha’s

memories. The sound is typically accompanied by the image of a young woman running in

fear, thus suggesting sexual violence. The weary voice of a female narrator (Ayesha) and

the images of young girls in earlier fragments also indicate that the impending violence is

likely directed at the young woman whose panicked feet we see. Note that the train sound

is ‘unreal’ in that it is not tied to any visual or plot detail in Khamosh Pani. We do not see a

train in the memory sequences.7 We do not know if Veero’s family travelled by train or

if she is running alongside train tracks. Thus, unlike the realistic sounds of the present,

284 P. Sundar


the train sound is largely detached from the visual narrative. Its startling introduction,

moreover, makes it a compelling and thought-provoking aural device. It forces the

audience to reach beyond the limits of the plot and visuals to understand what is going on.

It compels us to consider history.

Trains became sites of horrific violence in 1947. Partition refugees were attacked and

slaughtered as they journeyed to their new home country. At the height of the civil war,

several trains arrived at their destinations full of dead and mutilated bodies, earning the

moniker ‘death trains’ (Aguiar 40). Not surprisingly, trains have served as an important,

if ambivalent, sign of modernity in South Asian literature and cinema. In most films that

deal with Partition, trains become the site of brutal, bloody violence (Parmar 70). It is this

historical and cinematic knowledge that accounts for the terrifying effect of the train

sound. It connotes danger, death, and (sexual) violence. The ‘invisibility’ of the sound,

moreover, embodies the heightened anxiety of an unseen threat.

These Brechtian qualities enable the train sound to convey the horror of Partition from

the perspective of abducted women. The emotional distance that distanciation creates

between character and audience is key given the film’s concern with violence against

women. I have argued elsewhere that empathy is a problematic mode of relating to others

since it risks equating the pain and struggle of the dispossessed with that of the relatively

privileged (Caygill and Sundar). Deploying distanciated sound allows Khamosh Pani to

counter the official and social silence surrounding Partition in a way that respects the

specificity and alterity of women’s experience. As in Ghatak, sound stymies audience

identification here even as it incorporates Ayesha’s desperation and terror into the film’s

formal structures.

The train sound is also valuable because, like the film’s representation of silence,

it is uninterested in simply moving from silence to speech. As a non-verbal, aural

representational strategy, it demonstrates that Ayesha’s trauma may be unspeakable in the

present but it is not entirely unrepresentable. The film’s ambivalence about voicing trauma

– about the problem, indeed the apparent impossibility, of representing such deep pain – is

temporarily resolved in the soundtrack by evoking the traumatic event without lapsing into

a debate about representational authenticity.

Temporality and the uncanny

If the terror of Partition (women’s terror, in particular) is audible in the sound of trains, the

terror of the present is signified through the mesmerising but disorienting television ad

that follows one of the memories. The sequence in question opens with the image of a

woman running frantically. Whereas the preceding shot was almost entirely black, the

light in the memory fragment is blinding. The camera moves unsteadily as it follows the

panicked woman. We hear heavy breathing, urgent voices, and the sound of a train

growing louder as the woman runs. All of a sudden, the woman is intercepted and dragged

away by some men. The train sound persists as the film cuts to the present, to a

commercial on a television screen. The train on the soundtrack slows down, as do the

images on screen. We see silhouettes of men playing cricket in slow motion against a

bright blue fabric-print background. In addition to the slow, percussive train sound, we

hear an electronic-sounding gong or bell, distorted echoes of several voices including

those of the cricketers, and another male voice that declares the name of a textile product

and calls it ‘the winning fabric!’ As this bizarre ad draws to a close, we see some men

eating and staring at something ahead of them. An off-screen voice discusses the history

of Pakistan since Partition. It is at this point, at the very end of the 30-second sequence,



that we realize that we have moved out of Ayesha’s memory and are watching television

along with locals at the dhaba.

Unlike the popular songs on the radio, this ad seems completely unrelated to life in

Charkhi and to the memory fragment that immediately precedes it. It looks and sounds

surreal. The jarring images and sounds prevent total immersion; they force us out of

the narrative for an instant. The ad shifts attention away from Ayesha’s story (whether past

or present) and instead dwells on a certain feeling. It amplifies and prolongs our sense

of disorientation and shock at the abduction we have just witnessed. The distanciated

sound, editing, and slowing down of the audio and visual tracks make for an ‘uncanny’

experience.

