Bloody Aftermath of 1947 Partition : India TV Saga Sparks Controversy

The television miniseries opened with an agonizingly long scene depicting a sweating, frustrated Hindu Untouchable, an animal skinner at the lowest rung of the caste system, struggling to kill an elusive pig.

Not the makings of a prime-time hit on American television, perhaps. But in India, where television is only now emerging as an important social force, an artfully filmed and directed Hindi-language series entitled “Tamas” (Darkness) has had viewers glued to their sets on recent Saturday nights.

The serial’s subject is by far the most sensitive ever aired on the normally cautious government network: the bloody aftermath of the 1947 partition of British India into Pakistan, with a Muslim majority, and India, with a Hindu majority.

More than 14 million people were forced from their homes in the resulting population shift. As many as 500,000 Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs died in religiously motivated massacres. Few Indian families, particularly in those from divided Punjab province, were left unscarred.

As a result, “Tamas,” which depicts Hindus killing Muslims and Muslims killing Hindus--as well as acts of kindness and courage by religious communities--is volatile stuff.

Sparked Demonstrations

Its showing has sparked demonstrations in several Indian cities. In New Delhi, 3,000 demonstrators from fundamentalist Hindu groups, incensed over the program’s depiction of some Hindus as instigators of the horrible violence that accompanied partition, stormed television studios last month before they were driven back by club-swinging police.

In Hyderabad, capital of Andhra Pradesh state, Hindu demonstrators burned government vehicles and files at a regional television facility earlier this month. The Press Trust of India news agency reported 15 people injured, including 10 police.

A legal petition by a Muslim businessman in Bombay nearly forced the series off the air as a lower court judge ruled that it threatened “public order and morality.” Subsequent appeals court and supreme court rulings, however, have kept the show alive. Tonight, the last of six hourlong episodes will be aired.

Indian television officials report that the audience has grown with each installment, although they have no specific numbers. The publicity generated by the protesters has helped to draw more viewers to the series, they say.

Even viewers across the border in Pakistan, reached by powerful Indian transmitters, are caught up in watching the tragic flight from their homeland in what is now Pakistan to India of the poor animal skinner, played by actor Om Puri, and his pregnant wife and aged mother.

Appraisal of Partition

“It is the first objective appraisal of what happened during partition and what should not have happened,” Mazhur Ali Khan, editor of the leftist magazine Viewpoint, said in a telephone interview from Lahore, Pakistan.

In Indian intellectual circles, “Tamas” is being heralded as an artistic and social triumph.

“Nothing that has been put out by Indian television before has had such sustained seriousness, sensitivity and quality,” said Indian author Pran Chopra, a fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi.

The serial’s director, Govind Nihalani, 47, whose own family was part of the huge refugee population that migrated to India when he was only 7 years old, praised the “courage and conviction” of the director general of national television, Bhaskar Ghose, and the program’s sponsors.

In India, producers must find their own sponsors before they approach government officials for permission to have their work broadcast. Finding sponsors for “Tamas” was particularly difficult, Nihalani said. “I tried three major industrial houses who turned me down because they said my idea was too sensitive and too expensive.”

A textile mill and a toiletry company eventually agreed to finance the show.

Filmed in Bombay

Nihalani spent $600,000 shooting the series, which was filmed entirely in Bombay, capital of India’s movie industry.

He said he hopes that the show’s success will encourage others in the motion picture industry here to tackle difficult subjects. Although several of India’s best-known directors, including Satyajit Ray and Shyam Benegal, have worked in television, none has approached issues as inflammatory as the religious communalism portrayed in Nihalani’s series.

Like India itself, the television medium is seen as a sleeping giant, with great potential as a social and moral educator.

Despite its population of 780 million, India has only 14 million television sets. However, the potential audience is much larger than that number might indicate because sets are placed in many village squares and are also shared by large extended families in their communal homes.

