‘Ms Marvel‘ follows the story of a Pakistani-American teenage girl, Kamala Khan, played by Iman Vellani, a Pakistani-Canadian actor. Kamala, who is a massive superhero fan, discovers that she has superpowers after receiving a gold bangle from her grandmother Sana, played by veteran Pakistani actress Samina Ahmed.
The latest episode of the show has Kamala travelling back in time to when her great-grand mother Aisha, played by Mehwish Hayat, was migrating to Pakistan in 1947. The episode is rife with emotion, as Oscar-winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy successfully evokes the bittersweet chaos and sorrow of what the migration must have felt like.
https://twitter.com/msmarvelupdates/status/1542569051335151618
https://twitter.com/kidofmisfortune/status/1542054191451017222
But one Partition related scene in particular has got people worked up. In the scene, Kamala's Nani tells her about the emotional duality of identity that came with the Partition.
However, some people seem to think that the last sentence, when Nani says that people are claiming identities based off of an idea by the British is problematic and not an accurate portrayal of history.
There are some who argue that this idea takes away the agency of the Hindus and Muslims who fought hard to get their independence.
https://twitter.com/jaff1r/status/1542084975968780290
https://twitter.com/UrvaAK_/status/1542174697558884355
https://twitter.com/shaat_up/status/1542105469589852160
https://twitter.com/saachsirfsaach/status/1542612660797280259
https://twitter.com/ehbeerawr/status/1542834085797810176
https://twitter.com/akkkk93/status/1542935341312708609
People are angry at the show for erasing the oppression Muslims in India had to face, and think the show should have attributed the mess of Partition to 'Hindu extremism' instead. The very pro-two nation theory approach some people are taking to the scene depicts the kind of communal violence we still see in our society even today. Across the border, the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) preaches narratives of Mughal invaders who oppressed Hindus, while here, we talk about the horrors of living under Hindu oppression. The white man once again conveniently gets let off the hook.
Others yet, are trying to be the voice of reason, and are maintaining that political technicalities aside, the sentiments echoed by Kamala's Nani are very accurate to sentiments a lot of our grandparents and elders might have, which is what the show was trying to portray. And even if you may not agree with the political stance on how Partition played out in reality, you cannot deny the generational trauma that all of us still carry with us.
https://twitter.com/SohaTazz/status/1542842242624360450
https://twitter.com/mishalmursani/status/1542445450262872070
https://twitter.com/watchwithneebz/status/1542541790590402560