Scholars of postcolonial literature, and of Partition narratives in particular, have used the

psychoanalytic term unheimlich, often translated as ‘unhomely’ or ‘uncanny,’ to describe

the experience of being unmoored from one’s home. The German word heimlich refers

to that which is ‘cozy, familiar, and homelike. . . . The phenomenon of unheimlich, then,

is characterized by [the] utter transformation of what was once settled, understandable,

and comfortable’ (Nagappan 89). For Gayatri Spivak, such an encounter with that

which is oddly familiar yet profoundly disturbing can be a productive one. It is only by

denaturalizing concepts we take for granted such as home, nation, and other can we begin to

dismantle existent power relations (Kumar 98).

I have been arguing that Khamosh Pani questions official accounts of 1947 – accounts

that erase the violent reality of Partition for ordinary citizens, particularly women, treating

it both as an aberration and a necessary step in decolonization – and the sexist ideology of

nationalism that underpins this history. One of the ways the film does this is by bringing us

face to face with the unheimlich. By definition, the unheimlich defies easy description or

understanding. It is, rather, a matter of feeling or experiencing the uncanny. What we get

in the memory/television ad sequence is just such a visceral experience of the uncanny.

The television ad in particular presents us with several familiar images and sounds – men

playing cricket, fabric print, the sound of a bell – but these elements are assembled such

that they look and sound completely unfamiliar. The use of cricket and English, two of the

most enduring British imports to the subcontinent, flags the role of colonialism in shaping

modern public culture in Pakistan. Cricket is a national obsession in both India and

Pakistan, and an important site on which communal and national anxieties play out. The

reference to the game thus corresponds with the film’s broad interest in the politics of

religious nationalism. However, it is unclear exactly how cricket relates either to Ayesha’s

memories or to life in Charkhi. The use of silhouettes is also surprising, for it does not

match the visual style of the rest of the film. Previous memory fragments end with

instantly recognizable signs of present-day Charkhi. At the end of this sequence, we see

the television sitting on a ledge. However, as we have not encountered a television set in

Charkhi so far in the film, it is not immediately clear that we are back to 1979. The ad itself

is so stunning, both aurally and visually, that it takes a moment or two to even recognize

that we are watching television.

The soundtrack too leaves several questions unanswered: What do we make of the bell,

the echoes, and the distorted voices? What is the product being advertized? Whose voice is

it that declares ‘the winning fabric’ and what does that phrase mean in the context of the

film? So far, we have only heard Ayesha’s voice as narrator and we have not encountered

any television commercials. Even when we grasp that the male voice is advertising a

superior textile product, a ‘winning fabric,’ the link between that statement and the subject

of the film remains opaque. The power of the voiceover in this ad lies not in its precise

referentiality so much as the feeling it inspires. The male dominated audiovisual field of

286 P. Sundar


the ad draws attention to the masculinist violence of the abduction scene. There is,

moreover, a profound disconnect between the victorious tone of the ad (‘Howzzat?!’, ‘a

winning fabric’) and the horrifying abduction depicted in the preceding memory fragment.

Another significant aural detail is the transformation of the train sound, which I have

argued is an important means of engendering the distanciation effect in the memory

fragments. The dreaded sound morphs into something else entirely in the ad, something

unnamable and thus even more terrifying, as it slows down and is overlaid with the

electronic sound of a bell. As distressing as it is, the train in Ayesha’s memories is an

instantly legible sign of sexualized communal violence. The television ad unsettles even

that. We are forced, thus, to grapple with what is at once familiar and unfathomable.

Repetition, in the form of echoes, a tolling bell, and the sound of a train in motion,

heightens the sense of dread and anticipation. As these sounds meld together and gradually

slow down, we hear time itself decelerating. The aural and visual contrast between the

rapid, unsteady movement in the memory fragment and the relatively smooth, slow motion

of the television ad heightens our awareness of – and confusion about – time in this

sequence. This audiovisual distortion of temporality is so potent that time seems to stop

altogether. For an instant, we are drawn into the uncanny time/space of a memory that has

become, or is becoming, real.

In locating the encounter with the unheimlich in the present as much as the past – that

is, in the contemporary television ad and the memory fragment that precedes it – Khamosh

Pani challenges our understanding of history and of time itself. Since this sequence comes

before Salim’s radicalization, it foreshadows the transformation of Charkhi into a new and

scary place.8 The juxtaposition of the memory fragment and the television ad, and the

smooth editing, also make it hard to distinguish between the past and the present, between

the young Veero’s panicked state in the flashback (the beginning of this sequence) and the

chaos and fear descending on Charkhi in 1979. Like Partition survivors faced with the

resurgence of religious extremism, we are forced to question our assumption that this

uncanny experience is a thing of the past. All certainties of character, time, and place

unravel during this 30-second sequence. All we are left with is a strange sense of past and

impending doom.

