Breaking all the boundaries

Irrfan Khan speaks Punjabi for the first time in Qissa, a drama set in the chaotic aftermath of the 1947 partition of Pakistan and India.

Qissa is about Umber Singh, a Sikh played by Irrfan Khan who is forced to flee his village during the creation of India and Pakistan in 1947. Courtesy Heimatfilm

Set in the aftermath of the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition, Qissa is a beguiling family drama starring the enigmatic Irrfan Khan as Umber Singh, a Sikh trying to forge a new life for his family after they have been uprooted from their home in Rawalpindi, in what is now Pakistan.

“Partition really works as a kind of metaphor,” says Qissa’s director Anup Singh. “The film begins with the partition and then shows how we live these partitions in our everyday lives. I want to deal with all kinds of limits.”

Singh looks at how one family copes with being part of a community living in forcible exile. “There are various journeys taken in the film,” he says. “The journey of Umber Singh and how he chooses to create this whole world that he can control, and give himself a future that history and destiny have taken away from him. This is very different from his wife, who accepts what happened and believes that it’s not out of vengeance that they can create a new life, but acceptance.”

Singh’s own family was displaced in 1947. His grandparents were forced to leave India and the director, born in 1961, grew up in Tanzania. “I have lived through stories of exile all my childhood,” Singh says. “The stories of my grandfather had a profound impact on me. His were stories of bitterness.”

In the film, the father of three daughters is so desperate for a son to carry his family name into future generations that when his wife gives birth to yet another girl, he convinces himself that the child is a boy.

As we see his fourth child grow up, gender politics have an increasingly prominent role and the story asks what it means to be a man or a woman. “We know in a lot of communities from all over the world, the idea of a wife is that of a lesser person, one who is defined by the husband,” says Singh. “The same goes for a child. A female child is defined very differently from a male child.”

Trying to find an actor with the right gravitas to play the conflicted father led the director to Khan. “When I was writing the script, I knew I needed an actor like Dilip Kumar,” says Singh. “Actors who do not cheat you, do not give you prepackaged emotions. Choosing ­Irrfan was simple – he has a quality of repose, an ease, he is not scared to allow you inside his vulnerabilities. Almost like a poet of performance he builds things slowly.”

The fastidious Khan, however, faced a major obstacle when he took up the role. “It was the first time I had to speak Punjabi in my life,” he says. “I was concerned about that aspect of the character. I took lessons, practised with friends to get it right.”

Playing a Sikh also came with another unexpected complication: “If you aren’t used to the pagdi [turban] and you have to wear it every day, it is actually more difficult than you imagine,” says Khan.

Also difficult was trying to find an actress who could pass for a man.

“It was a long process. We looked in Delhi, Punjab and even London,” says the director. “I saw hundreds of auditions and then we had the great luck of seeing Tillotama Shome. She reminded me of my mother when I was a child. I don’t tell her this, as I’m sure she doesn’t want to be seen as my mum.”

The director says it took 12 years to make the tear-jerker. “It’s not an easy film, it doesn’t fall into any predetermined genre and it had some people looking at me as if I was as mad as a hatter.”

• Qissa screens at 9pm on Saturday at Emirates Palace and on November 2 at Marina Mall’s Vox 6. See www.abudhabifilmfestival.ae/en for more information.