Sarah Singh’s documentary
The Sky Below looks at many lives that were directly affected by the Partition. By Shrabasti Mallik
We have all learnt about the Partition and the circumstances that resulted it. But how often have we thought about the millions of people who lost their lives in the process and the families that were separatedIJ When Sarah Singh decided to bring out the many unheard voices that were lost in 1947, she discovered that there was more to the story than we have come across in textbooks. In her 75-minute documentary The Sky Below, the director has concisely portrayed a balanced voice of people in the two countries that were directly affected.
At the very onset, Sarah had the clear vision of wanting to make the documentary a part of the academic curriculum in India and Pakistan because she felt “history books are a lot of times influenced by those who have the power to determine what the history is. So in some ways people do not have a neutral sense of what happened.”
It took her two years of extensive research and travel in countries to gather all the information and footage she needed. In 2007, she finished the documentary before the 60th year of the Partition. “I wanted to screen the movie on that date. Very less people are bothered about the Partition and its aftermath. I wanted them to see and realise what the two countries had to go through and are still going through,” she said.
Trauma was one of the emotions that people went through. It was more important for Sarah to bring out the threads that are never really talked about. She shared, “There were things like people helping each other, the question of what happened to the women and about the Sindhi-Hindu story. These became important because they were not spoken about in the media, who only look at a particular aspect of the issue.”
The director feels that the two years that she spent while shooting were a blessing in disguise. The process provided her a very long period of time to be in a state of constant discovery. There were challenges, too. She said, “It is always difficult to find funding because everybody is so independent nowadays. I found none for this. Fortunately I was able to complete 98 per cent of the film on my own, otherwise it would have been very difficult.”
The other important thing for Sarah was to understand the place and the cultures, before she included them in her documentary. She recalled, “I was absolutely and utterly exhausted by travelling and digging information, talking to people about difficult confrontational issues and, in some cases, extremely traumatic things.” The documentary, she says, holds particular relevance to the recent attack at the office of the international weekly. She said, “We all are targeting a certain community. We don’t want to look at things in black and white.”