Aural spectres

The editing of other memory sequences and the shift in narrator at the end of the film also

enact such a temporal challenge. At first, it seems as if Ayesha’s memories interrupt life in

the present: they come out of nowhere and include images, sounds, and (fragments of)

stories very different to those of present day Charkhi. However, in attending to the

soundtrack, we notice that the memory sequences usually begin and end with a sound

bridge. Sounds of 1947 linger over images of 1979, up to 10 seconds at a time. The sound

bridges at the beginning introduce and lead us into the flashbacks. The ones at the end

extend the memories aurally after the visual track has shifted back into the present. This

use of sound bridges blunts the sharp temporal distinction articulated in the visual and

aural style of the film (color versus sepia images, naturalistic versus distanciated sound).

It suggests that the past does not just shape contemporary events. It lives on, loud and

clear, in the present – it persists as an aural spectre.

In all nine memory sequences, sounds of 1947 continue after sepia images have been

replaced with color images of the narrative present. We do not typically get a sound bridge

in the reverse direction. That is, the sounds of contemporary Charkhi are rarely paired with

images of Partition. The one brief instance in which this happens is when Ayesha asks her



brother to return to India without her. Ayesha’s memories come fast and furious in this

scene, and we move rapidly between the past and present several times. During one such

transition, we hear Ayesha’s adult voice saying ‘no’ as we watch women and girls jump

into the well in 1947. Thus, even when we briefly hear the present over (images of) the

past, the film does not ask us to contemplate how memories are constructions of the past

from the vantage point of the present. The point is not to undermine the veracity of

Ayesha’s memories but to indicate that both her private trauma and the religious violence

that caused it still persist.

The aural persistence of the past in Khamosh Pani renders real and audible the idea that

a ‘limit event’ such as Partition ‘can often constitute an emotive and affective framework

for a virtually infinite continuum of violence in collective and generational memory’

(Kumar 85). In other words, Partition is more than just an unfortunate ‘moment’ in the

history of South Asia, for it forms the basis of people’s lives and identities even today.

The memory/television ad sequence brings home this argument about temporality and

affect by giving us a tangible, visceral experience of the past-as-present. It enacts a

complete blurring of the past, present, and future. These historical ‘moments’ are one and

the same. The lines between the past and the present that the village has carefully enforced

through silence crumble in this sequence. Ayesha’s traumatic past does not just interrupt

her day. It briefly takes over the present, both sonically and visually. It infuses the

contemporary advertisement with new meaning and feeling – a sense of the uncanny.

Although nominally located in the present (1979) this startling ad comes to represent a

different time/space altogether, one that is familiar but unlike any other moment in the

film. The overall effect is that there is no visual, musical, or narrative containment of the

past, or of the violence of religious nationalism.9

Conclusion

I have argued in this essay that the strategic use of sound and music allows Khamosh Pani

to enact a critical mode of remembrance and memorialization. The soundtrack critiques

the binary configuration of silence versus speech, and the imperative to move from the

former to the latter in the aftermath of trauma. In centering women’s experiences without

‘speaking havoc’ (to use Nagappan’s pithy book title) the soundtrack inserts the reality

of women’s lives in South Asia into contemporary debates about remembering and

responding to trauma. It expresses the pain of women like Ayesha and Zubeida without

re-victimizing them. It maintains fidelity with women’s trauma even as it sidesteps the

questions of ‘authenticity’ that plague testimonies and often distract attention from

historical injustice as such.

In disrupting and distorting linear temporality, the soundtrack of Khamosh Pani also

asks its audience to question simplistic progress narratives that locate sexual, communal,

and national violence in the ‘madness’ of the past. Madness, illogic, and disorientation

are all common tropes in the literature on Partition. Such incomprehension is key to the

film’s aural construction of the unheimlich. But rather than limiting the gory violence and

the experience of the uncanny to the distant past, and thereby suggesting that Partition was

an aberration, the film soundtrack reveals how modernity is implicated in, and perpetuates,

the very beliefs and practices that resulted in Partition.

