Two elderly men sit at a table; a candle flickers next to a pot of coffee and a board game. With each roll of the dice they share memories from childhood, shaped by the partition of British India in 1947. When the borders were redrawn, 15m people were displaced: Ishar Das Arora, a Hindu, travelled from newly independent Pakistan to India, while Iqbal-ud-din Ahmed, a Muslim, made the opposite journey. One man recounts a trip on a train in the wake of a massacre, walking carefully past the corpses slumped in their seats. The other remembers following a refugee caravan as it ambled, hungry and exhausted, through a drought-parched landscape.
“Child of Empire”, a 16-minute animated “docufiction experience”, recently had its premiere at the Sundance film festival. Using virtual-reality technology, viewers can follow the two men on their grim odysseys, often immersed in events, at other times watching from a distance. Each character is based on the experiences of several real people; some details come from the lives of the film-makers’ grandfathers. Omi Zola Gupta, the film’s writer, drew on this research for the dialogue and Stephen Stephenson used old photographs to accurately depict the terrains and towns in his animation.
The idea for the film came from Project Dastaan, Urdu for “story”. A peace-building initiative founded by students at Oxford University in 2018, it reconnects people made refugees by the Partition with their communities and ancestral homes in present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, using a mix of archival material and digital technology. The release of “Child of Empire” coincides with Partition’s upcoming 75th anniversary in August. Organisers hope to show the film in schools and museums across the subcontinent.
Mr Stephenson’s animations are effective in their simplicity. The characters look as if they are made from papier-mâché, which emphasises that events are being seen from a child’s perspective. The scenery is depicted in broader strokes and mountain ranges are rendered beautifully as a delicate smudge of grey, as though shrouded in mist. The visuals can be alarming, too, as when a stream of blood runs down a road.
Such computer-generated animations can risk making the experience feel like a video game, lessening the emotional impact of the story. But the film remains measured in tempo and tone; quieter moments between the two characters contrast with the disturbing flashback scenes. A sequence in which the viewer is invited to participate in Holi, the Hindu spring festival, is joyful as bursts of colour fill the headset. “Our biggest challenge was giving a sense of the horrors of [the men’s] travels, but then not putting off the viewers because the actual stories we were hearing from them were gruesome,” explains Erfan Saadati, the film’s co-creator.
“Child of Empire” highlights the similarities between journeys undertaken from either side of the border as well as the scale of the upheaval. Both stories begin in the Punjab region and both characters are saved by members of the other religion. Sparsh Ahuja, the film’s other co-creator and a founder of Project Dastaan, says they were conscious of keeping “a balanced story between the Indian and Pakistani perspectives, and picked stories that reflected the common political narrative of their home country”. Advisers to the project included Faisal Devji, a historian, and the journalist Anita Rani.
The creators hope to remind viewers that it is “ordinary people that suffer the most when nationalisms are created and torn apart by political elites,” explains Mr Ahuja. They also hope to draw historians’ and documentarians’ attention to the possibilities of this new technology when depicting complex crises of sectarianism, colonialism and identity. For Project Dastaan, virtual reality has proved a useful tool in cultural preservation, a way of enlivening fading memories and customs and of immersing viewers in the lives of others. ■