Partition in Film & TV

this show. In episode one, you heard me say that my experiences watching Partition portrayed in the media left much to be desired. I have seen a handful of depictions. I'll discuss some of these examples with writers and filmmakers Chaunty Dcor and Fatima Uscar, both of whom also have their own work related to Partition. Before recording this podcast, I had only watched Gandhi directed by Richard Attenborough, Viceroy's House structed by Grinder Chad, the entirety of the Crown,

and one episode of Doctor Who. Since then, I have watched Garum which means Hot Winds directed by m Satu Commosh Pawnee or Silent Waters directed by Sabia Sumar, and of course Miss Marvel. Which one should you skip and which one should you immediately explore from I Heart Radio, I'm Nahasis and this is partition a podcast that will take a closer look into this often forgotten part of history.

Gandhi seems like an excellent place to start. It is your base, sick, run of the mill biopic that starts out with Gandhi as a young lawyer and how he then transforms into the benevolent leader we learned about in our textbooks. This film was made in two and I think it's one that older generations tend to cling to because of how massive this film was in every aspect, the cast, the costumes, the production value, the sheer amount

of extras. I'm sure at the time the people of India and Pakistan felt like their struggles were being recognized by a global audience. In fact, when I asked an elder relative if he had any suggestions on what maybe good examples to watch, he suggested Gandhi. This film is considered an epic and movies like this don't really get made anymore. It won eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor for Ben Kingsley for the

titular role. It is also probably the most mainstream film related to partition in terms of availability and so called prestige. My first viewing of this film, I can say with the utmost confidence, will be my last. I don't think this film was great to begin with, and I certainly don't think as time went on it aged particularly well. It was truly a struggle for me to get through it, not only because it was three hours long and felt like it, but the utter lack of nuance is painful.

We don't really get a critical and honest portrait of Gandhi, but one that is more filled with hero worship than anything else. It is documented that Gandhi was a racist. An MPR article from two thousand nineteen states that in his early writings, Gandhi made comments that white people should be the dominant race and black people are troublesome, very dirty,

and live like animals. If a film is attempting to paint us a realistic portrait of a man, it must also include the parts of him that are flawed and unethical too. Now we don't have the time in this podcast to dissect all that is wrong with the film Gandhi, but here are a few key points. Ben Kingsley's brown Face was truly unacceptable. He maybe have Indian, but that doesn't change the fact that his skin was made significantly darker with makeup. Gandhi was directed by a white British male.

I know this film was a passion project for director Richard Attenborough, but when you have someone not from the effected community at the helm of a project of this magnitude, something will usually feel off. We get a finished product that is clean and glossy instead of genuine and raw. We had the villainization of Mohammad A Llegina, the founder of Pakistan, so much so that the film was actually

banned in Pakistan upon its release. Instead of giving us an accurate glimpse into the complexities of independence and Burrow, along with screenwriter John Briley, decided to create a good guys Versus Bad guys narrative. In reality, we know that every man involved had their own self serving plan with how they wanted independence to play out, including Gandhi. If you're going to make a film with a hundred and nine a minute runtime, at the very least attempt to

make it more on the mark. The last thing I'll say is that Attenborough dedicated this film to Lord Mountbatten, the man who oversaw partition and is responsible for a good amount of the bloodshed. We see this declaration in the first minute of the film that, more than anything else, should tell the audience what type of film we're about to embark on. It was Mountbatten's idea to hasten the original timeline for a partition so the British wouldn't be

held responsible for the fallout. I don't think any Indian or Pakistani would ever thank him for his service, which brings me to The Crown. Let me preface this by saying, I love the Crown. I love period pieces and costume dramas. I worship Olivia Coleman, I love Corgis. I even had a Twitter through I devoted to every corgy that appeared on the show. Not enough, if I'm being honest. The Crown tells the story of Queen Elizabeth the Second and how she ascended to the throne and the many political

events that took place during her reign. I didn't watch the show for research at all, more so because we were sheltering in place and it was on my watch list. However, that didn't stop me from noticing the extremely small allusion to partition. In the pilot episode. Well, I know the purpose of the series is to showcase the royals and their lives. The British Raj was a major part of their empire, and the pilot episode takes place shortly after Partition.

