Khamosh Pani: The re-writer of history

Pakistan-born director Sabiha Sumar's debut feature Khamosh Pani has all the ingredients that can make a film click in post 9/11 Southasia, especially as our two traditional enemy countries are being forced to give peace a try. The youthful director had all the reasons to believe that her film would be received with enthusiasm. Hers is a charming effort to combine all current preoccupations into a neat whole, including the ever-increasing interest in the Partition of 1947, the phenomenon of militant religious fundamentalism, the continuing misogyny within the subcontinent's communities and the so-called war against terror. If the reviews in various publications, especially from India, are anything to go by, Sumar has not been disappointed. However, in her effort to connect these diverse and rather complex social and historical realities with one another, she seems to have preferred to rely more on her imagination than on the facts of recent history.

Khamosh Pani is the story of a Sikh woman from a village now in Pakistani Punjab, who survives the bloodbath of 1947 riots, when women fell victim not only to men on the other side of the religious divide, but also to their own kin. Her family wants its womenfolk to kill themselves by jumping into a well rather than be violated, but our main character flees.