Pakistan-born director Sabiha Sumar's debut feature Khamosh Pani has all the ingredients that can make a film click in post 9/11 Southasia, especially as our two traditional enemy countries are being forced to give peace a try. The youthful director had all the reasons to believe that her film would be received with enthusiasm. Hers is a charming effort to combine all current preoccupations into a neat whole, including the ever-increasing interest in the Partition of 1947, the phenomenon of militant religious fundamentalism, the continuing misogyny within the subcontinent's communities and the so-called war against terror. If the reviews in various publications, especially from India, are anything to go by, Sumar has not been disappointed. However, in her effort to connect these diverse and rather complex social and historical realities with one another, she seems to have preferred to rely more on her imagination than on the facts of recent history.
Khamosh Pani is the story of a Sikh woman from a village now in Pakistani Punjab, who survives the bloodbath of 1947 riots, when women fell victim not only to men on the other side of the religious divide, but also to their own kin. Her family wants its womenfolk to kill themselves by jumping into a well rather than be violated, but our main character flees.
She later finds herself in the custody of a Muslim, whom she marries, after converting to Islam and taking the name Ayesha. The film begins in the late 1970s when Ayesha has grown into a middle-aged woman, a widow who makes ends meet by teaching the Qur'an to village girls. It is during this time that her teenage son Saleem slides into the clasp of the destructive jehadi militancy engendered by Gen Zia-ul Haq's Islamisation campaign.
This is the time when Sikh pilgrims from India have begun regular visits to the sacred gurdwaras in Pakistan. One of the pilgrim groups includes Ayesha's brother, who looks for and eventually finds his sister. The discovery of this Sikh connection enrages the Muslim villagers, including Saleem. The pressure mounts and in the end Ayesha jumps into a well and, so to speak, finishes the unfinished business of Partition. In the film's rather inexplicable finale, the supposed war on fundamentalism of Pakistan's current military ruler is hinted at favourably.