In this scene, we see the wedding of Queen Elizabeth the Second and Prince Philip Winston. Churchill makes a grandiose entrance with his wife and sees Mount Batton across the church and gives him a very sharp look. As they take their seats, Churchill whispers, with much disdain to his wife, this whole thing is Mount Batton's triumph. He engineered it all, the man who gave away India. I remember watching this

being like cool, that's a take, I guess. In contrast, another popular British show, Doctor Who, actually portrayed the story of Partition with respect. The episode Demons of the Punjab, aired in and was written by Vinet Patel. Now I know absolutely nothing about Dr Who, or the science around it or what the police Box does. But when I mentioned my work with this podcast to a few friends, they told me about the storyline from the eleventh series, so I decided to give it a watch. Watching this

one hour episode completely out of context. I was pleasantly surprised it managed to capture the emotion, confusion, and brutality of the situation well because it was told from the perspective of the people. It directly affected supernatural elements aside. We follow a Hindu family in a Muslim family in the days leading up to a wedding where their children are said to Mary. Tensions arise when the groom's brother

and his nationalist beliefs clash with the community. The audience could feel the fear and the unknown future and safety of these characters. Best of all, I did not see any British characters, minus the characters who traveled with a Doctor journalist Christian Hello from Entertainment Weekly as Hotel the following question. Most Doctor Who time travel stories tend to focus specifically on English history and it's great heroes like

Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria. But here the focus is an event connected to England, but it also challenges English assumptions about their own history and their role in the world.

Was that intentional? Potel responded with a lot of Doctor Who history episodes are focused on these great figures like Queen Victoria or William Shakespeare, and I liked the idea of doing a story about people on the ground were affected by a period of history but aren't really rich or famous or well known enough where they can just shake it off of it, because the greatest tragedy of partition is that the people it affected were people who

are not remembered or acknowledged. Making them nobody's to focus on them felt like a really exciting thing and an important thing to do, rather than focus on the viceroy who would have been in charge at the time. I couldn't agree more. I met with filmmaker Shanty Decor to talk about some other films that depict partition. Shanty directed a deeply personal documentary about her father titled Terrible Old Children. She explores many different facets of his life, including partition.

I discovered this movie when I was submitted to the Cleveland International Film Festival, where I was curating films. Since then, it has gone on to screen at numerous festivals around the world. So my father got a letter from his father who was still in India, and he only opened the letter twenty years after his father's death. And he gave me this letter and said, maybe you can do something with this. So I read the letter and that was the beginning of a path to making my film

Terrible Children. Over the next three years, and I really learned the challenges that he had, not just within his family, but living in India during the backdrop of partition, which really triggered him to one to leave India to come to California where he eventually met my mother. And it's an unlikely love story between my father and my mother, who was from Denmark. And I learned the context for why my father's family banished my family when my father

married a Danish woman. Shanti is another person who had to find out the story of nine herself, and I wanted to know what sources she looked into to find out more. Well, because my father never talked about partition, I knew I had to learn about it on my own. So it was really literature where I was able to

get like the heart and soul of the stories. Um. Two books I learned about were Cracking India by bobsy sidwa Um that's through the perspective of a party woman living through partition, and Midnight's Children of Course by Salmon Rushdie. And what I loved about those books was there was an authenticity about characters and the day to day moments of living in this environment where people had to make very subtle choices which could lead to life or death.

