Main Vaapas Aaunga: history ends, memory does not

A film that echoes a similar emotion when the protagonist screams -'Kaise Pata, Jaha main Khada Hu, Woh Hindustan Hai ya Pakistan?' (Who knows if the piece of land I stand on is or within Pakistan) . Perhaps to everyone their homeland is Toba Tek Singh.

A film released at the time when two people in the country could even be put behind bars for being in love, getting married or based on what food they prefer to consume, questioning the idea of Belonging Itself, is bound to become an interesting point of discussion.

A film set along two different yet parallel running timelines, within the peripheries of the life of one man - 95 year old Isher Singh Grewal of Chandigarh and the same Isher, rather Keenu back in Sargodha. The 95 year old with most of his faculties of memory and senses failing, urges his driver to drive him to Sargodha, completely innocent of the fact that the city was now across the border.

A border drawn back in 1947. This is exactly where the story flows, from near the office of Attari Cantonments where the glimpses of his life begin to grip him and the viewers gradually.

For the first few minutes of Main Vaapas Aaunga, the audience is left outside someone else's memory. A group of women appears on screen, singing a song that carries grief we cannot yet decipher. The film offers no names, no relationships and no explanation. Their presence precedes their identities. The first glimpse however takes us back to Kachi Dalan in Sargodha. The glimpse of Afsana (Sharvari Wagh) complaining to him about her missing pair of earrings.

Their absence arrives before their stories. By withholding identities in the beginning of the film, while slowing down at the emotional weight of these faces, the film makes the audience inhabit within the memory for some time before explanation.

It is an unusual act of trust. Rather than introducing its characters through chronology, Main Vaapas Aaunga asks its audience to inhabit the remembrance before understanding it. For a brief moment, we occupy a peculiar position—not of the survivor, but of the receiver. We are receiving someone else's memory before getting to experience it on screen.

Only later do we discover who these women were: members of a family whose lives were permanently marked by the violence of Partition. The sister who was killed. Some disappeared into the silences that accompanied sexual violence. Others remained alive but were consumed by the curse of the event that often outlived the event itself. A daughter and a daughter-in-law, all fall in line.

By then, however, something significant had already happened. The film has quietly altered the order in which we encounter history. We do not first learn what happened in 1947 and then grieve. We grieve first, and the memory slowly catches up.

That choice may be one of the film's most important achievements.

For decades, histories of Partition have moved beyond the political negotiations that created two nations to ask a different question: how do ordinary people continue carrying an event long after it has ended? Works such as The Other Side of Silence By Urvashi Butalia and Remnants of a Separation by Aanchal Malhotra have shown that the afterlife of Partition often survives in fragments rather than complete narratives—in an heirloom carried across a border, in a song remembered by a grandmother, in a story interrupted halfway because the words become too difficult to say aloud.

Main Vaapas Aaunga seems to understand that. The opening does not recreate the experience of witnessing Partition. Instead, it recreates something perhaps more familiar to contemporary audiences: inheriting memories they never lived through.

The audience begins exactly where many second and third-generation families begin—with scattered images, emotional residues, unanswered questions and lives left behind. The narrative shifts the core conversation towards the realities of survivor families of the Partition, contrary to popular narrative, that centre around what they were able to carry to India. It now shifts towards what remains left behind.

This also changes how the film understands memory itself. Memory here is not nostalgia. It is not an indulgent return to the past. It is an unfinished responsibility. The protagonist, played with remarkable restraint by Naseeruddin Shah, is not simply remembering because he cannot let go. It is not a voluntary act, for a dementia stricken patient, memory never comes with that choice. It became more about what lingered on within him after everything was lost, even his basic sensory abilities. What he remembered was something he never even spoke about to his own children. The restraint he held on to all his life was now no more for him to control, another loss. His memories sound undecipherable at first because all his words sound alien. Another sensitive aspect that does not delve into a narrative of Us VS them. The screenplay does not allow trauma to translate into hate.

Later it's only his Grandson Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) who had flown down all the way from Bradford, UK, to visit his ailing grandfather. It was Nirvair through whose sincere attempts to engage with every little incoherent word of his grandfather pushes the story forward.

In The Farthest Field: An Indian History of the Second World War, the author Raghu Karnad writes how 'people have two deaths: First at the end of their lives and the second, at the memory of their lives , when all who remember them are gone . Then a person quits the world'.

This itself resonated with The character of Isher Singh Grewal and his reminder to his brother at Sargodha, at his last visit - Yeh Duniya Khatam Hogayi Hai, Mudh kar Nahi Dekhna ( This world has come to and end never look back at it). He leaves.

Another interestingly important yet minute detail points out towards how the Character of Naseeruddin Shah- Ishar (meaning GOD) through his Nazm ( a form of urdu lyrical poetry) helps his own grandson- Nirvair ( Diljit Dosanjh) - meaning and attribute of God himself -the one without enemies, to come back home. Nirvair (the one without enemies) is the one who gets to visit Pakistan because of a British passport (standing apart from political enmity). A visit to Sargodha in Pakistan, only to unfold the Afsana,meaning a story (Sharvari Wagh), of Jiya ( Nick name of Afsana - meaning heart. The journey to find the truth of the heart takes him back to his roots, in Sargodha (a city popular in Pakistan for oranges- called keenus).

