Ramchand Pakistani Review

Ram Chand Pakistani : Review
Date: 2008-07-08
lndians can now see Pakistani films after four decades. Mehreen Jabbar’s Ramchand Pakistani which opened in Indian metros on August 1 is only the second film to cross the border, the first being Shoaib Mansoor’s Khuda Kay Liye released a few months ago.

Jabbar’s work is historically significant. Associated with television serials in Pakistan, she is one of the very few woman directors there to have helmed a feature for the big screen. What is even more interesting is the kind of support she garnered in India that made the exchange of talent possible. The film’s lead actress, Nandita Das, music composer Debajyoti Mishra, singer Shubha Mudgal (whose vocals are featured) and editor Aseem Sinha are well known in the Indian industry.

Indeed a great mix in a film that was inspired by real incidents. Her father, Javed Jabbar, who made Pakistan’s only English language film in 1976, Beyond the Last Mountain, has been running an NGO in the Thar desert. A Hindu Dalit once taught in a school that Javed has, and it was this poor man’s story that played on the emotion and imagination of the father-daughter duo. The seeds of Ramchand Pakistani were firmly shown with money coming in from Jabbar’s mother, the family’s friends and finally from a telephone and a biscuit company!

Mehreen Jabbar is certainly a gutsy woman, who dared to have Hindus as her central characters in her film that has already travelled to festivals at Tribeca, Seattle and New Delhi. The story takes place in 2002, when tension between the two South Asian neighbours was at its peak, and Jabbar dramatises this through a trauma suffered by one low-caste Hindu Dalit family living in Pakistan, just across the border with India. An open border then, it has since been fenced.

Ramchand (Syed Fazal Hussain) is just eight, but a hot-tempered lad, who in a fit of anger walks across the border. His father, Shankar (Rashid Farooqui), goes looking for him, but is mistaken for a spy and arrested by Indian soldiers. The father and son land in an Indian jail in Gujarat, and the boy’s mother, Champa (Das), is left anguishing over what could have happened to the two.

Her guess that they could have been carted away is as good as true, but she finds she can do nothing about it. In a nation where 97 per cent of the population is Muslim, Champa finds it hard to even lodge a missing report in the local police station.

Ramchand Pakistani has a very authentic feel about it: The prison scenes were shot in Gujarat, and the musical score and camera work enrich the work set mostly in Pakistan’s Thar desert. Performances are top rate with Hussain essaying the fear and confusion of a boy snatched away from his home and mother, and transported to a prison, where petty and die-hard criminals keep him company. Farooqui’s is no less a riveting role, given to a sense of despair and doom.

Das acts with the élan of a seasoned artiste, but Jabbar’s attempt to doll her up in bright costumes is clearly unsuited for a woman who is not even sure that her family is alive. It is killing uncertainty, and Das’ getup does little justice in a scenario such as this. Another flaw is Jabbar’s inability to develop some of the secondary characters, including Kamla (played by Maria Wasti) the policewoman who takes care of Ramchand in the jail, into something more convincing with the result that they appear no more than caricatures. The script slips here