Naseem: A Muslim family’s quest to belong after Babri Masjid demolition

It further manifests itself in the form of a deafening silence reverberating with the idea of a lost choice, and one is forced to question their belongingness in this country — the idea of home hurled into disarray and a sense of dislocation creeping in. In M.S. Sathyu’s Partition tour de force Garam Hava (1974), Salim Mirza’s Agra, despite becoming increasingly hostile and suffocating for him, was eventually left with a sense of hope since Mirza (Balraj Sahni) chose to stay and mingle with the crowd. In Naseem, dadajaan’s memories of the past, too, are that of Agra — an Agra of communal harmony where he was friends with Niyaz Khan and Awadh Tripathi, an Agra of his youthful idealism where he participated in the freedom struggle with his friends.

Naseem is set in Mumbai; it’s not specified when the family moved here from Agra. But the Agra which made Mirza stay back, and of which anecdotes are shared wistfully by dadajaan, seems to have become a utopia of the past for the Indian Muslim population, posing yet again the glaring questions of home, belonging and citizenship. One is forced to ask if Salim Mirza wouldn’t eventually have been faced with the same question. Today, being hurled with the acrimonious slogan, “Go to Pakistan,” at any criticism of the ruling dispensation has become a haunting possibility and the Muslim population is the most susceptible.

With all the fanfare around the inauguration of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, we are witnessing the culmination of the hateful politics that was unleashed with the Babri Masjid demolition. Thirty years after the movie graced the silver screen, the zenith of communal polarisation and bigotry has been reached — Indian politics today hinges on the spiteful agenda of Hindutva more than ever. Naseem was a creative expression of the legendary filmmaker Saeed Mirza’s despair at the end of an era that the demolition marked; and it has only become more relevant now given the deceitful stories being told by a regime to a nation quite evidently in turmoil.

Coming of Age on a Diet of Stories

The central narrative strategy that the movie employs to address this state of not being/feeling at home is through the mode of intergenerational storytelling. The film begins with the eponymous character Naseem, a 15-year-old girl, sitting in front of a mirror, combing her hair. Her mother and brother, sitting sideways and appearing enraged and despondent respectively, are reflected in the mirror, flanking Naseem from both the sides. Along with Naseem, the television screen is also reflected in the mirror from which the sounds of vitriolic sloganeering of a Hindu mob then puncture the silence of the opening scene.

Therefore, at the very outset, the movie establishes the atmosphere of home as that of anguish, anxious anticipation and uncertainty within which Naseem being an adolescent cannot quite comprehend the situation like the adults. But framing her looking at her reflection in the mirror shows that this event is going to have significant ramifications for her as her sense of self is being shaped. She gets up and crosses over to dadajaan’s room, asking him about the meaning of her name, further emphasizing that the movie is interested in looking at this rupture in the history alongside her own coming of age.

Dadajaan tells her that Naseem means the morning air which is as beautiful as her. In this very scene, the movie also establishes both its sense of elegiac loss since dadajaan reiterates the meaning of her name — the new morning air could now be the one ushering in this barbarity but also dadajaan’s and the movie’s sliver of optimism in Naseem continuing to be a calming breeze however dark the preceding night might have been. It also sets up the television as a source of information, which is the medium of bringing the distressing information from the outside world throughout the movie, in contrast to dadajaan as someone who endearingly relates anecdotes — he keeps asking her if she would like to listen to a qissa, as someone to whom Naseem goes with her apprehensions, curiosities and questions. 

As the noises from the malicious Hindutva campaigns also breach the walls of her classroom, dadajaan’s stories then seem to be bringing some kind of anchor in her life. In a scene, Naseem is trying to learn the names of freedom fighters for her history exam and dadajaan interjects, “hum bhi toh the” (“we were also there”) and then he recounts to her a tale about his rebellious encounter with a British official during a Diwali night, along with his friends, back in 1944. Dadajaan’s remark is significant since it challenges the dominant idea of a historical narrative, creating space for his own little history (Ira Bhaskar, Richard Allen; Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema, 2009), and Naseem goes ahead to write about this anecdote in her history class test, becoming a storyteller of sorts herself, capable of challenging the dominant historical narrative.

In his essay, “The Storyteller”, Walter Benjamin writes, “In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers… After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding”. The storytelling relationship between dadajaan and Naseem becomes especially notable since firstly, the stories are never complete in themselves — there’s a lot that remains unsaid, and secondly, Naseem’s own story is also unfolding — these stories would acquire much more depth and nuance as she goes through life. Hence, Naseem is not merely an innocent receptor of these stories, rather an avid listener who is no less a storyteller herself. Not only is she inquisitive but inventive as well; she fabricates a story and goes to watch a Shah Rukh Khan movie along with her friends when she’s been told to go back home.