So literature really informed me. And then um, and then I saw a documentary, a four part documentary. I believe it was from BBC or Channel four, I can't remember. And it was a very you know, it was a journalistic you know, give me the dates, give me the politicians name of what happened. And of course I watched it because I wanted to learn as much about the politicians who were involved and so forth. But there was

really something lacking. It seemed really one dimensional around these kind of almost arbitrary conversations between politicians, but not like what was happening in the hard and soul of the people on the street. I asked her how she prepared to talk about partition in her documentary. So the first thing I did when I was preparing to make the

film was I started to write the vice over. I had to make sure all the facts were in place, but I also had to get to the emotional truth of the story, which was my father's story, which I was telling. I went to the National Archives to see what I could use for my film, and there were just incredible images that, um, you know, it's true that that an image can tell you a thousand words. And I didn't know what was possible because I had to figure out, how am I going to tell this story?

How can I represent the unrepresentable about these stories if I don't have the footage right? So, um, there's a part in partition where I found this footage in the National Archives. It was footage of demonstration um in India and where British soldiers were essentially beating Indians out right. So I looked in the US for footage, and then I also looked in the UK for footage. It's she

discovered something that shocked her. What was so interesting was this particular section of footage which was so important to tell the story. Of course, you want to see, like here's the tension between the colonialists and the Indians, right. And then when I was looking at exactly the same

footage from the UK, it had deleted. It had taken out the shots where the British soldiers were beating up the Indians, And it was so fascinating to think well, this is supposed to be the quote objective history of a country that is saved in the archival footage. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. And of course you think, well, what in America are we not showing this our national history?

But that's another conversation. But it was so it was very interesting to see how different countries represented their relationship to partition, as well as taking these epic stories and turning that into a micro event. I think his children of parents who went through partition and who won't talk about it so much, a part of our healing is to understand what happened on a micro level and a macro level. You know, how did this affect our family in ways that we have to investigate when they won't

talk about it. Shanty then describes walking in the streets and neighborhood where her father witnessed violent attacks. So when I went to India to shoot the film, it was just myself and my cinematographer, and I met my cousin who is my father's nephew, and he brought us through the neighborhood where my father experienced partition. It was an interesting neighborhood. Um, it was in Old Delhi. My father

ran away from home at sixteen. Tolaeth's grandmother and she lived in this building that was just on the edge of the Muslim section in Old Delhi, and she ran an a or vetic business. She had her doors open to everyone. She was a healer, right, And so my father has this memory of waking up in the middle of the night to the sounds of slaughter, and that was Muslims passing through the street unaware it was a Hindu neighborhood. And this is what he woke up to

as a teenager, and it haunted him. One Terrible Children premiered in Cleveland. There was quite a few audience questions, mainly from older viewers. I really appreciate people's curiosity and willingness to learn, and whether they come from a South Asian background or a Jewish background, or you know. I mean, I just think that that reverberation of trauma translates on so many different levels. So if people have never heard

of partition before, that's cool. Let's have a conversation and let's start to make observations and share these observations with each other about how this affects us and how this affects our families. Moreover, how do we survive it and how does it make us stronger? I wanted to know how Shanti's father felt about the seventy anniversary. Yeah, I brought it up to him, and it was obviously something

he was very uncomfortable about. But what I do see is that he is deeply, deeply affected by seeing what was happening in the Ukraine, seeing what was happening in Rwanda, seeing the same cycles of this belief of racial purity and ethnicity and how that destroys people. So he kind of sees these goes of partition throughout his lifetime, which is really haunting. And I think that's something that everybody needs to listen to about partition, because it is yet

just another example of how history keeps repeating itself. You can learn more about future screenings and bookings for Terrible Children on Shanty's website shanty decor dot com. I thought Shanty would be a fun and interesting person to discuss the last three films on my list, so I asked her to watch them so we could talk about it.

