An immediately startling film in the three-part animated anthology Lost Migrations, currently playing on Mubi, Sultana’s Dream, opens on a note of wonder. Based in Calcutta, an elderly woman, Sultana is whisked off in an afternoon dream to a fantastical society. This dream is a faithful adaptation of the eponymous short story by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, which first appeared in The Indian Ladies’ Magazine in 1905 and is hailed as one of the earliest pieces of feminist science fiction.
Finding herself transported to her girlhood, Sultana trails an unnamed woman who guides her through a land where no man is found in the open. It’s night-time and all public spaces are occupied by women, garrulous and teasing and jaunting. Deeply encased in natural reserves, this unusual land forges an eco-intimacy with everyone who dwells in it.
Hossain’s story distils a brief nevertheless provocative reverie. The details animating her matriarchal utopia are spare but telling enough to posit a counterpoint to patriarchal superimpositions. The text’s Sultana, a newbie to Ladyland, buzzes with questions about how this country, which is left nameless in the film, functions without men. All her doubts are allayed when the guide reveals alternative structures focusing on peace and arenas of boundless, time-efficient exploration. The film elides the eco feminist text’s expansive suggestions on the technological inventions that power this unique society. It emphasises Sultana’s dithering, though, in fathoming the feasibility of such a society that is devoid of men in the public sphere. It recognises the sheer weight with which patriarchy unhooks its claws on women, compelling them to assume a fundamental distrust of their own capabilities, trapped in a loop of self-undercutting. What’s critically retained from the text is a key jolt of reasoning that makes Sultana realise how she is blindsided by her own expectations of the divide in men and women’s work.
Quickly, the magical, liberating phosphorescent glow of this place is dispersed by an ensuing snatch of fragmentary sequences, shifting among several sites of violence and horror, including Lahore, Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Amritsar, all within a crucial year, 1947. Urvashi Butalia’s influential 1998 book, The Other Side of Silence, hangs as a spectre from this point in the narrative, theoretically illuminating every angle to the multiple personal narratives of unnamed women which are assembled in the latter half of the film. It forms a grounded companion piece to this short film.
Flipping the heady beauty of the lush utopia for images of stark terror, each fractured episode underlines Partition’s brutal demands on women. ranging from forced confession to being slaughtered by their own families before the enemy gets any chance of laying their hands on them. There’s no haven, no one to turn to. Despair, betrayal and abject abandonment thicken around the edges of these chilling chapters.
These snippet-like interruptions provide gut-wrenching images in the anthology, dipped in shocked discoveries of losses and paranoia that sprawl far beyond imagination and comprehension. Consider how the directors-animators ( Sandhya Visvanathan, Aniruddh Menon, Shoumik Biswas and Aditya Bharadwaj) frequently swoop down on minute objects, lavishing them with the attention and care of keepsakes so that they can act as anchors to one’s lost home and family remnants. A teenage girl insists on ferreting out and carrying at least her grandmother’s tiny pearls in the middle of a frantic riot-time evacuation. But it shatters in haste.
Echoing these women’s forsaken destinies, the protagonist of Haseeb Rehman’s Rest In Paper too finds every door shut on him, thoughbeing a man he’s exempt from countless other horrorsaccompanying Partition. His name itself is subject to mutilated variations-he starts as being called Ghulam Ali who is essentially tossed between India and Pakistan, neither country’s administration inclined to trust his innocence. The short film taps into the interminable ordeal of a refugee who has no papers to have his claims stamped with approval and certified into existence. Tipping the officers only gets him so far until he’s categorically reminded he doesn’t belong where he tries to stake his claim. A singular refrain tails him: how can he be an Ahuja ? He doesn’t even look like one.
Ali surreally thins out during his journey. With each successive blow to his pleasand his identity discredited wherever he seeks refuge, his personhood becomes increasingly fleeting and shunted from the most essential elements of asylum. To whomsoever he swivels, all he’s met with is a bundle of rigid, unblinking scepticism keening not to attribute the least bit of credence to his mute declarations. Ali/Ahuja’s Kafkaesque rigmarole gets progressively unsalvageable, with him turning fragile, wispy and ultimately being tucked away into the forgotten annals of history.
Yet, some individuals retain a semblance of their roots, as displayed in Sawera Jahan’s Seabirds. Food and oral storytelling combine as conduits of defiant remembrance, staving off imminent erasure the farther one is separated or dimensions of home. A particular recipe elicits a rush of memories, a pained, necessary acknowledgement and reaffirmation of the many homes one has had to make anew due to the diktats of “some people”. Nithya’s grandmother takes her on a narrative tour of all the fraught geographies intrinsic to her past and present. From Burma to Madras, in one full swoop, the film chronicles a vast family history, rife with losses most of which are permanent and some repurposed into a new kind of inheritance. What lingers, as was the case with Ali/Ahuja in Rest In Paper, is pervasively told that they have no discernible trace of their purported identity. Nithya’s grandmother is adamant about holding onto the Burmese bits of her identity and lineage as much as she is about her Tamil-ness.
None of the films in Lost Migrations brandish exaggerated, over-stylised leaps. They are bound together by a visual minimalism, despite vibrant spurts spilling through both Rest In Paper and Seabirds. The animation is characterised by a striking simplicity, with the aesthetic frames pared down to evoke the barest of emotions. What also stands out as a shared feature is the freewheeling jumps cleaving through a breadth of space and time. Anecdotes and memories, many of which are osmotically joined to experiences of others, weave in and out of temporally split modalities.
In Lost Migrations, aparticularly piercing truth that foregrounds the woman’s body as battleground arrives in the final exchange of Sultana’s Dream, occurring between a mother and her daughter. Sultana has never been to places that haunt her thoughts and dreams nevertheless she asserts she “felt” them. Specificities of borders dissipate in the face of men desperately scrambling to reinstate the honour of women by forcing them towards the only fightback they deem noble and dignifying- death.
All the three films in Lost Migrations fuse testimony and nightmare into concise, nerve-shredding meditations on fluidity of identity and the need to rescue it from the isolating confines of border-making. Movements and journeys are evoked in healthy measure. “We aren’t trees; our roots can move”, Nithya’s grandmother stresses in Seabirds, in direct resistance to any prefiguration of identity that’s caged in static, sedentary positions. These are grim stories but the abiding corrective coursing through them is an unflinching, determined clenching onto every place we come from, move through as well as a steady process of individual remaking. Our identities aren’t cast in stone. That’s the driving kernel we encounter in these stories; these are the binding words to clutch onto in every waking moment of our lives and struggles.
