Recurring post-colonial themes in Silent Waters

    In Silent Waters we encountered some of the same themes we’ve seen in other partition literature, such borders, boundaries, and divisions. In the film’s opening, we get a look at normal life in Pakistan in the 1980s, including a traditional Muslim wedding. This scene alone is packed with boundaries and divisions, of people crossing those boundaries and even of borderlands.
    In one clip a man leaves the group of married and unmarried men and crosses the red curtain to dance with his wife who is on the other side with the bride to be, married and other unmarried women. This seems to be an example of an acceptable form of border crossing, which will contrast with unacceptable crossings later.
    Furthermore, one might even consider the sight of theses marital festivities as a borderland as the bride and bridegroom are not single, but not yet married, either. And borders are crossed on the men’s side of the curtain as a man rises to dance with the paid female entertainer.
    In another example of borderlands, the two young lovers, Zubeida and Saleem, arrange a clandestine meeting while walking from school to home. They move from this borderland between their academic and their domestic lives to a graveyard, a borderland between life and death. This is where the young lovers meet to talk about their future together, so not only does the graveyard serve as a borderland, but it also foreshadows the fate of their romance, as Ayesha and Zubeida form an unspoken pact neither is able to uphold under the weight of Islamic nationalism.
    And as far as divisions go we see that after the British divided up India, then Pakistan set about dividing up itself. Consider the raising of the wall around the girls’ school. Even time itself fell under the sway of partition. I was reading Wikipedia’s entry on partition and it said even partitioned time was partitioned in 1947. Pakistan adopted “New Standard Time,” which put the country 30 minutes behind India. Weird, to think that the two countries even divided time when they split. This is like a bad divorce on crack.
    They even split up Heaven. When Ayesha is teaching the Koran to the little school girls both Sikhs and Muslims get a Heaven, but its not the same one. And finally, we get the division of Ayesha and Veero — one dies while the other lives on in the memory of Zubeida and Saleem: which one depends on your interpretation of the film.