All of these films were directed by South Asians. Up first is Vice Roy's House, which was released in and based on the books Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique LaPier and The Shadow of the Great Game, The Untold Story of Partition by Norandera Singh Sarila. Like Gandhi, this film was also been a Pakistan due to its characterization of Jinna Viceroy's house. Follows Mount Batton and his family while he oversees the disillusionment of the British Raj

in India. There is a downton abbey upstairs downstairs like way of storytelling where you see the Indians, Muslims and Sikhs serve Mount Batton's household as they talk amongst themselves about the issues going on as they overhear possible outcomes of partition. A felt filmmaker grew in their child A's heart and intention were in the right place, but the general consensus for Shanti and I was that there was

too much information being squeezed into the film. Both of us greatly admire Childa's work, but here we get a cliffs notes version of events, fragments of stories that ultimately leave us with nothing. It's so interesting trying to judge films on a historic event. We're going to be looking at several different films that portraying Partition. But for me, the first question is who is the audience? Whoever the writer director is, they have to think about who the

audience is, who's funding it? Right? So I mean it's a vice stories house. It's showing both the British and the South Asians, but it's pretty clear that the primary and protagonists are the Mount Mountains and we're following their narrative, We're following their point of view, and the secondary story is about you know, Lord Mount Battons, Indian valet who's falling in love with the Muslim woman and the loss of his family during Partition. But that's just structurally in

terms of the script. That's how it's created, and we're seeing, which I think is good. We're seeing both positive and negative characters in both the British and for the South Asian characters, but essentially we are being asked to emphathize with the Mount Battons. This was another point of contention for me. Mat Baton was portrayed with an exuberant amount

of sympathy. I have not read Phenom at Midnight. My father had read it when he was in school, and I did consider looking into it as a part of my research for this podcast. I had asked several historians and other academics about their thoughts. But this book wasn't held in very high regard because it's mostly a firsthand account from Mobaton. Combine this with the fact that Viceroy's House was in part produced by BBC Films and the British Film Institute, I can hazard our guests as to

why his character isn't judged too harshly. But it would have been very different if the primary story was about this Hindu man falling in love with a Muslim woman, seeing what she had gone through in the refugee camp with her father, etcetera, etcetera. So I mean the structure of the story I would imagine I have not read the book that is based on, but the writers and the director had to follow that particular story. So I don't want to ask a square to become a circle.

It is what it is. But what was interesting was the scenes that were supposed to be so dramatic that was happening on Partition, with the riots and the trains and and the violence. It somehow did not fall to me as horrible as it actually was. Whereas when I see the suggestions of it in other films and how it's absorbed by the families on an intimate day to day level or moment to moment level, when we're invested

in those characters, that's a whole other experience. So you know, here in the Viceroy's House, it felt more just something to keep the plot moving. There were a few scenes that planted seeds for what was going to come with partition, but they don't really grow in the way that is

needed to showcase the gravity of the situation. When the filmmaker makes it very clear that this is a story about a Muslim patriarch and his family, like in garm Haaba or Silent Water, where it is a story about the matriarch of her family and her very problematic son, we are clear from the get go this is who we're following, and we get their subjective point of view, whether we agree with it or not, that's what it is, and I think with the Viceroy's House we were getting

his point of view, but there were just too many things going on. At the end of the film, there was a message where Chada, the director notes her own partition story about her grandmother who fled to present day India and was reunited with her husband after a year and a half at a refuge camp. That is a story I would have liked to have seen. When you can put a phase to an event like this, that to me is where the audience is going to really

resonate and connect with the story and characters. I had the same reaction when I saw the kind of biographical summary of of who she was as a director. I was like, Oh my gosh, I would love to see the film that she would write from the beginning. That would be amazing. Unlike Gandhi and Vice Rays House, which can easily be found on a variety of platforms to stream, rent or buy, that was not the case for Garamhava

or Silent Waters. I could not find either of them on Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, HBO, Max or the countless other streamers we have at our fingertips. For Silent Waters, I was able to find and its streaming online on Canopy from my local public library, but different libraries have different content available. They luckily also had a DVD I could check out if I needed. When I looked for garamha The only copy I could find was a VHS at the UT Austin Library, where it certainly was not going

