This documentary is a political act of remembering post-Police Action violence in Hyderabad

In the history of modern India, the 1948 Police Action that culminated in the accession of Hyderabad-Deccan into the Indian Union has not received much attention. Popular narratives about this military operation exist but their focus has been on characterising the Police Action as an inevitable end to the people’s ‘freedom struggle’ against the ‘misrule’ of the Nizam. Some claim that Hyderabad’s surrender was an achievement to be singularly credited to the then deputy prime minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. In these accounts, the violence faced by ordinary Muslim individuals, households, and communities have rarely been acknowledged.

Only recently, new scholarship has focussed on different aspects: the afterlives of the military operation, puncturing straightforward narratives about it being only a freedom struggle, focussing on non-Muslims who opposed the accession, and foregrounding the experiences of violence faced by people during this period. Such scholarship introduces complexities, providing more granular accounts of the period.

Yet sometimes, along comes a film that is able to offer complexity in ways that scholars cannot possibly do, in ways that are far more compelling. When Pomegranate Turns Grey, a film directed by artist and researcher Thoufeeq K and poet and researcher Khurram Muraad and produced by Maktoob Media, is one such film. It is largely woven around the memories of Gulnaar, a survivor of the post-Police Action violence and Muraad’s grandmother, and the losses she has endured, inviting us to pay attention to the texture of that experience of loss. “How much weight could a chest hold, which carries the secret whispers for generations, echoes of their dead kin from the past,” the filmmakers ask.

A remarkable aspect of the film is that it does not attempt to be ‘comprehensive’ or ‘objective’ in the more conventional ways. It barely even offers the more well-known details of what was Police Action, the numbers and figures of violence and displacement, the contesting accounts of why the Police Action took place, as context. True, it does have testimonial accounts of things seen, heard, and done that contributed to a sense of dread among Muslims of the Deccan: of a newborn carried around by its displaced mother with the umbilical cord intact, of a baby who died when his scared mother unwittingly wrapped her hands around his mouth too tightly to prevent him from crying loudly, of a daughter who, at the height of the violence, pleaded with her mother to not kill herself by jumping into a baoli as other women of the time did, of a mother who refused to clean herself for three months of the blood of her slain son.

These searing memories might belong to Gulnaar but are also a shared experience for Muslims in the region. For several decades, Gulnaar, her grandson says, rarely spoke of the days of the Police Action. Perhaps she didn’t want her children to inherit from her the khauff (a sense of fear, dread, and trauma) she went through, Gulnaar’s son says. For me, hearing the word khauff in the film reminded me of the late Arzoo Sab, an old lawyer from Gulbarga city who I met during my PhD fieldwork, who spoke to me in great detail about the “khauff ka mahaul” during and after the Police Action. If Gulnaar chose silence so that her children do not inherit her trauma, Arzoo Sab chose to contest in the general elections, knowing fully well that he would lose. His reason, he told me, was because he wanted other Muslims to know that this country continued to be theirs and that they would not or should not recede into oblivion in a post-partitioned India or an acceded Hyderabad. In another instance, a Muslim principal of a college in a major city in the Deccan advised me not to focus on these aspects because it was unnecessary to rake up these old memories. Perhaps this act of deliberate forgetting was one way of ‘assimilating’?

Memories need prompts or as the filmmakers say “…these secrets keep falling, Like moth wings from a burning lamp.” For Gulnaar, it was the anti-CAA protests that erupted in the country in 2019 that opened up a flood of buried memories, tumbling out of her freely and openly. In his book on the Police Action, author Afsar Mohammed writes of his interlocutor Quddus Saheb for whom the violence during and after the Babri Masjid demolition brought back memories of the post-Police Action violence faced by Muslims and who felt this was yet another Police Action. In this film, however, the makers eschew such explicit claim-making about the continuities in experience of Muslims in post-Partition India but instead invite the viewer to undertake their own journeys of understanding contemporary India.

The film embraces the realm of the intimate in more ways than one. Gulnaar’s focus on details — a half-torn saree, a hanging umbilical cord, the rows of jowar and tuvar crops among which people hid, the platforms on trees where perpetrators stood and spotted individuals, rivers in full torrent — presents a far more vivid picture of the experience of violence than any scholarly account could. Complemented by stunning shots of a lonely but lush landscape, the film embeds these memories of Gulnaar and others within the land of the Deccan and the history that has played out here. The filmmakers ask us, for instance: “When the blood is spilled on red soil, we cannot separate one from the other. How long does it take for water to become potable again? To wash the mounds of rotting corpses?”

This deeply political act of remembering that the film undertakes can be seen as part of a larger body of work by feminists and historians who have worked to excavate the varied experiences of the 1947 Partition through testimonies. Similar works by other scholars around the Police Action give us a sense of how ordinary people experienced the momentous event. For some, as this article shows, the violence of the Police Action came suddenly and unexpectedly. For many, living in the countryside, as Gulnaar also recollects, it was the arrival of the tanks (vehicles without tyres, she says) that heralded the onset of violence that would tear their lives apart, leaving them to cope with the loss of many, many loved ones. Here we hear not narratives of freedom and independence but of ‘war times’, as Gulnaar’s sister says.

Yet it would be a disservice to the film to say this is only about 1948 Police Action and the violence during and after the period. When Pomegranate Turns Grey offers us something more, something poetic — by taking us into the realm of the domestic, it offers us glimpses into how lives are built across generations, the different relationships succeeding  generations of a family have to traumatic pasts, how people not only remember events and violence but also the roads they ran on as little children, memories of explanations provided by slain siblings on how soil is formed, the neighbours they grew up with.

The film belongs to a repertoire of work that speaks of post-Partition India, particularly of the experience of loss, displacement and violence — and one that has not been told enough in the public. AG Noorani, the eminent lawyer who passed away on August 29 this year and who wrote the unflinching book Destruction of Hyderabad, was motivated by similar considerations of laying out the truth, of telling a story that has refused to be told. Yet the film and Noorani’s book could not be more different in form and style. What When Pomegranate Turns Grey does, and does beautifully, is to show us how ordinary individuals carry the burden of momentous history and how traces of this history shape the lives of succeeding generations.

Swathi Shivanand teaches history and media at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal. She is a founding member of the public humanities initiative Khidki Collective. Views expressed are the author’s own.