When Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy was studying for her A-levels while growing up in Pakistan, she heard that Michael Jackson was playing a concert in India. The 17-year-old was desperate to go, but when she told her grandfather, he forbade her – not just from the concert, but from the country. “He said, ‘You are going to India over my dead body.’ He was a very logical man, so I wondered why.”
The answer lies in 1947, when Obaid-Chinoy’s grandfather became one of more than 15 million people who fled across the hastily drawn borders between the new country of Pakistan and newly independent India. Seventy years on, the migration it sparked is still one of the biggest in history, while the repercussions – from the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 to the ongoing hostility between the two now nuclear countries – still shape the subcontinent today.
Sitting in the refined surroundings of a hotel in Soho, London, Obaid-Chinoy says that, while the politics and brutality are often discussed, the personal stories of partition are too often ignored. For her grandfather, the experience was too emotional to talk about. “He said to me, ‘I left a chest of pain in India and I don’t want any of my family to go there and see it.’”
It’s this mixture of nostalgia and hurt she is exploring in Home 1947, an art installation created for the Manchester international festival. Dressed in a director’s uniform of black, made less severe by her long, glossy hair and fuchsia lipstick, Obaid-Chinoy is a commanding presence. So the contemplative nature of this project is something of a departure. As she discusses it, her voice softens. “This is personal. It’s an ode to my grandparents’ generation. How did it feel that, when you left your home, it not only stopped being your home, but became part of an enemy country?”
It’s a question that has held her attention for more than a decade. In 2007, the film-maker helped found the Citizens Archive of Pakistan – the first in the world, she says, to begin collecting oral histories of partition. “You read the textbooks, you see the news reports or watch archival footage, but everything is from the political point of view. What about the lives they left? The conversations they never finished? The scent of jasmine outside their bedroom window?”
Part of the artwork is a recreation of a pre-partition home, while another room contains films with personal stories. In one, a woman remembers leaving her childhood friend, recalling how they would sit for hours under their favourite mango tree, swapping secrets. A second has a police officer remembering the euphoria and spontaneous cheers that broke out when his ship docked in the new country of Pakistan.
Yet the horrors are not ignored. Between one and two million people were killed in the desperate scramble and communal bloodletting that followed the British decision to split the country in two. More than 75,000 women and girls were raped, and some trains ferrying refugees between the new nations arrived at their destinations filled with corpses. “It is about the experience,” says Obaid-Chinoy. “What it felt like to be on a train where your father gave a gun to your brother and said, ‘Shoot your mother and sisters if they come to rape them.’”
Obaid-Chinoy, now 38, was a student in the US when she started making films, spurred on by the fact that, after 9/11, “television screens in America were flooded with journalists who had parachuted into south Asia and didn’t understand it”. Unfortunately, she knew nothing about film-making. “It was the days of Yahoo and I typed in ‘visual journalism’. The words ‘documentary films’ popped up. So I watched one.”
A month later, she had found her first story: Afghan refugee children living on the streets of Karachi. She sent out a proposal to about 80 organisations, finally making a film for New York Times Television. It was an extraordinary start, but it’s not hard to see why she was successful. Obaid-Chinoy has the authority and directness of a woman who has learned to make her voice heard in a patriarchal society. Being a female film-maker, she says, “allows you access to places you would not be allowed to go as a man”. The trick, she says, is to find common ground and establish trust. But there’s one other thing: “Believe you deserve to be somewhere – even if it is an all-male jirga[tribal council] where women are not allowed.”
After A Girl in the River was released, an ‘honour killing’ bill was passed in Pakistan.
Obaid-Chinoy moved back to Karachi a few years ago. She describes it as home and the place she wants to bring up her two daughters (“I am in the business of bringing up feminists”). But she also talks about a sense of duty to “start difficult conversations” about Pakistan. In 2012, she won the country’s first Oscar for Saving Face. The film, about acid attack survivors, led to a mechanism for swifter prosecutions and more doctors doing reconstructive surgery on survivors.
In 2016, she won her second Oscar for A Girl in the River, a documentary about 19-year-old Saba, whose uncle and father try to kill her when she marries a man of her choosing. After her win, a previously stalled “honour” killing bill was passed in Pakistan, and today Saba – whose uncle and father were released and came back to live in the same neighbourhood – was granted asylum in Switzerland.
Success has not always made life easier for Obaid-Chinoy. Despite international recognition, there were loud complaints that her films tarnished the country’s reputation and pandered to negative western attitudes towards Pakistan. Unsurprisingly, she gives such criticism short shrift, pointing out that “honour” killings have been a focus for activists within Pakistan for decades, while her film’s contribution was to bring this to national – and international – attention.
“A Girl in the River has incredibly positive messages in it, too: a policeman who is a hero, a doctor who is a hero, a lawyer who is a hero. Am I glad international pressure forces society to confront an issue so horrific? Absolutely. If this is what it is going to take, I will work on that for the rest of my life.” The film has been shown, she says, in more than 300 screenings in Pakistan. One, at the University of Peshawar, highlighted why it was needed. “The boys and girls sat on different sides – the boys cheered the father, the girls cheered Saba.”
Which means, she says, that critics who worry about Pakistan’s reputation are missing the point. “If you don’t like your reflection in the mirror, don’t shoot the messenger.” By now, she is stabbing the table for emphasis. “Grow up. Confront your issues. Bring about change.” Her irritation stems in part from her belief that many of the attacks on her are motivated by a simple fact: “I am a woman. I am successful. And I am not afraid to speak my mind. And that doesn’t sit well with a lot of men – and women.”
Asked about her next projects, she reels off an exhaustive list that includes overseeing a series of 14 films, a sort of how-to guide for women and their rights in Pakistan: “How to file a police report, how to get a divorce, how to report rape, where you can go if the police won’t file your case.”
Is she expecting a backlash? Of course, she says serenely. “It is very hard to be a woman in Pakistan and speak your mind. You know there will be an attempt to silence you. And the more people do that with me, the more I know I am being successful.”