to work. I miraculously ended up finding it on YouTube, but it is unclear if that was purely by chance or was vetted to be on the platform. It's no wonder many don't know about partition or the tragic details the widely available examples I came across given incredibly condensed version of events. We live in a world where if something isn't available in an instant or at the push of a few buttons, we are less likely to seek

it out. Accessibility is a big problem when it comes to finding more accurate depictions of partition and it's lingering effects. Silent Waters takes place in nine nine. We follow Aisha, a widow who survived the violence of part Visition, going about her life in a Bakisani village. She has a son, Selene, who is lost in more ways than one, and in the process of trying to figure out his future, get swept up in extremism when some Islamic activists come to

their village. Her son's new erratic behavior triggers a lot of painful and traumatic memories for Aisha. This film took the well known European Film Festival Locarno by storm, taking home the awards for Best Film, Best Actress for Care and Care, and Best Director for Sabiya Sumar. Garamhava takes place in as AMRSA family are trying to navigate their lives as Muslims in India since they did not want to leave their ancestral home. The family struggles with discrimination

within a changing political landscape. Since both films take place after a partition and follow a specific family and the consequences they must endure from their choices and lack thereof. Shanty and I discussed these films mostly in conjunction with each other. Something that I felt was very distinctive in these movies is that we see the perspective of two Muslim families, and that was very deliberate, Loyalty being a

major theme that overlaps. Before Pakistan everyone was Indian and in garam Hova where we really see what identity the family prioritizes. They don't want to go to Pakistan. India is their home and that doesn't change because of some man made border. I think they're so interesting to watch side by side because garm Hova, you know, he was

made in nineteen seventy three. It's an art film. He was credited with pioneering a new wave of art cinema movement in Hindi cinema was for a very specific audience. And Silent Water is also an art film. So these are two films that assume the audience has some understanding of what partition was, so they don't have to go

through the historic epic scenes. And so both of these films are so intimate by getting to know these characters, becoming invested in them, feeling what they feel, being concerned for them, and that's how it triggers our interest into what partition is. If we're outsiders, we don't need to know the history lesson version of partition, but more so how people reacted to it, how it changed their life, the ramifications both positive and negative of their actions. That

is how you get people to engage and care. Throwing a number of statistics without context isn't really going to mean much to people. It seems to be made like it's for folks who are already familiar with partition. But when it wins Best Film at the Lucarna Film festival in Switzerland. Clearly it is translating to an audience outside of the South Asian audience. So Silent Water it was made in two thousand three. So now we're we're seeing

a woman character who has agency and Garaba. The women are quiet, they kind of go along with what's happening with the family patriarch. I'm not going to judge in vent three film with the two thousand lengths us simply unfair, but Silent Water it was. What was so interesting was from the very first scene to the very last scene, we're watching this woman's choice with how she deals with her son, with how she teaches young girls the Koran.

She's very inclusive in her teachings, to her choice of talking to her son when he's dealing with Islamic extremists and is frightening Lee taking their stance on things. We learned that Aisha used to be a seek and a former life. So when many Seeks are granted permission to visit shrines in the village, she makes food for them, but their presence also makes a recall memories from her past to her choice of giving food to the visiting Seeks,

and these are quiet, very simple very profound gestures. She's not calling arms to anything, but these are the areas where she has agency and she can make a difference. And once we see the film and we know and we understand that it was her choice to not jump in the well with the other seek women, that was her choice to live. And then when we learn what her choice is at the end of the film, which I won't give away again, is her choice, but this time her choice is affected by how the whole village

and her family treated her. It is a story about how a woman is using her agency in an incredibly oppressive situation. We talk about as sun Selin. We see similar situations play out, not only in film and TV and literature, but in real life. So many lost boys and men are susceptible to radicalization and ray superiority. The US, for example, it's home too many of these people. I was really taken by the portrayal of the Sun and how he was lost. He was under employed, he was

