Pinjar : Partion time melodrama

If I’d known this movie had about nine songs (I saw a list somewhere… too late!) I may not have bothered watching it. Not that they’re bad songs exactly, but nine? Do we have to force-punctuate every event with a song? The first half-hour, I decided, is best spent in the loo.

Anyway, sandwiched between those songs is a nice story. Puro, (Urmila Matondkar) daughter of a wealthy hindu in Amritsar. She and her sisters are happy, frolicking without a care in the world. But disaster is waiting around the corner when Puro is abducted by a horseman and spirited away to God knows where. Her family is frantic but they can’t find her. Her father doesn’t look awfully hard though. If she’s gone, she’s probably better off dead.

Puro has been plucked out of her happy life by a Muslim family to settle an old family fued. Something about 500 ruppees, land etc. Apparently Puro’s family had done much the same to a woman from the abductor, Rashid’s family.

Rashid, apart from this one act is basically a good guy and also happens to be in love with Puro. She, of course, is completely devastated. Thereafter, she begins crying and continues mostly crying through every scene. When, this must have been exhausting for Urmilla! She did a great job of acting, though.

Puro escapes, one night, and makes her way back home. Despite her mother’s welcoming arms and tears, there’s no place for Puro with her family anymore. “We gave you life; now do us a favor and go”, her mother told her. Her father, who needn’t damn well have been that harsh, commanded her to get the hell out.Puro’s ex-family has to get busy with the delicate job of getting the other children married, so the sooner she’s out of the way, the better.

A disbelieving Puro now makes her way to the village well with a view to chucking herself headlong into it. But Rashid is waiting for her and takes her back to her new home. She doesn’t like that too much, but has to lump it. She continues to live with Rashid and agrees to accept his favor of being his wife. Puro becomes Hamida. Meanwhile, the one person who’s unable to forget her is her brother. Nor can he accept standing helplessly around doing nothing about it. He looks and looks.

Strife hits the village – and all other villages as India is torn into two bleeding halves during the Partition. Stuff happens. Why should I tell?

Anyone who’s compelled by stories of the Partition era will enjoy watching this movie. Melodrama bursts out of almost every scene, everything is overstated, overcooked, over the top. But Indian audiences are quite at home with that. The scenes and settings are beautiful and look realistic. I hear there are a couple of small historical inaccuracies, but that didn’t get in the way of the story which can railroad its way through anything at that heightened intensity.

Here are some of the actors: Urmila Matondkar, Manoj Bajpai, Sanjay Suri, Sandali Sinha, Priyanshu Chatterjee, Ishaa Koppikar, Lilette Dubey, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Farida Jalal, Alok Nath, Seema Biswas, Sudha Shivpuri.

Oh, and pinjar means skeleton, and they don’t let you forget that in this movie.