Deepa Mehta speaks with Subhash K Jha about 26 years of her Partition classic 1947: Earth, which starred Aamir Khan.
Watching Aamir excel as the communal Dil Nawaz in Deepa Mehta’s 1947: Earth it is hard to believe that Aamir was not Deepa’s first choice. Shah Rukh Khan was.
Aamir Khan argued and battled with director Deepa Mehta all through the making of this film. He hated the way his character shaped up. He hated everything to do with the film. But as Dil Nawaz the ice-cream seller during those troubled months of Partition, who has the hots for the ayah Nandita Das, Aamir gave the most controlled performance of his career, bringing out the communalization of a perfectly sane and reasonable man during the unreasonable insanity of communal riots. More than the spoken words we saw the change from a gentle soul to a hardliner in Aamir’s body language and his incandescent eyes. What a performance! Deepa Mehta still thinks this is Aamir’s best performance to date.
Deepa Mehta spoke to Subhash K Jha on 26 years of 1947: Earth. “Thank God you liked 1947: Earth. You had called my Fire “despicable”, do you remember? But yes, 1947: Earth is my own favourite too. Bapsi Sidhwa, on whose novel Earth, the film is based, famously said , “All wars are fought on women’s bodies. Earth set in 1947 during the partition of India, sadly still remains , 78 years later , the fallout of sectarian war. Hatred and pillage are still practiced with seeming elan , sometimes with terrifying results , all over the world. We have to thank the heritage of colonialism as well our innate sense of righteousness and the superiority of our own religion over that of the ‘ other’. There is so much I ponder over what the film Earth reflects. The dissolution of friends, the helplessness of children , the tragedy of lovers.”
Deepa speaks about the terrific cast. “Nandita was superb and a dream to work with as ‘ayah’. Aamir and Rahul gave frightening and dreamlike performances , respectively. Although Aamir didn’t like his own performance I still believe he was splendid. In India, I was labelled ‘anti-Hindu’. 1947: Earth, it remains the favourite of all my films. Sadly, the relevance of its subject, sectarian war sees no sign of abating the world over.”
