The present decade has been the best for Hindi cinema in a long while. Nandita Das' Firaaq joins the list of outstanding débuts of the period.
Firaaq is a day in the life of Ahmedabad in the aftermath of the Gujarat carnage of 2002. An ensemble narrative, Firaaq is peopled with stories that happen to converge on a particular day, of the ones who return from what they presumed was an escape from the violence, and of the ones who prepare to forsake a city that has become unbearably persecutory.
An exploration of a sub-culture of survivors, and a prescribed indictment, Firaaq weaves intertwining tales of victims, mostly, and of their perpetrators;
A young Muslim couple, Muneera (Shahana Goswami) and Hanif (Nawazuddin) returning to their ransacked home obsesses itself with attaching faces to a mob that might’ve gutted their home.
A 6 yrs old boy sheltered in a refugee camp desperately searches for his father.
A Gujarati housewife (Deepti Naval) atoning an all-consuming guilt of having refused sanctuary to a pleading Muslim woman, her husband (Paresh Rawal) who has participated in the pillage, and is now protecting his rapist younger brother.
An inter-faith couple (Sanjay Suri and Tisca Chopra) that is embarking on a move away from an Ahmedabad that is threatening their fragile co-existence.
An aged musician (Naseeruddin Shah) who’s defeated in his search for strength to endure inevitable hatred for the other, and his man-Friday (Raghuvir Yadav) who’s shielding the musician from the same.
Amongst its accomplishments, Firaaq is an example of superior direction of an inspired cast of performers. Special mention must be made of the youngest members hobnobbing with the stalwarts in the film – Shahana Goswami, Nawazuddin, and Sanjay Suri.
While all these few stories, culled from innumerable other scars, could’ve been independent of each other, Nandita Das and her co-writer Shuchi Kothari make them succinctly inter-dependent, and resultant on each other, in ways that are cathartic and poignant. Collaborative writing is known to be tricky; Firaaq's writing seems to be as novel as the end result is rewarding – the film was collabo-written by the writers over the Internet Telephony Service Skype. If that’s what sires enlightening cinema, so be it.
As far as the relevance of the film is concerned, I personally feel, as many cinematic articulations of the Gujarat carnage and its aftermath is welcome; to invoke the Mitscherlichs, “there is no moving beyond loss without some experience of mourning.”
Let there be healing, instead of an inability to mourn.
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