Khamosh Pani review
Abhinav Nayar
HIST 396
Film Response Paper I – Khamosh Pani
Ideas of a Nation and Social Transformation: A Response to Khamosh Pani
Much of Pakistani history could be explained as contestation of ideas of the new nation, the “land of the pure”. Speaking to the Constituent Assembly in 1947, MA Jinnah presented his vision for the country:
“If you change your past and work in the spirit that every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what his color, caste, or creed is first, second, and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges, and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make” (McDermott, Gordon et. al. 759).
In subsequent months, the constitutional debates revealed the deep divisions that existed within the country. Less than 2 years after Jinnah’s speech, the Objectives Resolution held that Islam was to be the guiding force in Pakistan’s political life. Still later, the Munir Report of 1953 concluded that an Islamic state was anathema to the ideals of political modernity and that Pakistan ought to be a liberal secular state. These two conceptions of religion set up a constitutive tension in which Islam’s political significance becomes ambivalent – as doctrinarily inflexible, historically anachronistic, and therefore incommensurable with modern statehood. This existential tension is visualized in Sabiha Sumar’s film Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters).
Set in a Punjabi village near Rawalpindi, it tells the story of Ayesha, a widow raising her teenage son Salim in 1979 just after General Zia’s military coup. They enjoy a mostly serene existence until radical Islamists arrive from Lahore to induct new recruits for the jihadi cause and to propagate the Islamization of the country. Initially dismissive of the zealots’ dour persona, the impressionable Salim is taken in by the sheer forcefulness of their rhetoric, frustrated as he is by the lack of
HIST 396
Film Response Paper I – Khamosh Pani
Ideas of a Nation and Social Transformation: A Response to Khamosh Pani
Much of Pakistani history could be explained as contestation of ideas of the new nation, the “land of the pure”. Speaking to the Constituent Assembly in 1947, MA Jinnah presented his vision for the country:
“If you change your past and work in the spirit that every one of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what his color, caste, or creed is first, second, and last a citizen of this State with equal rights, privileges, and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make” (McDermott, Gordon et. al. 759).
In subsequent months, the constitutional debates revealed the deep divisions that existed within the country. Less than 2 years after Jinnah’s speech, the Objectives Resolution held that Islam was to be the guiding force in Pakistan’s political life. Still later, the Munir Report of 1953 concluded that an Islamic state was anathema to the ideals of political modernity and that Pakistan ought to be a liberal secular state. These two conceptions of religion set up a constitutive tension in which Islam’s political significance becomes ambivalent – as doctrinarily inflexible, historically anachronistic, and therefore incommensurable with modern statehood. This existential tension is visualized in Sabiha Sumar’s film Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters).
Set in a Punjabi village near Rawalpindi, it tells the story of Ayesha, a widow raising her teenage son Salim in 1979 just after General Zia’s military coup. They enjoy a mostly serene existence until radical Islamists arrive from Lahore to induct new recruits for the jihadi cause and to propagate the Islamization of the country. Initially dismissive of the zealots’ dour persona, the impressionable Salim is taken in by the sheer forcefulness of their rhetoric, frustrated as he is by the lack of