Sound in Khamosh Pani thus becomes a critical feminist strategy for remembering the

enduring violence of Partition, particularly for women survivors. Analyzing ‘fictions of

violence’ penned in the immediate aftermath of Partition, Priya Kumar notes that ‘to write

of violence in ways that do not necessarily efface the survivor’s subjectivity, calls for a

288 P. Sundar


different kind of telling’ (124). It also calls, I argue, for a different kind of reading – for

listening as analytic strategy. Listening to Khamosh Pani engenders not just a richer

reading of the film, but also a theoretical critique sensitive to the everyday lives of women

in South Asia.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Sara Dickey, Rajinder Dudrah, Moti Gokulsing, and the anonymous reviewers ofSouth Asian Popular Culture for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

1. See Sarkar’s critique of this body of films in Mourning the Nation (chapter 7).2. See Kabir’s ‘Musical Recall’ for the mourning work enacted in (diasporic) Punjabi music.3. I regret to note that the India-centric nature of this section reflects the paucity of scholarly writing

on Pakistani and Bangladeshi films, particularly with respect to ‘Partition cinema.’ For instance,only two contributors to Filming the Line of Control, a volume on cinematic representations ofIndo-Pak relations, discuss non-Indian productions. The films they reference are Khamosh Paniand the 2005 documentary My Brother, My Enemy.

4. Alaap is the improvised, unmetered elaboration of a raga at the beginning of a song in Indianclassical music.

5. This is in sharp contrast to an earlier conversation where Salim asks Zubeida if she will set asidemoney for artists once she attains a college degree and a good job in the city. When she says yes,he declares that he has decided to marry her then: she can be the breadwinner; he will be an artist.

6. Many thanks to Muhammad Zain-Ul-Abideen (Zain) for help with the translations. I have aimedto capture the spirit of Zubeida’s words here rather than provide a literal translation.

7. The one image of a train in this film is when the Sikh pilgrims arrive in Charkhi.8. Paromita Vohra, the scriptwriter of Khamosh Pani, alludes to precisely this shift to the unheimlich

when she notes that the television appears in only two scenes in the film, ‘once in the dhaba andonce in Lahore when Salim goes with the others and meets the professor [the political rallyscene], both of which are moments when something changes in the fabric of the village’ (Vohra,emphasis added).

9. For an alternate but compatible reading of time in Khamosh Pani, see Munjal (90–91).

Notes on contributor

Pavitra Sundar is Assistant Professor of Humanities in the Department of Liberal Studies at KetteringUniversity. Before moving to Kettering, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Film andMedia Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies, at Dartmouth College. Her research and teachinginterests span postcolonial literary and cultural studies, South Asian studies, and US, third world, andtransnational feminisms. She is currently working on a book project on the musical construction ofidentity in Hindi film soundtracks.

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Bharat, Meenakshi, and Nirmal Kumar, eds. Filming the Line of Control: The Indo-Pak Relationshipthrough the Cinematic Lens. New Delhi: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Bhattacharya, Neeladri. “Predicaments of Secular Histories.” Public Culture 20.1 (2008): 57–73.Print.

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Caygill, Maggie, and Pavitra Sundar. “Empathy and Antiracist Feminist Coalitional Politics.”Intersections: Essays on Community, Identity and the Limits of Feminism. 2002. Web. 12 April2009.

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to Indian Sociology 19.1 (1985): 177–95. Print.Jaikumar, Priya. “Translating Silences: A Cinematic Encounter with Incommensurable Difference.”

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Filmography

1947/Earth. Dir. Deepa Mehta. Cracking the Earth, 1998.Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. Dir. Anil Sharma. Zee Telefilms, 2001.Garam Hawa. Dir. M.S. Sathyu. Unit 3 mm, 1973.Hey Ram! Dir. Kamal Hassan. Raajkamal Films International, 2000.Khamosh Pani. Dir. Sabiha Sumar. Vidhi Films, 2003.Mammo. Dir. Shyam Benegal. National Film Development Corporation (India), 1994.Meghe Dhaka Tara. Dir. Ritwik Ghatak. Chitrakalpa, 1960.My Brother, My Enemy. Dir. Kamaljeet Negi and Masood Khan. National Film and Television

School (UK), 2005.Pinjar. Dir. Chandra Prakash Dwivedi. Lucky Star Entertainment, 2003.Chitra Nodir Pare. Dir. Tanvir Mokammel. Kino Eye Films, 1999.Tamas. Dir. Govind Nihalani. Blaze Entertainment, 1986–87.Train to Pakistan. Dir. Pamela Rooks. Channel Four Films, 1997.

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Silence and the uncanny_Partition in the soundtrack of Khamosh Pani

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