The ongoing TV production of the Hindu epic “Ramayana,” for example, is estimated to reach 200 million viewers. On Sunday mornings, when “Ramayana” is shown, the country becomes a huge electronic temple, with devout Hindus in some areas lighting incense and placing offerings before the screen.

‘Ramayana’ Offends Some

Gaudily produced and ornate, the “Ramayana” series has also managed to offend some Indians. Leftists object to the broadcast of a religious epic by a supposedly secular national network. And recently in Bangalore, a city in a Kannada-speaking section of southwestern India, anti-Hindi protesters took control of the studio and prevented transmission to the local audience.

Aware of the enormous political potential of television, Indian authorities have moved cautiously in programming. Nightly newscasts--tepid stuff by American standards--have sari-clad anchorwomen reading government press releases while the screen depicts stiffly posed officials attending meetings.

When the first television serials began appearing four years ago, modeled on Mexico’s successful use of the series format to tout tamer social issues such as family planning, they mostly stayed clear of controversial religious themes.

Slowly, the managers of national television have introduced more complicated themes: a series about a crusading housewife who takes on corrupt officials and inefficient bureaucracy; a series about several generations of one family in pre- and post-independence times (but without the trauma of partition); an artistic rendering of the stories of fiction writer R.K. Narayan, who writes in English but was translated into Hindi to reach a broader audience, and a semi-investigative news program that has recently dealt with such subjects as heroin addiction among preteen-age boys in New Delhi and the decline of the Indian circus.

Much of the program innovation has taken place under Director General Ghose, 49, a Bengali member of the elite Indian Administrative Service who directs and acts in theater plays in his free time.

Tested on Typical Indians

Ghose said that “Tamas” is by far the most “explosive” program that he has allowed to be broadcast. Before he made his decision to proceed, he asked a cross-section of Indians to watch it with him in a network viewing room so he could gauge their reactions.

The program’s success, said Ghose, is “testimony to the growing maturity of the Indian viewer.” After the first episode, he said, the network commissioned surveys of Indians outside mosques, Hindu and Sikh temples; the overwhelming majority said they wanted the series to continue.

Only one significant change was made in the series, which is based on a novel of the same title by Bhisham Sahni, a leftist scholar who played a major role in making the television series.

In the book, the name of the character who asks the animal skinner to kill the pig is Murad Ali, an obviously Muslim name. In the film, that name is changed to Chadhuri, which could be either Hindu or Muslim. The identity of the man who hires the man to kill the pig is important because later the pig carcass shows up on the threshold of a mosque--a desecration in the eyes of Muslims. That incident begins the deadly cycle of religiously motivated killings that characterized the partition.

Noticed Name Change

The change in name was noticed by Hindu fundamentalists who have protested the series. The protesters, mainly members of the right-wing Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) and the quasi-fascist Rashriya Swayam Sewak Sangh (National Volunteers) contend that the change was made to avoid upsetting Indian Muslims.

“Everyone knows,” said Bharatiya Janata Party Secretary Vijay Malhotra, 56, “that in those areas the riots were started by Muslims. In this serial, it has been claimed that the riots were started by Hindus involving a slaughtered pig. This is absolutely imaginary.”

Of course, the underlying message of the series, and of the book by Sahni, is that extremism and fundamentalism in all faiths is a threat to civilization. In India, where fundamentalist Sikh terrorists still rampage in Punjab, and Hindus and Muslims still engage in open warfare in the major cities, it is a particularly timely message.

“The painful fact is that we remain hobbled by the communal factor and that this factor continues to play a part in our daily lives and politics,” S. Nihal Singh, a columnist for the newspaper Times of India, wrote in an article about “Tamas.”

Instead of “exorcising the ghost of the past,” he wrote, “we continue to be haunted by it.”

“I didn’t want to end up with a simple story about partition,” said “Tamas” director Nihalani. “I want people to know that the small extremist groups do not represent an entire community, but rather small pockets within that community.”