Silent Water

The rise of religious fundamentalism in Pakistan had a great influence on every individual living in this country. This impact has been shown by Sabiha Sumar in her film Khamosh Pani (Silent Water). Khamosh Pani is a film about the life of a middle aged woman, Ayesha, who lives with her son and gives Quran lessons to children. Ayesha was born in a Sikh family but has lived all her life in Pakistan, hiding her identity from everyone including her son. Throughout the film, she gets flashbacks of partition when she was asked by her father to commit suicide by jumping into the well in order to protect his family’s honor. But instead she ran away and was abducted and later on married her abductor and converted to Islam.

Ayesha’s son, Saleem gets misguided by two men who come to the village and recruit young boys for Jihadi activities by radical influential Islamic talks. General Zia’s Islamization transforms Saleem completely and he thinks he has got a new direction in his life and he now knows what he has to acieve from his life. This change in Saleems attitude affects his mother to a great extent and she repeatedly warns him to stay away from these extremists men. A Sikh group comes to that village for pilgrimage and within that group is Ayesha’s long lost brother who sets out to the village in search of his sister. When Saleem finds out that his mother is actually a Sikh, anger rushes through his blood and he along with his fundamentalist friends run a violent campaign to throw the Sikh pilgrims out of the village.

Ayesha commits suicide by jumping into the same well where her father asked her to jump years back. Saleem puts his mothers’ box into the river and it is carried away by the river currents. Three decades later, Saleem has now turned into a powerful, Jihadi leader. The rare glimpses of the atrocities of partition shown in this film are true incidents that happened with the Sikh and Muslim families. The film also shows the changes in the lives of Muslims living in all parts of Pakistan brought about by General Zia’s Islamization.

Through this film, Sabiha connected the contemporary violence of the 70’s with that of the 40’s. She wanted to show that the violence didn’t end during partition but it is still a continuing process. Sabiha showed that Saleem played flute in the first few scenes of the film but instead of making him a music artist, she made him an extremist because she wanted to show that under Zia’s dictatorship Pakistan was completely wiped out of the possibility of arts and culture.

The story of partition is told in bits and pieces throughout the film but in such a way that it brings out the pain and sufferings that the women faced during the partition days. Ayesha goes into a flashback again and again and makes us all feel the trauma that she, and many other women like her, went through. There is a dialogue in the film by Ayesha that, “Two countries were born, Men abducted women, Fathers killed daughters, Everyone said it was to save their honor, Some young girls died, Others survived, People moved like the sea leaving everything behind, Broken memories, half dreamt dreams, places of worship.” This dialogue brings back the painful memories of partition and the atrocities that many Muslims and non-Muslims went through.