This Deepa Mehta movie is a somewhat boggy work covering over 60 years in the turbulent history of India and Pakistan from just before the second world war up to Indira Gandhi's repressive "Emergency" of the late 1970s, as they affect five generations of a well-off Muslim clan and their associates in Kashmir, Agra, Mumbai, and Karachi. It brings together Dickens, Kipling and Shakespeare, Christianity, Hinduism and Islam, comedy, tragedy and farce, and has as its moral and dramatic fulcrum the year 1947 when the misjudged partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan was insisted upon by the Muslims and acquiesced in by the departing British. The further break up of what is now just called Pakistan from East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1974 is largely depicted as a body pile up ending in the split, but was precipitated by the western parts trying to impose Urdu on the Bengalis, who were not about to give up their culture and language.
Salman Rushdie wrote the script from his 1981 novel , and his Rushdie's brilliant insight was to bring together the private and public lives of those involved by inventing a mystical bond between the children born around the midnight hour of 17 August 1947, which is the birthday of modern India. Why the movie was so long in coming is hard to say, but it brings all sorts of walks of life together under one film umbrella, and it is fascinating to watch.
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