Imtiaz Ali’s ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ & The Open Wounds Of The Partition

The 1947 Partition of British India into India, Pakistan, and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) is perhaps the most talked-about event of 20th-century South Asian history. It is also, ironically, the least-talked-about event of 20th-century South Asian history. Almost eight decades after Partition, there is so much we still don’t know about the events of August 1947 when borders were drawn overnight through lands and peoples, when families were separated, and neighbours were turned into enemies at the stroke of Cyril Radcliffe’s pen that is often overshadowed by the sheer violence of what we do know about the Partition. Like a dying man struggling to find the words to express his last thoughts, it’s incomprehensible to those of us who were not there. Imtiaz Ali’s ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ is the story of one such man.

‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ is the story of the Grewals, a family of Shikh refugees from Sargodha, now “on the other side of the border”, and the Grewal patriarch Ishar (played by a brilliant Naseeruddin Shah in another stellar performance). In 1947, a young Ishar had to leave behind his home in Sargodha and the world he knew when Punjab was cut in two between India and Pakistan. Now, in his death bed, as a long, hard life takes its toll and dementia sets in, Ishar is lost in his memories and delusions of that time — the young man he used to be, the first love he lost, the family he left behind, and the home he can never return to. Like Bishan Singh, the protagonist of Saadat Hasan Manto’s ‘Toba Tek Singh’, Ishar speaks in riddles — of cricket matches on the moon, Martian invaders with small eyes and long tongues, and Mallika Dilfareb from Munshi Premchand’s ‘Duniya ka Sabse Anmol Ratan’ (The Most Precious Thing in the World) — setting his grandson Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh) on a search for the truth hiding behind Ishar’s delirium. At 166 minutes, it’s a serious film about a serious subject, but outstanding performances from Shah, Sharvari, Diljit Dosanjh, Vedang Raina, and Rajat Kapoor, elevated by an outstanding original soundtrack by A.R. Rahman, make it an immensely watchable film.

‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ is a film about many things. It is, of course, a film about Partition, displacement, and the desire and longing of returning to one’s home. It is about love, and trauma, and guilt — about the weight of an unfulfilled promise to return carried from one country to another, carried through an entire lifetime, and perhaps beyond it. As geopolitical crises displace millions across the world — in Ukraine, in Iran, in Gaza, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, and elsewhere — it is also a film about what people lose when they lose their homeland. It is a film about love that hardens into not-quite-hatred but something else, and love that remains when it is the only thing left to hold on to.

When people are displaced from one place, the first thing they leave behind is their ‘zameen’ — their land. In the South Asian imagination, however, ‘zameen’ signifies far more than a physical territory. It signifies ancestry, memory, kinship, and generations of lives rooted in a particular place. To lose one’s land is not simply to lose property or material possessions; it is also to lose a sense of identity, belonging, continuity, and selfhood that is inseparable from that place. Severed from this anchor, people often turn to alternatives through which they try to preserve and reconstruct their identity.

For Ishar in his death bed, this alternative takes the form of Afsana (Sharvari) — the young Muslim woman he fell in love with in his youth, back home in Sargodha — who becomes the embodiment of the life he left behind, the life that was taken from him. As he lies dying, his fading mind keeps slipping back to 1947, to Sargodha, and to Afsana. Like the tattoo on his left arm, her presence remains indelible in his addled mind.

As Ishar slips between reality, memory, and his imagination, his dying mind’s fabulous stories, Imtiaz Ali weaves a sweeping love story set against the enormous tragedy of the Partition. In true Imtiaz Ali fashion, he shows us the beauty of the world that was lost through the love-struck, idealistic eyes of a young Ishar, nicknamed Keenu (Vedang Raina) who at one point dismisses fears of communal violence saying, “you think Hindus, Shikhs, and Muslims can be separated?”, refuses to leave when a group of Muslim men tell him he cannot visit Afsana’s neighbourhood, and promises her to come back even if he is ever forced to leave.

Across the film’s two timelines, Undivided Punjab in 1947 and present-day India and Pakistan, this promise is what propels the story. It haunts young Keenu and old Ishar — the cold, hard man he would become — like a ghost of the past. And there are other promises too like the promise the Grewal men made to the women of their family to return for them and take them back to India when their home was attacked and the women were sent to hide with a Muslim neighbour because “women have no religion”, leading to the tragedy that befell them — the tragedy that befell many women across religions and borders during the Partition — the same tragedy that befalls women in many conflict zones across the world. The truth traumatises the men of the family so brutally that in their mind it solidifies into a curse the weight of which crushes Ishar even in his death bed.

In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ could have — and perhaps would have — become just another Bollywood melodrama about the horrors of Partition. But two decades into his career, Imtiaz Ali rises to the occasion, bringing together both the strengths and familiar weaknesses of his filmmaking instincts in this post-‘Amar Singh Chamkila’ magnum opus. ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ combines the intense yearning of ‘Rockstar’, the historicity of the original ‘Love Aaj Kal’, and the verve of ‘Amar Singh Chamkila’, but suffers from the familiar Imtiaz Ali folly of writing women as muses and other-worldly characters who ground and give purpose to his men as in ‘Rockstar’ and ‘Tamasha’. Here, however, that tendency largely works. We encounter Afsana and the Grewal women almost entirely through Ishar’s memories. Yes, they are idealised and perhaps not fully-formed but that’s only because his time-worn memories have smoothed their rough edges and made them so — transforming them into symbols of a world that no longer exists.

Vedang Raina as young Keenu and Naseeruddin Shah as old Ishar both deliver outstanding performances in bringing this character to life. At one point in the film, we see these two characters — who had been largely distinct by their portrayal and even their name until then — converge into one. As Keenu/Ishar finds out the truth about what happened to the Grewal women and Afsana after Partition, he turns to his brother and says, “This world is over. There’s nothing left here for us. Do not look back.” He pauses for beat, stands up, and walks away, closing that chapter of his life.

In ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’, Imtiaz Ali touches on something that we do not often acknowledge when talking about Partition: that for most of those directly affected by the Partition, the event was too painful to look back to the land and people they left behind. With ‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’, Imtiaz Ali makes a counterpoint that this is perhaps the reason the wounds of Partition have remained open over the years — shaping polity in both India and Pakistan. By framing the story of Partition through this love story, he argues that when hatred, pain, trauma, and time slip away, love persists.

‘Main Vaapas Aaunga’ is currently playing in cinemas.

Here’s more from Homegrown:

Shattered Homelands: The Many Partitions That Have Shaped Modern South Asia

‘Lost Migrations’: Watch An Animated Series Exploring The Untold Stories Of Partition

The Price of Hatred: How The Partition Resulted In The Loss Of Interfaith Music