under educated, he was hopeless. That's an awful feeling, and that is a timeless stateless nationless existence, right Like in other words, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, what century, or what decade you're in. That's a constant that you're going to have people in the population who

are under educated, underemployed, feeling powerless. And in so many different countries we're seeing like those are the guys who will join whatever extremist group, and you can I'm not just gonna say it's you know, in this case, it happened to be an extremist Islamic in this country and maybe a white supremast. So the film was about what

was happening in nineteen seventy nine. But the beauty of this kind of storytelling is it becomes universal and it is this kind of warning of like, this doesn't just happen in this country in nineteen seventy nine. We're seeing it right now, and that's the beauty of a film that's beautifully told. In Garama, we see two brothers of

a multigenerational family, Salim and Helene. Salim owns the family shoe business and Halim is a political community lead here who is the first of the family to move to Pakistan.

This was a story that was so smartly told. You have these two brothers, one who is a very well respected businessman who is the main character and the other who is he's a kind of religious leader in the community, but also an opportunist, and so it's really the businessman who sticks around and who has this unwavering optimism to stay. And I found it so interesting. There was a quote in the film that was said by his brother which was,

there's something stronger than religion bribery. So day today you're seeing how this family is disintegrating before your eyes. And it's all the more heartbreaking because his father, the patriarch of the family, is a man who holds such dignity and kindness and compassion for those around him. Because the majority of the mers A family stay in India, they see their lives crumble around them. They do not hold

the same statue in the community. They are treated very differently by people who are once their friends and their neighbors. Their business deteriorates immensely. Multiple acquaintances tell them to move to Pakistan, that they would have a better life, but the mirrors as are steadfast, and their decision to stay again. I think it's a specific in the story that becomes so universal, Like we know what racism is in the Western world, but when we see it there the day today, humiliations.

It is crushing to watch this wonderful person have to bear this load of like not getting a bank load, difficulty finding a house to rent, watching his family one by one leave from Pakistan, until we actually see, you know, something being thrown at him in the street, and it's

just it's it's so hard to watch again. I think, similar to Silent Waters, We're watching a character make choices, day to day choices, and those are the choices that define who they are and their morals and their way that they're going to survive that fits for them, not how the country tells them what they should do. I knew with that question when MS Marvel came out on Disney Plus that I was going to watch it. I'm very behind the m c U, but I had to

watch to this show with a Muslim superhero. Kamala Khan is an ordinary girl living in New Jersey with her Pakistani family when one day she gets superpowers like the heroes she's always looked up to. I had absolutely no idea that partition was going to be a major storyline in the series. Thanks to this show and its creative team, so many more people in the West know about partition.

Here to talk more about bringing these stories to life is writer and filmmaker Fatima Ascar, who wrote the fifth episode in the series called Time and Again, and serves as a co producer on the show. Fatima uses she they pronounce. All six episodes of Miss Marvel are streaming on Disney Plus. Fatima's latest work, a novel called When We Were Sisters, will be released on October eighteenth, and the book is currently on the National Book Awards long

list for fiction. But before we had our conversation about Miss Marvel, I talked to Fatima about their collection of poems published in If They Come for Us. The book features several poems about partition. I actually hadn't really seen partition in media at all, and it was kind of mostly through the stories of my family that I pieced together and figured out we're about partition. I was like, wait, what is this event? Like what is this thing that happened?

