'Jinnah' - the saga of a nation

Delayed by controversies, Jinnah, a film about Pakistan's founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, is finally being shown in cinema halls across Pakistan to packed audiences seeking more than just entertainment. Described as the country's answer to Richard Attenborough's multi- Oscar winner Gandhi, the film, according to its producer, former Pakistani High Commissioner to Britain, Akbar S. Ahmad, tries to give a human face to a man who was thought to have been austere and inflexible. 

A moving scene in the film shows Jinnah weeping when he saw the suffering and bloodshed after the subcontinent's partition, by departing British colonial rulers, in August 1947 to create Pakistan. 

The film has won golden and silver awards for the best foreign film in the United States. It also got an excellent response at the September 1998 Montreal film festival. 

Pakistanis who have seen the film do not come out talking of the role of religion in the Pakistani state, but of how patriotic it made them feel. 

"I think that everything that was said in history books has come alive through this movie," said one of them in Islamabad. "It showed that Quaid -e- Azam (the Great Leader ) was a very tolerant man. It didn't show that... we should try and suppress the minorities," said another. 

"The movie develops patriotism among the viewers and I suggest that every Pakistani should watch it," said a schoolteacher who had come to see it with her pupils. 

"The movie teaches us that we should love Pakistan," says Imran, a businessman. 

Like Gandhi, the film opens at the last moments of the leader's life. The first scene shows Fatima, Jinnah's sister, coming out of the ambulance that broke down while taking Jinnah to the hospital. 

The script then moves into the realm of fantasy, with a post-death scene where a prompter shouts at a clerk to "open" Jinnah's file. 

A scene of one of the violent Hindu-Muslim clashes that erupted after the subcontinent's partition, is shown in the background. Jinnah says: "I had no ambitions except to fight for the Muslims of India." 

In another scene, Mahatma Gandhi suggests to top Congress Party Leader Jawaharlal Nehru and British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten that after the departure of the British, the Congress nominate Jinnah as the prime minister of an undivided India. 

Here the prompter comments: "Jinnah sahib (sir) ! Why didn't you accept the proposal." Jinnah replies: "It wouldn't have worked." 

The film also touches on the much talked about romantic link, that was said to have existed between Nehru and Mountbatten's wife Edwina. In one of the scenes, Jinnah rebukes Liaquat Ali Kahn (before the latter became Pakistan's first prime minister) for coming to him with intimate letters exchanged by Nehru and Edwina. When the prompter asks Jinnah why he did not take political advantage of this evidence of the Nehru-Edwina relationship, Jinnah curtly replies: "We do not stoop to this level." 

In Pakistan, the Nehru-Edwina affair is seen to have been a major factor influencing the demarcation of the India-Pakistan boundary in a way that Pakistan complains was to its disadvantage. 

It was not easy to make a film about a man revered in Pakistan as one who gave a safe home to Muslims in the subcontinent. 

Many Pakistanis, for example, objected to Jinnah's portrayal by Hollywood film star Christopher Lee, who has also acted as Dracula. 

The five million-U.S. dollar film got sizeable contributions from Pakistani-Americans. 

Work on the film began when Nawaz Sharif was prime minister. 

But a controversy soon flared up over whether Jinnah should be portrayed as a secular and liberal Muslim leader or a deeply religious personality. 

The film shows him as a liberal and progressive leader with a largely secular vision of Pakistan. Until the time Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was prime minister in the 1970s, Jinnah was projected as moderate and liberal, and a champion of western democracy. However, after military ruler Zia ul Haq overthrew and hanged Bhutto, Jinnah was officially shown as a deeply religious person. 

Although the Sharif government withdrew financial backing to the film, the military regime that has replaced him pulled out all stops to let the film be completed. 

The film's producer, a fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge University and professor in-charge of the prestigious Allama Iqbl Chair at the University of Cambridge, explains the main thrust of his work. " I want to discuss the role of Muslim leadership and the direction it should take in the near future. Jinnah's greatness does not come down if his wife smoked or his daughter married a non-Muslim. His greatness is in the creation of Pakistan," he says. 

Not everyone is praising the film. According to some, it humiliates the great leader by showing only the negative aspects of his life. They compare it to Attenborough's depiction of Gandhi which only touched on the positive sides of Gandhi's personality. 

Jamshed, a former history student was not satisfied with the film, describing it as a futile effort. He says there was no need to give the Nehru-Edwina Mountbatten affair so much time in the film as it had no relevance to Jinnah's life. "Moreover, his five-year married life period has been given 45 minutes which was also not needed," he said. 

"It is a documentary film which has failed to cover real historical episodes of the Pakistan Movement," says Ali Haider, another Jinnah viewer. 

Before the film's release the sons of Pakistan's first prime minister had tried to stop its screening. But a court rejected their plea for dropping some scenes in the film that they complained, depicted their father Liaquat Ali Khan in a derogatory light. But the film was in bigger trouble in February when the film's producer was accused by director Jamil Dehlvi of financial misappropriations in its making. 

(Copyright Inter Press Service) 

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