Based upon the novel Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa, Earth is the second instalment in Deepa Mehta’s thematically linked but dramatically unrelated ‘Elemental Trilogy’. Earth is set against the backdrop of the 1947 partition of India, as seen through the eyes of 8-year-old Lenny and her beloved nanny, Shanta (Fire’s Nandita Das).

Lenny’s family is Parsi (Persians settled in India for many generations) and as Lenny’s mom explains to her, Parsis try to blend in (as ‘sugar in milk’, sweet but invisible) and remain as neutral as the Swiss in a country where heterogeneity of religions, cultures and languages has been a norm for many centuries. This self-styled neutrality is tried hard when the British viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, announced what many regarded as a premature pull-out date from this Jewel in the Crown of the declining British Empire. Some called this hasty departure an ill-considered political move, but it might well have been a deliberate and churlish one.

After all, no doubt many a sahib had heated discussions along the lines of the dinner table row at Lenny’s home, where the sneering Englishman questions the Indian’s ability to self-govern, inciting the Indian to threaten him with bodily harm, and culminating in a forced apology from the Englishman. And so the sahibs with an overweening sense of entitlement are forced to ‘grant’ independence to and leave the country they had plundered for almost two hundred years. But to make sure the natives would be at each other’s throats, they came up with the brilliant idea of partitioning India according to religion, with the Hindu majority and the Muslim minority separated geographically. Since Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs had lived together for many generations, this meant an upheaval of more than 11 million people—people uprooted from the only home they knew and having to travel, often on foot like the refugees they were, for hundreds if not thousands of miles. As many as a million people were murdered in wide-spread riots and smaller-scale atrocities committed in the name of religion. The country was devastated, and India and Pakistan remain deeply divided to this day.

But Lenny, as an 8-year-old, does not know any of this at first. All she knows is encompassed within her privileged upper middle class life in Lahore (then in India but now the capital of Pakistan) with her beautiful mommy and her busy daddy. As partition draws near and friends and neighbours are forced apart, Lenny’s mother rues not being able to help those they know; her father acquires a gun.

Before, when Shanta takes Lenny to the park, a host of men of different faiths would pay court to the beautiful young woman. The men would riff each other good-naturedly about their religions, but now the talk turns increasingly political and intolerant. Among the men are two Muslims—ice candy wallah (Indian superstar Aamir Khan as Dil) and physiotherapist wallah Hasan (Rahul Khanna, MTV Asia’s first VJ). While Dil is a honey-tongued and rascally poet and crooner, Hasan woos Shanta with soulful glances.

Lenny favours Dil, but Shanta settles on the gentle Hasan. “I’ll marry you, Ice Candy wallah,” Lenny says to the devastated Dil when Shanta rejects his offer of marriage. He had lost his sisters in a hideous atrocity committed by Hindus and is ripe for vengeance. “If I’m with you, this beast inside me will stay on a leash,” he told Shanta. But it was not to be. Her choice will have tragic repercussions that would seal their fates in the coming days of chaos and anarchy.

While the novel Cracking India won a top literary award in Pakistan, the movie was banned there, and was heavily cut by censors in India. Critics of Earth have faulted Deepa Mehta for biting off more than she can chew, and for reducing important social issues to melodrama. Such insinuations of her being overly-ambitious, melodramatic, or unequal to the task she has taken upon herself (that of a film-maker of conscience) are poorly-directed. Mehta, a Canadian film-maker of Indian descent, has an uncanny knack of balancing the personal with the epic, of targeting the intimacy of human life amidst the bigger socio-political picture. She has demonstrated that she is able to delve, with a deft yet light-handed touch, straight into the hearts and minds of her subjects who have been cursed to live in oppressive societies and interesting times.

Like all great directors, she has also shown that she is capable of coaxing the most amazing performances from her actors. All the leads give superb performances, but that’s to be expected. What is more amazing is that the young performers, notably Maia Sethna as the young Lenny, but also the bit-part child actor who plays a little Muslim boy who describes how he escaped marauding Hindus and found his mother murdered—his brief appearance almost reduced me to tears. The movie is heavily symbolic, with Shanta portraying Beauty, Hasan as Love, Dil as Hatred, and of course the children as Innocence that is ultimately betrayed and destroyed. As an end note, Bapsi Sidwa, the author of Cracking India appears in a brief but moving cameo as the older Lenny, so it would seem the novel is at least semiautobiographical.

Deepa Mehta, with the help of cinematographer Giles Nuttgens, have done a remarkable job of adapting the novel to screen. The scenes of riots, the aftermath of carnage, the obscenity of mobs functioning without a shred of humanity, the futility of decent people opposing such mobs—these are all portrayed with horror-laced immediacy and utter believability that will keep you on the edge of your seats right up to the last emotionally draining seconds of the movie.

The strongest, most potent, and most devastating of the three films in her Elemental Trilogy, Earth is Deepa Mehta’s ode of conscience, eloquent in its condemnation of intolerance and violence, especially that committed in the name of religion. She understands that religious differences are often used to mobilize people (as in other parts of the world, notably the Middle East and Northern Ireland) who believe they are working out past, age-old, grievances. But in their attempt to reclaim lost honour, they unwittingly fall prey to the politically-motivated powers who use them to flex their political muscles and expand their influence and territories. The principle of ‘divide and conquer’ is not limited to use by the British Empire; in recent history, the Belgians used it to devastating effect in Rwanda. Power-brokers and politicians of all faiths (or none) use it without a second thought to this very day. Religion is only one, highly visible, part of the equation.

The title refers to land, to the homeland that was lost to the millions of displaced people, to the earth tilled by their forefathers for generations, to a country wrenched apart at the most fundamental level, to homes gone in the blink of an eye and at the cruel whim of politicians and bureaucrats who used Partition in a final divisive act that resonates to this very day.

Strongly recommended.


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Better than Watching TV
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older