And it was really then that I was like, oh, okay, like I want to learn more about it. And so as I was writing If They Come for Us, and this was like before it was even an idea that it was going to be a book, I was writing poems that were about Partition, and it was really through you know, the writing of those poems and and wanting to do more research that I really started to look

into that. So it was it really came about because I was very hungry for information and I was looking at it, and that's kind of how I found out so much about Partition. That was when I was really in deep research mode for Partition, and it was very clear to me as I was writing if They Come for Us, and there were so many ethical questions I

was up against. There's so many things that I considered as I was writing that book, and especially as I was writing the Partition poems, and I did an incredible amount of research in order to write that book. The next year, they got a phone call. There was a moment in twenty nineteen when Marvel called me in to have a meeting with them, and they didn't tell me what it was that. They were just like, hey, we would like to meet with you, and I just kind

of thought it was like a regular meeting. And I remember I got to Marvel in my head, I was like, I wonder if they would ever do like Miss Marvel as a series like it was. So was nineteen like it was just so different. Um, and I didn't. I just didn't think it was on the radar, especially because it had been such a few years under publishing, like she had just come out, and so I was like, I think I'm just going to ask them in my meeting, like hell, if you what what would you ever do

something with that? And then the executive who brought me in, we were like walking around and then she swiped in for a conference room that was just gonna be me and her. We walked in. As soon as she shut the door, She's like, I'm here to talk to you about Miss Marvel and I was like, Okay, cool, I don't need to bring it up. You're going to bring it up. And then, um, that started off a very intense period for me where I was I just started

to work for Marvel. I was incredibly curious how show and her Bishop k Elie infused Partition with Miss Marvel and asked how the idea came about. Fatima explains, when we all started to work in the writer's room, you know, she had an idea and a vision um, but there wasn't a pilot script yet and we were all kind of really working on what would this show look like. And it was really beautiful how she ran the room

because it was very um. There was a kind of egalitarian quality to it or equal um quality, where it was like everybody just was really able to contribute a lot of ideas and she was a really good facilitator of that, and so it was just really beautiful to work with that creative team for um the months that I worked there. There wasn't a mandate from Marvel that

was like these are the storylines. It was done through Visi's vision and through the writer's in the writer's room, and so very early on into the process, I actually talked a lot about partition. I kind of gave a like a luxury to the writer's room about partition, and everybody was like, we would really really like to include this and the series, you know. And I think that that was something that Bisha had wanted um before, you know, and it was something that I felt like also was

really important. All the South Asian Muslim writers in the room front like was really really important and so um that was kind of how that came, and they really came from the writers in that room really wanting that and then really fighting to have Partition via centerpiece of the show. They went into more detail on how Partition

was going to be represented on the screen. You know, in terms of getting into the mindset, it's also getting into the characters, Like it's a very character driven story, and there were things that you know, even just considerations around like knowing that it was going to be on the Marvel, knowing that it was going to be on Disney, knowing that we were going to do these things, what

were we anchoring in? And it was very important for me that we not anchor and I think all the writers in the room, Ambishop, that we not anchor in like trauma porn, and that this wasn't just like look how bad this thing was, or look how bad we had it. But what we did was we anchored in a love story, and we anchored in the love between these two characters, and we were able to say, look at this as the backdrop of what we've seen. And I think for most people in the West, I don't

know that they've really seen images of partition. I think that like that is not a thing that folks have a visual reference point for. And so you know, it was very important to me that that story be around and centered around a train because of the symbolism, the inventory, symbolism of the trains and partition, and I think it was very important for a Western audience to see that visually and to say, wow, this is what this looks like. You know, you read a number and you don't compute

the number, but this is what this looked like. And I think that that was very important. With each episode of Miss Marvel, I would get more emotional because so many parts of the show I can wholeheartedly relate to on many levels. There is one specific scene in episode four where Kamala travels to Karagi and she's having a conversation with her grandma. Her grandmother tells her my passport is Pakistan, but my roots are in India. And in between all of this there is a border, a border

marked by blood and pain. People are claiming their identity based on an idea some old Englishman had when they were fleeing the country. These few sentences holds so many truths. In previous episodes, we talked about the difficulty of going back to India and Pakistan and how these borders are soul crushing for the people who are in some ways trapped what I've seen is people be like, I did

not know that you could get that on Marvel. Like the fact that you guys did that, the fact that you pushed forward and fought and got that on Marvel is huge. And I think I've heard that from South Asian people, but I've heard that from people who are not South Asian but who are like the fact that you could include like this deep historical component on a major superhero franchise like show is pretty wild. And I

was like, yeah, I think so. And you know, there's just things that I saw, like Fisha had sent me, like there was like a little bit of a like a Google search history um for you can kind of like see the Google metrics and stuff. After episode four, the search results for Partition like skyrocket, Like people were googling like what is the partition of Indian and focus on and so to literally be like, wow, we like change.

