A TRUE BUT INCOMPLETE PICTURE

MOVIE: Firaaq(2009)
DIRECTOR: Nandita Das
CAST: Naseruddin Shah, Paresh Rawal, Suhanna Goswami,Sanjay Suri, Tisca Chopra and Deepti Naval




Now straight away let me tell you that talking about this movie here is controversial. I wont go deep into the political roots of this movie because I do not desire to hurt any section or inspire any section to do something radical. Whatever has happened in the Gujarat riots is unfortunate and inhuman. This movie deals with this issue and is set in the time during the riots. The strength of the movie is undoubtedly the technically sound direction of Nandita Das and the powerful performances by Naseruddin Shah, Deepti Naval, Paresh Rawal and others. Sanjay Suri and Tisca Chopra too were very impressive. The title Firaaq is exceptionally apt. It is an Urdu word which means both hope and separation. And both these emotions form the roots of this movie. The hope that things would get better and the separation from communal harmony and humanity too form the theme of this story.

The educated Hindu intelligentsia in our country today speaks pro-Muslim things rather than facts to prove their secularism. They have somewhere in them that if they praise Ustad Bismillah Khan(RIP) instead of Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia, they could be striking a more secular note. It is a usual human tendency, and it is somewhere reflected in Nandita Das' Firaaq. It is no doubt that this movie is a collection of some true incidents, but the sequencing of these events and the character built up has made it look very much anti-Hindu more than pro-Muslim. I mean the story writer may argue that he has not projected Hindus in general but only one character of Paresh Rawal and that in his story such a thing has happened. He may bring out an incident from the newsreel to support his storyline, but many newsreels and story lines regarding the Hindu sufferings may be omitted. All this because of that "prove to be secular" tendency.

Firaaq deals with the lives of different people in different societies and facing different conditions, the common thread between them being the riots. Naseruddin Shah brilliantly plays the retired musician who is cut off from the happenings of the world outside and immersed in the seven notes. Sanjay Suri and Tisca Chopra play a Muslim-Hindu couple who are migrating Delhi seeing the conditions here. Paresh Rawal and Deepti Naval play a Hindu couple where Rawal is a con fellow and Naval is a fishy woman with a good heart. No real reason for ther fishiness and hallucinations of riot victims was substantiated. Suhana Goswami plays a brilliant role of a woman whose house is burnt in the riots. Like most of the Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta kind of meaningless "meaningful cinema", this movie though superior to a Nair or Mehta flick, is inconclusive even with efforts of conclusion, is controversial unnecessarily and is a true, but an incomplete picture, which can be really dangerous.