The film’s plot is built around Parzaan, the son of Cyrus and Shernaz Pithawala, who ‘disappears’ during the violence of 2002, never to be found. While escaping a murderous mob of Hindu militants with Parzaan and his sister Dilshad, Shernaz loses her son. Cyrus – who works as a film projectionist – is away at work at that time.
The rest of the film follows the story of Cyrus and Shernaz trying frantically to find their son. They console their daughter, Dilshad, that her brother will return and then she can tie him a rakhi. Their search results in humiliating encounters with the callous and corrupt police system.
While the film shows that the violence unfolds after the Godhra train-burning incident, it does not hold this up as the precipitating event. Rather, right from the beginning, the film offers a record of how activists of the Hindu Right were involved in planning the pogrom, using maps to target specific Muslim-majority areas. Although in a particular scene Muslims are shown bursting crackers to celebrate Pakistan’s win in a cricket match, and a later scene connects Muslim anger to jihad, the film overall does not stereotype Muslims.
The Pithawalas live in a multi-religious housing complex called Mohmadi Mansion, inhabited mostly by working-class and lower-middle-class families. Muslims, Parsis and Hindus live as friends, chatting and laughing with each other.
Parzania’s Mohmadi Mansion is not a ghetto, unlike Dev’s Noor Manzil. A cinematic tableau holds it up as an allegory for Indian secularism. To establish the syncretism of secular living, the audience is taken inside Hindu, Muslim and Parsi households, each of which is marked by religious signifiers – images or symbols specific to a particular religion.
It is a space also marked by exchanges that signify secular modernity. For example, an elderly Muslim man, sharing the news about his niece getting married to a ‘nice Hindu boy’ who she met on the internet, says, ‘Gone are the days of satis and burqa’. The Muslim-sounding name of the complex, however, gives the audience a sense of why it was targeted by Hindu militant mobs. The majority-minority dynamics vis-à-vis Parsis and Hindus (and by extension Muslims), and in the larger context of national identity, are made clear in several sequences of the film.
For example, in one scene Alan looks at an image of Zarathustra pasted on the wall in Cyrus’s projection room at the cinema theatre and asks: ‘Is this Allah?’ Cyrus replies with a smile: ‘I’m a Parsi, not a Muslim.… We are like the Jews of India.’
In another scene, Shernaz, while putting Parzaan and Dilshad to bed, tells them a story about who the Parsis are and how they arrived in India. She says that when the Parsis arrived in Gujarat a thousand years back in a ship from Persia, the king of Gujarat told them that there was not enough place to accommodate them. The king demonstrated this by filling a bowl with milk till the brim. In response, a Parsi priest took a spoonful of sugar and mixed it with the milk and told the king that, like the sugar which blended with the milk, Parsis would blend with Indians and make their culture sweeter. Shernaz ends her story by saying: ‘Since then Parsis and Indians have lived in peace and harmony.’
On both these counts, the relationship between Parsis and Indians within the film’s narrative offers two interrelated addresses. First, it says that although Parsis were outsiders, they assimilated so well into Indian (read: Hindu) culture that their community had never been a reason for any acrimony (unlike the Muslims). This story in many ways sets up the film’s condemnation of the tragedy to follow, that despite the fact that Parsis are a peaceful community, only because they also have Islamic names (like Muslims), the Pithawalas were targeted by Hindu mobs. Secondly, even thousand years ago the core of the Indian nation was Hindu, and not only Parsis but also Muslims even today remain on the margins of this core.
However, as Gyanendra Pandey has argued, while the Hindu nation thought of both Parsis and Muslims as outsiders, the former were accepted as Indians because they were thought to be refugees fleeing persecution, while the latter were looked at as aggressors. Moreover, as a ‘microscopic minority’, Parsis were never thought of as having the capacity to threaten the Hindu core of the Indian nation.
Pandey explains the Hindu logic behind the Indian nation’s construction of itself: The Parsis remained different in religion, culture, and ‘language’ … but they had contributed significantly to ‘our’ political, economic, intellectual, and social development. The Muslims had, on the other hand, put forward their own, separatist demands, and had stood in the way of the united struggle against the British. They had not accepted ‘our’ conception of India: they were therefore not Indians.
Through Cyrus’s and Shernaz’s accounts, the film offers a historical record of the construction of the Indian nation, to distinguish Parsis from Muslims, and to foreground their harmonious relationship with the Hindu nation. Either way, it establishes and holds on to the idea that India was historically (and thus naturally) Hindu.
The Gujarat High Court’s judgment in the Best Bakery case made a reference to Parsis by using an almost identical logic to that analysed by Pandey. The court invoked the identity of the Indian Parsi to state how there was a need to ‘learn the patriotic feeling to be Indian along with personal religious observations from Parsis’. The judgment recommended that Parsis be considered a test case for demonstrating how this could be achieved without ‘obstruction’.
Clearly then, the judgment singles out Muslims, without naming them, as the ‘anti-national … who does not adhere to the essential nature, culture and religion of India’. This essential nature, culture and religion, by default, is thus considered Hindu by the court.
The plot in Parzania unfolds through the narrations of Alan, the white, American man who has come to live in Ahmedabad, researching on Gandhi for his PhD thesis. Alan is coming to terms with his own complicated Christian past, and drinks bootlegged liquor incessantly from his hip flask in a state where alcohol is banned by law. His voice-over provides the historical and political context to the pogrom, particularly with regard to the rise of the Hindu Right.
This narration grounds the event of the pogrom in evidence that is presented not just as commentary but also as factual record keeping. Alan’s non-diegetic voice-over accompanies scenes where he is writing his thesis on an old Lexikon 80 typewriter. These are dramatically charged scenes, where he is writing in a stream-of-consciousness fashion after getting drunk on bootlegged liquor to tide over the violence that he has witnessed outside.
It is ‘a scene of writing and its subsequent erasure, literally’, where Alan records his memories of witnessing and burns the papers he has typed on. The use of the typewriter as the technology of recording memory and the material destruction of what has been recorded – unlike the use of computers to virtually record and delete written text – lends an affective intensity to the impossibility of recording (and thus remembering) the enormity of the violence.
Excerpted with permission from Ways of Remembering – Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in New India, Oishik Sircar, Cambridge University Press.
