Religion and Zinda Bhaag

                There are two crucial scenes in Zinda Bhaag that point to the absence of exile’s association with religion. There’s a minor reference to this in the funeral scene during climax when Chitta’s dead body comes back. Khaldi, who at this point is utterly desperate to leave the country, approaches Chitta’s father and asks him for his passport. It appears somewhat selfish, even though we already see Khaldi sob over the death of his close friend. But the desperate times he is in necessitate such painstaking decisions which Khaldi has to take. And hence he comes off as being irreverent of a religious tradition of a Muslim community which sits together and mourns the death of a person for days on end.

                But there’s also not a lot of understanding of religious ceremonies on the part of the exile during lighter moments. In another scene early on in the film (which was missing in the version we saw in class), Khaldi and his friends go to a bungalow to fix an air conditioner. At the same time a dars takes place at the house which a ceremony delivered by Islamic scholars on traditions and rituals of Islam. Such meetings are usually attended by women belonging to privileged backgrounds who are not exactly working and can afford to spend time discoursing in such activities within social spaces where they meet people from the same social statuses.

Khaldi and his friends are alien to this setting. To them such religious activities are pastimes that the rich afford and amount to mere abstract discussions. The woman leading the meeting says:  “remember, sisters, we have to think in terms of horizontal and vertical.” And then she asks the guests to respond to her when she says: “So, sisters, the horizontal is us, and the vertical is…?” to which the women reply together: “Allah”. Khaldi and his friend (Tambi), through a facial expression shared between each other, show a complete lack of understanding of this interaction between the speaker and the attendants, not understanding one bit, what the women were implying. This lack of affiliation with the dominant religious engagement ties with the film’s overall objective of portraying these exilic figures as being dissociated from the national discourse.

(CP)