Docu Tries to Relive Days After Police Action

Hyderabad:As Telangana marks the integration of Hyderabad with India on September 17, a documentary tries to recall those days and the impact it had on several families.

“This is a story that we grew up with. It comes up at the dinner table, in random conversations after a film,” said Khurram Murad, who co-directed the 37-minute documentary ‘When Pomegranate Turns Grey’ with Thouteeq K.

The Shehr Festival organised for the first time by The Deccan Archive foundation its second screening at Dhi Contemporary on Thursday, followed by a conversation between writer Daneesh Majid and Murad.

Murad tried to live those days through the dread and dreams of his grandmother Gulnar, as the film puts it. “It shakes the whole idea of who you are, where you come from, what your family story is, what could have been a possible future,” Murad said of the three-year project as he learnt what happened.

Gulnar was 16 during the Police Action. She lost a brother in the action, while a sister went to Pakistan and never returned. Gulnar spoke little about 1948 to the next generation because she feared her own fears would pass to her children.

However, the film offered little historical context for Operation Polo, a concern Majid also raised after the screening, pointing out that viewers unfamiliar with Hyderabad’s 1948 history may struggle to place the testimony. Murad said this was deliberate, and added, “We made a conscious decision. We opened a window. People who watch the film can go and learn more.”

Gulnar’s testimony describes the violence directly, in scenes familiar from Partition accounts.

She recalls warnings that “goondas” were coming to loot, attackers breaking down the family door and killing her brother, and the military arriving later.

Soldiers grabbed girls, she says, while women jumped into a well. In another memory, someone covered a crying baby’s mouth to keep their hiding place secret; the child died on her aunt’s lap. “May our enemies never face such dire times,” Gulnar says, a line that resists the cycle of remembered persecution being inflicted in return.

Murad returned after the screening to the word older relatives used for the event. They often shortened “Police Action” further and called it simply “action”. “‘Action’ is an event. It is a reference point in time,” he said. Families located marriages, migrations and the building of homes around it. “They describe marriages, migration, everything in relation to ‘action’,” Murad concluded.