The Times by Chris Petit

The opening of the short story by the Urdu writer Saadat Hasan Manto, on which Partition (Channel 4) is based, provides a good summary: “After the partition of the country, it occurred to the respective governments of India and Pakistan that inmates of lunatic asylums, like prisoners, should also be exchanged. Muslim lunatics in India should be transferred to Pakistan and Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani asylums should be sent to India”. Manto’s story is colloquial, droll and dead-pan, about the lunacy of the partition of 1947; the lunatics sensibly conclude that the whole idea is quite mad.

Tariq Ali and Ken McMullen’s adaptation is an ambitious affair, which replaces the deceptively casual air of the original with a severe formality. The film is shot on enclosed studio sets as a series of carefully composed contrasts between the starkness of the asylum and the ritualized institutions of conference and dinner tables, where talk is about the nature of power. What the British like to excuse as ironies of history, the Indians take to be euphemisms for imperial strategy. Ideas dominate Partition. The asylum becomes a neat reverse mirror for the seeming order of the political order and, for emphasis, the same people play both lunatics and rulers.

The film is shot in long takes with a slowly moving camera (usually involving a move to the left, for those interested in significance), or via reflections (which offer a series of reverses to mirror the thematic development). The general air of disorientation is a result of McMullen’s wanting to create a mildly hallucinatory feel. Conversations go full circle and start to repeat themselves. Sometimes the script declares itself awkwardly: “All power is defenceless against resistance”. Although there is surface elegance, this is not conventional viewing, and not easy. In spite of a striking combination of colour and monochrome sequences, lit to achieve maximum tactility, the style belongs not to television, but to the minimalism of theoretical cinema.

Partition is a deliberately contrived work, and it demonstrates, by default, how unexperimental television drama has become.