The Poisoned Well: Memory and Forgetting in Sabiha Sumars Silent Waters

The paper revisits the events of 1947, which gave birth to two independent nations, India and Pakistan. The nation-building enterprise unleashed terrible violence and brought unspeakable suffering to millions of people who unwittingly found themselves on the wrong side of the border and sporting wrong identities. Of these the most vulnerable were the women. The stories of their plight rarely made it to the official narratives of the times. Pakistani film Silent Waters is one such narrative. It took more than half a century for it to find a voice. The chief protagonist of the film is a woman, whose life bears the imprint of the Partition and who becomes a victim of the continued, present-day violence against women. The film takes up such fundamental concepts as identity, belonging and home and shows how women are called on to define them again and again. This paper scrutinises these quests.