Train to Pakistan

I finally got around to seeing this film the other day, and it was worth the wait. It tells the story of a small town on the border of India/Pakistan just as partition is ripping the cultures apart. Singh's novel of the same title came out in 1956, and was probably the first English language novel to deal with this traumatic historical event, which saw nearly 10 million people rendered homeless, and perhaps 1 million murdered, raped, and kidnapped. Rooks takes Singh's social realist narrative and faithfully transcribes it to the screen, with the allegory of India's tragic fate still bitterly intact. Hopefully, this film will gather a wider audience later in its life than it had upon release when it was all but ignored, in India and abroad. It has an important message to us all about the reality of cross-cultural harmony being destroyed by desperate and ignorant ideologues. Unfortunately, the current political climate in India and Pakistan seems largely uninterested in such a view right now.