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A character in search of an audience

Ever since the Richard Attenborough epic, Gandhi, swept to superhit status and garnered a whole heap of Oscars way back in 1982, a body of opinion in Pakistan has felt the need for a similar film on the life and times of Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

Thus, wealthy Pakistanis, mostly expats, came together to finance Jamil Dehlavi's film Jinnah -- but the work is far from over.

Although Dehlavi, who is both producing and directing the film, has finished his work, the movie lacks for distributors in the United States and Europe. And people associated with the film believe that time is running out.

Investors in Jinnah include former prime minister Moeen Qureshi but, as actor Richard Ashby, who portrays India's then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru in the film, notes, ''They're just amateurs... If they're going to find a distributor, now is the time to do it.''

More problematic is that Jinnah -- which has been subjected to months of controversy within Pakistan over its portrayal of the westernised intellectual who pushed for Pakistan's creation -- is, in many ways, a defensive work which actually suffers in comparison to Gandhi.

Attenborough's epic had drawn flak in Pakistan because its brief portrayal of Jinnah conformed to the Western stereotype of the leader: as a humourless, ambitious aristocrat who sips wine while working to carve a Muslim state out of British India.

Dehlavi's central character is a different man entirely: frequently witty, compassionate, loving to his wife and sister, worried about potential Hindu-Muslim violence.

Portrayed by British actor Christopher Lee -- who, Pakistani cynics jibed, is known mainly for playing Dracula -- the Jinnah of the eponymous film is recognisably human and laudable, while still being a shrewd and even ruthless politician.

Lee's Jinnah did not want a theocratic state run by mullahs -- in the occasionally simplistic script written by Dehlavi and noted Jinnah scholar Akbar Ahmed -- clearly is a product of British and Western training. He is seen on two occasions reprimanding Muslim zealots about the need for women's rights, even though he also insists that his Parsi wife 'Ruttie' (played by Indira Varma) converted to Islam before their marriage.

''We wanted to show that the only man who founded a Muslim country in our century was a liberal politician and a modern intellectual,'' says Dehlavi.

Yet the team behind Jinnah have produced a portrait of Pakistan's founder that is neither here nor there -- and is equally likely to win objections from Islamists, liberals and Indians over how history is represented.

When the celluloid Jinnah stages debates on the rights of minority Muslims in a free India with Nehru and Gandhi (played by Sam Dastoor), the movie comes briefly alive with a look at the vexing questions the three leaders faced: what would be the shape of a new India? And could Muslims fit into a democracy heavily weighted to the Hindu majority?

Those questions, unfortunately, are quickly sidestepped. Instead, the film's makers place considerable weight on the ridiculous idea that the sorry fate of Partition and of Pakistan was heavily influenced by an affair between Nehru and Lady Edwina Mountbatten, wife of England's last viceroy.

Rather than simply correcting the unflattering impression of Jinnah in Gandhi, Dehlavi and Ahmed show a radically different world in which Gandhi is as conniving as he is noble, and in which Nehru's ambitions for power -- not Jinnah's -- push forward the split of the subcontinent into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan.

It is also a world, sceptical historians note, where Hindus slaughter Muslims frequently, but Muslim atrocities are only mentioned and not shown.

Perhaps the strongest sign of the film's defensiveness is a literal trial, conducted in a mock-afterworld, where Jinnah once again dons a lawyer's robe to try Lord Mountbatten (effectively portrayed as an amiable dolt by James Fox) for his culpability in the problems that plagued Pakistan's birth. The loss of Kashmir, the brutality in which one million people died crossing the Indo-Pakistan border -- all of that, the film suggests, is owed to the Mountbattens.

In short, Jinnah seems to be targeted at Pakistani nationalists. Ironically, however, that community demanded dozens of changes in Dehlavi's original film, including scenes suggesting that Pakistan's founder regretted the state he had helped create once he saw the violence of its birth.

The final cut still shows Jinnah weeping over the deaths of Partition, while an uncomprehending crowd cheers him on. And there are a few remarkable moments, particularly a series of amusing exchanges between Jinnah and an angel (played by Shashi Kapoor) who must judge whether the Pakistani leader deserves a happy afterlife or not. (Muslim groups have also objected to the angel sequences.)

For the most part, however, the film fails to show what kind of state Jinnah wanted to create, and indeed makes little effort to show Pakistan at all. East Pakistan -- which broke away later to become Bangladesh -- is not even mentioned, and there is almost no examination of the differences between India's Congress party and the Muslim League.

For all the effort, Jinnah lacks a centre -- and Pakistan's founder, and his creation, remain as enigmatic at the film's end as they have ever been. It is an unusually ambiguous movie which deserves to be seen, but it may well be one that never finds its audience.

UNI

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