Garam Hawa (Hot Winds) is a film set in post-partition India, sometime soon after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January of 1948. The film documents the travails of a middle class Muslim family, and through that raises many questions not only about the dilemmas faced by Indian Muslims, but also about the nature of the transition which took place in 1947. Like most good films, this one doesn't try to answer all questions for us, but leaves us to reach our own conclusions about them.
 

Because of the poor subtitling, I have included a link to a general description of the film on this page, below, or you may link directly to http://www.filmindia.com/films/garland/garam.html to get details about the characters and their relationships. I don't expect you to repeat this information in your reviews, but nor should you get it wrong! The questions the film raises are both personal and socio-historical. There is of course the whole issue of the place of Muslims in post-partition India, and whether or not they should move to Pakistan. Some middle class Muslims from this family do, and apparently prosper. Yet others - whether it's Ammi, the grandmother, her son Salim, or Sikandar the grandson - feel that their personal, political, and historical ties to India are too strong to allow them to do so. The film certainly points to the special plight of a Muslim minority in independent India. At the same time, however, it is also a critique of the larger political system which produced partition (note how politicians are depicted in the film) and now runs independent India (Sikandar's Hindu and Sikh friends are equally unemployed).
 

REVIEW (and readings)

Your review of the film should try to set this film in its historical context, namely the politics surrounding India's partition. I have already given you a lecture on this earlier, and a handout. http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~sj6/filmHND04.htm The relevant chapters of your textbook do a very good job of summarizing the political and social events which produced this momentous event. I have asked you to read Mushirul Hasan's "Introduction" because he does a marvelous job summarizing the existing variety of scholarly writing by historians analyzing the partition of India. It also provides some more details of speeches etc., which are not present in the textbook. (Hint: Think about working on some aspect of the partition for your paper - Hasan has already done the preliminary research and outlined it for you! Your thesis still needs to be original of course)
 

Your review then, should demonstrate a familiarity with two things:

1. The history of partition.

2. How this history has been written about, the main trends, approaches, etc.
 

However, as I have already said to you before, I want this review, and the following one, to use your viewing of these films to suggest if and if so, how, films can help us re-examine the way we write histories. In other words, how can we use films to reach beyond the existing writing of the history of partition. For example, how could a film like Garam Hawa point us towards what is missing from the existing histories of India's partition? What sort of ideas could it give historians to usefully ADD to the histories they write? As I have said before, you can write such reviews only if you first understand the history, and the way these histories have been written, which of course, means that you need have done your readings!!
 

Best of luck, and my apologies for not being with you when you see Earth. The same general guidelines apply for the review. The film itself is much more recent, and easier to follow because of better subtitling and frequent English dialog. If Garam Hawa was set among Muslims in India after partition, Earth is set what is now across the border, in Pakistan, just before partition. Please feel free to email me with any questions you may have about the film or the readings. The reviews for Garam Hawa are due Nov. 14th. I want the reviews for Earth to be turned in the following Friday, so that we can get back to schedule.