An Afghan writer impacted by the Indian director Imtiaz Ali’s recently released film starring Naseruddin Shah, talks to the film’s co-writer Nayanika Mahtani, and shares her thoughts about home, belonging, and love.
By Sola Mahfouz / Global Southasia
“Memory is a spiritual concept!” as the late Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky put it
London-based writer Nayanika Mahtani says that her generation inherited both the memory of Partition and the silence surrounding it. Her young adult novel titled ‘Across The Line’, winner of the South Asia Book Award, 2020, grapples with these issues.
The literary scholar Marianne Hirsch uses the term postmemory to describe this relationship to inherited trauma: The generation after a catastrophe does not remember it directly, but receives it through stories, photographs, behaviors, and emotional atmospheres.
Naynaika Mahtani’s grandparents had lived through the rupture. For them, she told me over a video call recently, it was too immediate to speak about. Her parents’ generation looked forward, concentrating on rebuilding their lives.
“And then came our generation, which has the emotional distance, I think, now, to be able to go back without a coloured vision and see it for what it was and tell the story and reclaim that silence.”
Coming from a politically fractured country like Afghanistan, one form of storytelling I am most drawn to is the moment when a nation’s history enters the quotidian life of an individual, when a political rupture becomes the story of one person’s longing. That, to me, is one of the modern forms of tragedy.
I came to Indian cinema through Afghanistan’s own political rupture. By the end of the Soviet war and the civil war that followed, Afghan cinema had been destroyed twice over: First as an artistic tradition, hollowed out by propaganda and censorship, and then as a physical institution, its theaters, archives, and studios damaged or lost to war.
In 2001, television and entertainment had returned to Afghanistan following years of Taliban rule, after the American invasion. The Afghan entertainment scene, such as it was, often felt like a spectacle of progress performed for Western donors. But for many young people, Indian films and television serials became a window into a wider world of storytelling. Like my siblings and cousins, I began following them. Without knowing when it happened, I learned Hindi and Urdu from them.
Ten years after leaving Afghanistan for the United States, that connection continues, but only very selectively. Of the few filmmakers I still follow, one is Imtiaz Ali.
Perhaps that is why Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga (I Will Return) moved me so deeply. The film follows 95-year-old Ishar Singh Grewal, known as Keenu, whose stroke and dementia return him to his youth in pre-Partition Sargodha and to Afsana, the Muslim woman he loved and called Jiya.
As his grandson Nirvair tries to piece together these memories, the film moves between the present and a Punjab where Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus once lived together before political borders hardened their identities and drove millions from their homes.
Though the film is framed through one man’s memory, it evokes a much larger history through fragments.
“Memory is not black and white,” says Nayanika Mahtani, who co-wrote the film. “It’s a reconstruction.”
The film places these private memories within a much wider body of testimony. Nayanika Mahtani said that she and Imtiaz Ali conducted interviews and consulted oral histories in India and Pakistan, drawing on The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, the Partition Museum in Amritsar, and the Stanford-linked 1947 Partition Archive.
The Sargodha of the film is also the Sargodha of her family before Partition. The details of Keenu and Jiya’s world came from memories carried within her own family.
Small details in the movie originate from Nayanika Mahtani’s personal memories. The ‘chand bali’, the moon-shaped earring, for example, came from an earring she herself had once lost. Imtiaz Ali transformed it: “He used it as a recurring motif, which basically became this call to a time of innocence, just not letting go of the past, and how that can keep you afloat, even when you know it’s unattainable.”
This is how a lost earring became a vessel for an entire vanished world.
The title itself comes from Keenu’s scream from the top of a moving train carrying him to India, a promise to the love he left on the other side of the new border.
He wants to return home, but home is really the love he left behind: a memory that once gave him comfort and has now become a source of torture. He cannot return to either Jiya or Sargodha. Both are unattainable.
In this way, what began with the absurd decision of a British lawyer drawing a border becomes a lifelong tragedy for ordinary people. Nayanika told me that her grandparents never blamed the people who had once been their neighbors for the violence; they were not the ones engaged in it. “It was orchestrated. It was political.”
Parts of the film are hard to watch. They made me cry and left me reflecting. But still, as each fragment of memory unfolded, I wanted to cross into the screen and remain with the characters before Partition, to stay a little longer in their happy times.
The film moves with sorrowful beauty between the present and the past. Though it is about Partition, it remains relevant today. Then, as now, millions were displaced, leaving their homes on one side of the border for the other, a double tragedy on both sides.
Our present world is still filled with such tragedies. The final song turns directly toward these human experiences. The end credits share the words of an anonymous refugee:
“If I had a choice between leaving my home and dying, I would have gladly chosen death. Unfortunately, I did not have such a choice.”
There is something beautiful about the way art can complete an unfinished conversation, while also using it to engage with the present. I often ask myself: What responsibility do we have towards those who have suffered or are suffering?
Nayanika Mahtani said that when she watched the rough cut alone in Imtiaz Ali’s office, “I felt like my grandparents were sitting with me. I felt like they were there with me.”
She felt that something had finally been said between them.
“I think I came to do this,” she said. “That was my responsibility. That was what I came for.”
But by the end of the movie, the responsibility passes from the artists to the audience. The final song is an imploring, a plea, to embrace the whole shared earth. Ultimately, the film reminds us that human love is what unites us, and that we must keep searching for it, no matter how great the hatred dividing us becomes.
Main Vaapas Aaunga was released in theaters on 12 June, 2026 and has recently been released on Netflix.
Sola Mahfouz is an Afghan writer living in Boston, drawn to the voice beneath the fractures of existence. A voracious reader of global voices that reflect the multiplicity of human experience, she writes to give shape to what resists expression — what language forgets but the soul remembers. She is currently working on her first historical novel set in Afghanistan.
Event alert: Sunday 30 August – The Southasia Peace Action Network will host a conversation titled: ‘Home, love, loss… and ‘dosti’ (friendship), with Nayanika Mahtani, co-writer of the acclaimed film ‘Mein Vaapas Aaunga’ (I will Return), artist Salima Hashmi, author of the memoir ‘Waiting in the Wings / Enter Stage Left’ (2025), and Urvashi Butalia, author of ‘The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India’ (1999).
Time: 9 am ET / 6 pm Pk / 6.30 pm India/ 6:45 pm Nepal/ 7 pm Bangladesh.
Register here for the Zoom session
Or watch live at YouTube.com/southasiapeace
This is a Global Southasia (formerly Sapan News) syndicated feature available for republication with due credit to sapannews.com.
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