These parallels not just enhance our understanding of the deep lying complexities of Partition, but the deep rooted human grief entangled with it as well.

The director Imtiaz Ali along with his writer Nayanika Mahatani do not make the film look like a chapter on Indian history. The film and its narrative takes one through the everyday human details that did not take a Partition survivor to understand. It unfolds like a story of human life and how it looks when uprooted overnight, for reasons beyond their control.

The answer lies less in the film's dialogue than in its formal choices. Imtiaz Ali rarely treats memory as a flashback waiting to be explained, the memory itself becomes the Visual language of the film. The use of Urdu by Isher, is an ode to it.

Women become the plot

(Seeks help, this daughter of Eve!

Radha’s child, Yashoda’s breed;

The prophet’s race, Zuleikha’s seed;

Those who are proud of Hind, where are they?)

The violence did not spare anyone, Hindus or Muslims, any aspect of private lives, not even the women and children, not even the courtyards and corpses.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the first people we encounter are women.

Before the film tells us their names, it tells us they mattered. Across oral histories of Partition, women frequently appear precisely in this way—present in family memory but absent from official history, remembered through silences as much as through stories. The film does not always develop these characters with equal depth, but with a fate that shapes generations leaving families haunted and running away from the truth.

The angles acknowledge a truth that writers and oral historians have long been grappled with: some lives survive history only because someone refuses to stop remembering them.

That idea gives the film a relevance extending beyond its historical setting. As the generation that witnessed Partition gradually disappears, memory itself changes hands. Increasingly, the event survives not through direct testimony but through inherited fragments passed across families. It does not limit itself to Isher Singh Grewal's sister and mother, it brings forth the realities of every sister, daughter, grandmother and mother left behind. The ones whose bodies ended up becoming the sight of Communal Violence.

A Lyrical Narration

A break from traditionalist attitude of music carrying a story forward in mainstream Hindi Cinema, we notice how Imtiaz Ali along with AR Rehman consciously attempts to use the lyrical beats to slow down the gaze of the film. The best example of which could be Tere Paas Main.

Apni Kahaani Utni Rahegi Chaahe Badha Lo Chaahe Ghata Lo - wraps up the crux of the entire world of love and romance built by Isher (Keenu) and Afsana( Jiyaa) against the backdrop of politics surrounding communalism and Muslim League vs Unionist politics in and outside their campus. The two exchange glances in the midst of the protests accurately pinpoint the life of young lovers in Bengal and Punjab during 1940s partially torn apart by the decisions been taken by a group of elite politicians and Lines being drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, someone with not only very limited knowledge of Indian demography and but also someone who could not even care less to step out of his Residence in Delhi. An official who was asked to draw the line within a period of five weeks. Five Weeks to decide the fate of 15 million people across two pieces of land.

This fate itself brings us to the song Dariya intimately describing the horrors through movement, on a train. It includes lyrics in Bangla, reminding us the Partition of India was actually the Partition of lives within Bengal and Punjab.

Nonetheless the song Ishq Mastana has been a careful experiment to explore the folk beats of women in Punjab along with contemporary popular jazz. Another element of meticulous art and costume design reflects in the common vintage phulkari suits adorned by the female characters across the period in Sargodha, a delicate attempt to indicate the commonly worn suits by Hindu, Sikh and Muslim women alike across that time in South Asia that were rooted in culture and traditions.

Much to the liking of the song Mascara, that not only points out a product new to women in India of 1940s ,but also underlines the varied temperament of Keenu and Jiya.

A Past That Refuses to Become History.

A film that slows one down for a while Ina world fast moving towards different things and keeps its audience sitting quiet even after the last few seconds make us raise several questions?

How do we as a world react to the stories of displacement? How do we inherit that?

The visuals at the end from Bosnia ,to Sudan and then to Palestine and Back to Bengal And Punjab immortalize the conversations in memory, time and again. Palestine to Pakistan, the politics lies in the movement . The same movement, represented in The Train to Pakistan by Khushwant Singh.

The visual of Diljit Dosanjh standing with backs packed amidst hurling destruction is the reality of millions of lives today. All of it might take us back to different songs or books but ground zero has the same language to speak for all across borders.

Today as we in West Bengal talk of a day called Paschim Banga Dibosh , the question is on how we as a state decide to inherit Partition? through the celebratory tone, rejoicing the reclamation of a region that cost the lives and homes of people like us (just as how we witnessed among the Muslim League) or through delving into the preservations of the stories that ended abruptly, as that is all we have. As Aanchal Malhotra says, 'Memories work in mysterious ways. We surround ourselves with things and put parts of ourselves in them time and again. It hides in the folds of clothes, old records, inside boxes of inherited jewellery, between pages of old books and in the cracks of furniture and the stitches of frayed, embroidered handkerchiefs. It merges into our surroundings, it seeps into our years, it remains quiet, accumulating the past like layers of dust, and manifests itself in most unlikely scenarios, generations later'. Therefore the good news and the bad news is that it is perhaps only upon us to preserve and protect it.