Karvaan

Lajma, a Pakisti woman who spent her youth in India, returns in middle age to the place she grew up. When she sees her former parental home in New Delhi she is captivated by memories. Flashbacks, in which she reconstructs her life, lard her journey through India. A disappointing journey, because a lot has changed since her youth. Not only the house has become overgrown, the people with whom Lajma grew up are either dead or out of their minds. Her own brother, Divan Chand, who wants to protect his carefully constructed social status, has trouble receiving her. Butalia interweaves this network of family relationships in the disintegrated Hindu family with the story of a Muslim family, that lived in the same house at the time. Karvaan is a personal reconstruction of the vast migration of Hindus and Muslims in 1947 and its consequences. The film is about the need to return to places from the past, to come to terms with that, however painful that can be. Pankaj Butalia wanted to tell this story to throw more light on today’s Indian-Pakistani question and to understand what role is played by reminiscences in each of us. Pankaj Butalia: ‘The complex stories we bear with us in our soul reflect the suppressed patterns in society and vice versa.’