Usually, the trauma of Partition is always seen as something faraway and remote to the life and history of South India, especially Kerala. We often think that it is something that happened in the other end of the country, something not directly connected to our immediate experience or memory. The argument that often follows such observations is the different historical trajectory of Muslim migration, conversion and settlement in the region, whose culture is non-Mughal, and more to do with trade than with empire-building or religious bigotry. The Tipu Sultan 'episode' still remains an enigma, and is more often explained away as an aberration; the historical accounts defer as to his exploits, and also his religious and political compulsions.

PT Kunjumuhamed's new film Paradesi (The Foreigner) establishes continuities of the traumatic history of the North Indian Muslim with their regional/Kerala counterparts. It is so also for another reason, for, it is the patriotic and hence 'national' Muslim that the film idealizes and develops. The film is centred on the life of Valiyakathu Moosa (Mohanlal), who was in Karachi town of undivided India in the pre-independence period. He suddenly finds himself a citizen of that country when he tries to return to his homeland in Kerala. This fatal identity haunts him throughout his life, unsettling him and his family permanently. Not only that, his community members and even his family is forced to keep away from him, for fear of provoking the wrath of the state.

Following the trials and tribulations of Moosa, the film maps the essential contradiction in such fictitious notions like 'citizenship' that we take for granted and readily employ to define 'us' and 'them'. Is it the place one happens to be born in? Or is it the country one owes one's allegiance to? How does one prove one's allegiance? The film poses disturbing questions about such notions that fatally traumatize the lives of people who live amongst us but we often do not see.

Valiyakathu Moosa is not a citizen of one nation, but many nations. He was born in Malabar in 1921, the same historic year of the Malabar revolts against British power. He is very proud of being the son of a martyr of Pukkoottor battle, a heroic epoch in the history of Malabar. The familial obligations drive him from this part of undivided India to what subsequently became Pakistan where he did many odd jobs to send money home. But after independence, when he tries to return to his homeland, he finds that he is a Pakistani citizen and so, an alien back at home in India.

He is forced to bide his time at home; according to law, he has no rights of a resident-citizen. As and when his permit stays expire, he has to go into hiding and bribe the police and pin his hopes on fragile legal points. His fate is shared by several of his friends, many of whom are sick, insane and living in utter misery. Constantly hunted down by the police, they have no one but each other. Eventually the octogenarian Moosa is deported back to Pakistan. In the final telling sequence, we find him wandering in the sandy deserts of no man's land between the two nations – both of which have now become alien to him. Moosa’s  dilemma is a universal one, for this is the only land that ‘outsiders’ like him can inhabit, lands that are beyond or between nation states, lands not yet barbed into bounded territories.

Through poignant stories of an ensemble of characters, the film sketches a map of despair that the grand narratives of the nation makes invisible, and so, all the more painful. The camera by KG Jayan moves with the characters and is unflinchingly directed at them throughout the film. In the process the ambience and background often assume secondary importance, with the pace and format of the film being solely driven and defined by the dialogues.

 Paradesi was screened in the Competition Section of IFFK 2007 - The International Film Festival of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram   being held from December 7 to 14, 2007.