Whose history of partition?

This chapter studies Tamil cinema’s response to Partition as a means of understanding how Tamil Nadu, a southern state that was not directly touched by the ‘national trauma’ of Partition, relates to its watershed status in the making of Indian identity. It focuses on two different cinematic narratives of Partition through the case studies of Naam Iruvar, a classic ‘nationalist’ film released a few months before independence, and the controversial Hey Ram, released in 2000. Naam Iruvar’s story of the misunderstanding and eventual reunion of two brothers serves as an explicit metaphor for the conflict between communities that, in the film’s view, needed to realise their equal status in the nation and prevent its Partition. Hey Ram, by placing a Tamil Brahmin protagonist as both the survivor and perpetrator of Partition violence, is an attempt to create a south Indian story of Partition that makes the trauma and loss of Partition their own. Such an analysis stresses the fact that there was no homogenous experience of Partition, even as it unsettles the idea of a singular ‘national’ subjectivity or, indeed, a ‘national’ cinema.