Naseem’s feisty nature, her garrulousness and disregard for the boundaries imposed on her is consequential since the filmmaker seems to be posing whatever little hope he has in such a girl to be an empathetic and subversive woman for the harsher times to come. Interestingly, Naseem is the only person in the family who we see venturing outside, capturing the suffocation the family feels inside the home. To the question we began with, dadajaan replies that there was a tree in front of their house in Agra that he really liked, especially his wife. When Naseem asks him, “Just for a tree, dadajaan?”, he nods approvingly. Thus, home and belonging can only be understood in such an irrational, affective manner — the emotional attachment that defines a home would always overflow grand narratives or archival texts. Ironically, the home is now much smaller, it won’t have been able to accommodate the tree breathing in free air.

Home, Belonging and Citizenship

Frustrated by the rapidly growing Hindutva violence against Muslims, Naseem’s elder brother Mushtaq, who seems to be getting gradually radicalised, remarks, “Woh keh rahe hain ye jagah humari hai… aur aap qisse suna rahein hai. Aap samjhate kyu nahi hain dadajaan aapke qisson ka waqt khatam ho chuka hai”. (They are saying this place is theirs... and you are telling stories. Why don’t you understand, grandfather, the time for your stories has come to an end?”). Since there’s a sense of disillusionment and betrayal, an urge for a much more immediate and potent action from the youth, these stories seem futile — a leisurely indulgence, they don’t seem to have the allure that violence does. Lurking beneath such an outburst is also the idea that there is something threatening about stories, that such stories of Hindu-Muslim harmony from the past that dadajaan recounts can almost lead to inaction, that it has the power to stop someone from wielding arms.

I find the idea of qissa quite interesting since it connotes a little fissure in the historical narrative — something which might have happened in reality but is not a reporting of that event, it seems tinged with a certain fictionalizatio. It comes from memory and there could be lapses and selectivity in remembrance, and there is also the colloquial flavour of relating these stories. Thus, one is forced to ask, kya qisson ka bhi waqt hota hai? (Is there a time even for stories?) Do stories have the potential to transform waqt (time)? Can they narrativise waqt adequately and honestly? Can they play a role in ensuring that waqt in all its manifestations stays alive, that one narrative of waqt doesn’t overpower the other? If not for stories from human experiences and localised instances, big ideologies and sweeping discourses would dictate life providing one only with the option to choose from one of the two sides. I’m trying to think of waqt here as Rita Kothari writes, “in Urdu, waqt does not only mean time; it also means destiny, occasion, opportunity, fate and other things” (Rita Kothari, Silver Screen India).

In another scene, while friends and family have gathered to celebrate Eid, dadajaan recites a sher (couplet) by Mir Taqi Mir which he forgets in the middle, which Mushtaq’s friend Zafar goes ahead to complete. But as he further elucidates, dadajaan realises his extremist leanings and as Zafar quotes a sher by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, dadajaan rebukes him, “You’ve recited a wonderful sher Zafar, but you’re giving a different meaning to Faiz’s voice and no one has the right to change the poet’s intended meaning.” To this, Zafar replies that shayari (poetry) is any good only if it takes on newer meanings with time and then leaves the room. What someone like Zafar professes here is an utter disregard for the author/poet, their writing becoming an object here that can fulfil a pre-meditated end — that of mobilising, of validating the narrative he’s trying to push. When Zafar recites the poem it comes with a ready explanation. But the fact that an alternative meaning has to be forced out of a story or a poem, testifies to its potency if it were to remain in its original meaning.

Thus, the kind of storytelling we see happening between dadajaan and Naseem demands a certain patience which the youth seems to be lacking. For stories to be retained, Benjamin calls for a self-forgetful listener — “the more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply what he listens to is impressed upon his memory” — whereas for listeners like Zafar and Mushtaq, the self refuses to recede in the background. In another moment of thoughtful chit-chat between the two, dadajaan tells Naseem, “Jaanu, aadmi ki saari shakhsiyat, uski tehzeeb, yaadon ka kaarwaan hi toh hai” (Dear, a person’s entire personality, his culture, is just the caravan of memories). The use of the word karwaan is interesting here since it suggests a constant movement and a plurality; you keep making memories, and sometimes memory of an event melds into another. Similarly, for Naseem, the stories dadajaan tells of pre-independence camaraderie between him and his Hindu friends, and his youthful idealistic participation in the freedom struggle, are inextricable from the news of rioting that the TV constantly brings into the home as well as Zafar’s call for taking up arms. Thus, the convoluted nature of temporality that one inhabits as a result of this search for home that becomes elusive, can only be understood, expressed and shared through such intensely personal but searing storytelling.

Whereas Naseem seems to be cautioning against extremism as a result of communal violence, it is scathingly hopeless about the state. The movie ends with the death of dadajaan on December 6, the day the Babri Masjid is eventually demolished. The death of the poet symbolises the rueful end of an era, as also stated in the epigraph of the movie. But the last scene of the movie has Naseem remembering a conversation she had with dadajaan, him indulging her in one of his qissas, sitting under an open sky, in the new morning air (throughout the film, he is bedridden in his dimly lit room).

It might as well be her imagining instead of remembering, and that’s the silver lining — the ability to imagine, and to counter venomous narratives. For as long as Naseem has these stories, the traces of the waqt dadajaan embodied are somewhere out there, too, as Benjamin aptly puts it: “It does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report. It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.”