Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Earlier this year, I was riveted by Pakistani film director Khamosh Pani’s 2003 Silent Waters, set in 1979 Pakistan, just after General Zia-ul-Hag’s seizure and institution of Islamic law.

Pani’s powerful narrative film juxtaposes stories reflecting the profound humanity of tolerant Pakistani people who just want to enjoy the ordinary pleasures of everyday life with the compulsive behavior of religio-patriotic true believers who obsessively impose their “truth” upon others, and the political leaders who cynically use the mass psychology of fanaticism as a tool to legitimate their repressive regimes.

Pani also looks at how “women’s bodies became the battlegrounds for political conflicts” during the 1947 Pakistani Partition, just one of too many examples of a universal pattern of wartime violence towards women.

Ayesha is a seemingly well-adjusted middle-aged woman whose life centers around her son Saleem – a gentle, dreamy 18 year old, in love with Zubeida. They live in the village of Charkhi, in Pakistani Punjab. Ayesha's husband is dead and she manages a living from his pension and by giving Quran lessons to young girls.

The story begins in 1979, in a Pakistan under President General Zia-ul-Haq's martial law. In a few months the country will become a state ruled by Islamic law. Saleem becomes intensely involved with a group of Islamic fundamentalists and leaves Zubeida.

Ayesha is saddened to see her son change radically. Events escalate when Sikh pilgrims from India pour into the village. Later, a pilgrim looks for his sister Veero who was abducted in 1947. This awakens heart-rending memories…

Silent Waters stars emotive Indian actor Kirron Kher (who won a “best actress” award for this role at both the Cape Town World Cinema Festival and Locarno Film Festival) and was the first Pakistani film to be released across India. Indian reviewer Pankaj Shukla said that this film, a Pakistani-French-German production created a bridge between Pakistani and Indian cinema.

The backdrop of the film was based on the actual history of the Partition:

Silent Waters is based on actual events that took place when the Indian sub-continent was partitioned in 1947 into two new states – India and Pakistan. It was a time of intense violence. In pre-Partition Punjab, Muslims and Sikhs had lived side-by-side; but during The Partition men from both sides of the religious divide slaughtered each other. Each looted the other's property, which included their respective women: little distinction was made between robbing cattle and abducting women. Muslim men abducted Sikh women while Sikh men abducted Muslim women. The women were raped, sold, bought and, sometimes, murdered; some ended up marrying their abductors.

From the women’s point of view, they faced danger from two sides. The immediate threat came from males within their families. Their fathers, brothers or husbands forced them to commit suicide to preserve chastity and protect family and community honour. If they escaped death at the hands of the family patriarchs, they were targeted by men from across the religious divide as ‘nothing dishonours the enemy more than dishonouring his womenfolk’. Ironically, though, the women stood a better chance of survival against strangers who were less interested to kill them and more keen to dishonour the ‘enemy’ community…

In Pakistan, with the onslaught of Islamic fundamentalism from 1979, these seemingly well-adjusted women once again came under threat because of their non-Muslim past. For them this was Partition all over again. Religious intolerance and obscurantism threatened to undo everything they had built around themselves since 1947.

The DVD includes an outstanding twenty-minute Q&A with human rights activist Smita Narula,
a law professor at New York University and co-director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.

Narula said that the “roots of what we are seeing in the world (in terms of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism) today go back to this time.” Narula adds that President Musharraf’s regime, following his bloodless coup in 1999 has been a continuation of shifts beginning during the period following 1979. This includes Musharraf’s changing the constitution to give himself unfettered power; poll rigging; banning of political parties; and encouraging religious parties to take the place of political organizations.

Liberal parliamentarian and outspoken critic of the Musharraf regime, Sherry Rehman’s
December 2003 Indian Express article, “Pakistan under Shariat axe” and more recent September 2006 “Women's Legislation: Gap between Musharraf regime's promises and Action”
at the Pakistani People’s Party website examine how Islamicized polities has affected the lives of Pakistani women:

Our own history, as well as the experience of other Islamicised states, holds up a largely anti-women, deeply orthodox mirror to the societies they reflect. This picture threatens a large mainstream of Pakistani women today. Unlike the stereotype of the veiled, faceless woman the media likes to sensationalise, a majority of Pakistani women work unveiled inside and outside the home but remain unaccounted for, and hence unempowered, by the strictly fiscal nature of the modern economy. As in the wider South Asian context, in Pakistan too a woman's identity is a fragile social construct, subject to almost daily negotiation with powerful economic, political and cultural forces. What so-called Islamic laws will do is introduce a new slew of legal limits and cultural constraints to restrict even more the public space that most women can operate within.

Commenting on how this history demonstrates a universal pattern of how violence against women escalates during war, Narula asserts, “women’s bodies became the battlegrounds for political conflicts. Not just in Pakistan, but in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and now Dafur as well… Violence against women is a consistent feature of political transitions of conflicts throughout history.”

Filmmaker Sabiha Sumar, a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College in New York, described the difficulties in her exploration of this hidden past:

In 1996, I started researching the idea of violence against women during the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and found a reference to abducted women along the borders of Punjab and Bengal. I tried to locate women in the walled city of Lahore who might have suffered violence during the partition. But the issue of abducted women met with stony silence…

Nermeen Shaikh did an excellent interview in 2005 with Sumar at AsiaSource.

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