The Google algorithm is pretty huge. And you know, I think also I saw a lot of people and a lot of South Asian people on Twitter being like I've never asked my family about our partition history, Like I've never asked about this, and now I'm going to go ask And then people were sharing their stories and to do something like that, like to have a moment like that in popular culture where you're like, you know, I I grew up never seeing South Asian people on TV,

Like I, you know, it was like I think all of us did, where it was like there is no South Asian people and if we have them, their gas station owners or their doctors, or their terrorists or they're they're repressed Muslim woman, like, there's really no nuanced representation of South Asian people. M This right here is proof of how powerful the visual medium can be. Representation is important, but it needs to be accurate, show multiple types of

groups instead of showing stereotypes. Fatima mentions a study that came out recently about Muslim representation by the Pillars Fund, an organization that champions Muslim voices. There was justice statistic that Pillars issue that was like one percent of characters on TV are Muslim and of the world's population is Muslim.

And it's really disheartening when you occupy those bodies and you occupy those identities to say like damn, like really like you can't fathom my existence, Like you can't fathom that someone like me exists. With a rich, complicated history, with rich complicated identities. And I think that what I saw from the show overall was people responding to being like I feel seen, you know, thought them has the hope that with the success of the show, more stories

about Muslims by Muslims can be made. They kind of are like a punch in the ceiling, like they allow for more things to happen because people then have a reference point to be able to say, like, well, look at the success of this, like look at what they did, Like look at how people felt seen. Now we can make more content that's like this, or we can make content that's different. But because this show exists, it allows

for more freedom. Like I think one thing too about representation is that when you're so underrepresented that any time then you have a character that is of Muslim or salth Asian descent, they kind of have to be like perfect quote unquote, because then you're like, but then everyone's going to say that most some people are bad or it's gonna be this representational burden, and it's like, well, some mostli people are selfish, like some of some people

are assholes, like some Muslim people are whatever, just like everyone is and I think that when you kind of have the first one to really go than what you allow for us people to get into more nuanced conversations about what does the slice of life version look like for Muslim people? What doesn't mean for Muslim people to have complicated identities where they're not good or bad, but whether they're just human and they get to exist in

this kind of complicated existence. And I think that, um, when you have shows like this, it really becomes a blueprint or a openness for more things to be created in the aftermath of it. Unfortunately, Disney Plus is not available in Pakistan, but MS Marvel was released theatrically there with six episodes being screened two at a time. How special for Muslim kids to finally see themselves as a

superhero on the big screen. The Indian and Pakistan borders are discussed or alluded to in some capacity in every single episode on this show. Next time, I sweet to dr Data a lecture on international relations, so further break down this topic with me from an historical perspective, Whether the border is open or closed, as you rightly said, is often a question of geopolitics. It's, you know, down

to who's in power, who's not in power. There was at one point of bus that went to Lahore, there was a train that went to Taka, right, So there's this kind of bus diplomacy. There are trains on the eastern side of the border, and then every so often something happens like the Cargill War and these are shut down, you know. So there are moments in which diplomacy opens up these borders and moments in which the borders are closed until next week. I'm Nejazis and this is partition.

Partition was developed as a part of the Next Up initiative created by Anna has Ni, a Joel Monique and the Sinia Median. Partition is produced by Anna Hosnier, Tricia Mukerjee and Becca Ramos. It is edited by Rory Gagan, with original score composed by Mark Hadley.