Cinematic Memories of Partition: Visualizing Trauma, Otherness, and Reconciliation in South Asian Cinema

Abstract

The Partition of India in 1947 remains an unresolved trauma whose reverberations continue to shape South Asian identities and intercommunal relations. This paper explores how Partition cinema engages with the politics of memory, trauma, and reconciliation through three films: Deepa Mehta’s Earth (1947), Vijay Raaz’s Kya Dilli Kya Lahore, and Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani. Drawing upon Michael J. Shapiro’s theory of the cinematic gaze and aesthetic politics, E. Ann Kaplan and Joshua Hirsch’s trauma cinema, and Marianne Hirsch’s concept of post memory, this study examines how filmmakers employ visual form—mise-en-scène, camera movement, sound design, and symbolic imagery to transform historical pain into acts of remembrance and critique. The analysis reveals how Earth visualizes communal violence through destabilized framing and sensory dissonance; how Kya Dilli Kya Lahore negotiates psychological othering within confined spaces; and how Khamosh Pani contrasts rural tranquility with gendered trauma and Islamization. Collectively, these films challenge habitual viewing expectations and nationalist historiographies, reimagining Partition not as a closed event but as an ongoing affective and political process.