Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Cast: Jodie Whittaker, Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole, Mandip Gill, Leena Dhingra, Amita Suman, Shane Zaza, Hamza Jeetooa, Shaheen Khan, Shobna Gulati, Ravin J Ganatra, Bhavnisha Parmar, Emma Fielding, Nathalie Curzner, Isobel Middleton, Barbara Fadden.
Everything we do leaves a footprint in history, it is not just the so-called interesting characters of our time, the thought of as important, each one of has the potential to change the future with a single action, a smile in the right place to a person who may be contemplating a darker path, a word out of place due to anger can set in motion a war, falling in love across man-made boundaries can lead to a death of our making; that footprint in the sands of time does not discriminate, we all have the ability to effect the way our footprint is seen.
In our life time the world has changed beyond recognition, countries have come and gone, empires dismantled, political values once thought dead, have returned with a vengeance and the world moves ever on, our footprints we believe making no sense, no definite impression. Yet as Demons of The Punjab made absolutely clear, we are the instigators of our own past and future, no matter the light touch in the Earth, we are our own demons, we are the ones who have caused the world to fail though our apathy, through our denials, and through the small white lies we tell ourselves when we insist that other people’s stories don’t matter.
To see history through someone else’s eyes is to understand empathy, to see the fear of being separated from the one that they love on religious or ethnicity grounds is to feel a little piece of that footprint we left in the ground withstand the tide of shame and eat away at our soul.
The partition of India is surprisingly a story that the makers of Doctor Who have not touched upon, a rich and diverse history, a place of magic and beauty, and one that folded in on itself due to the ridiculousness of British insistence, of Lord Mountbatten’s unforgivable actions in displacing millions and creating a political power vacuum in which millions died. It is arguably right that we in Britain, those of us who have not looked deep enough at what we contributed to the effects of the partition are responsible for, we cannot change the appearance of our footprint in history, but we can bear witness.
It was always with great insight that the historical stories made the most of the ethos of Doctor Who, the small moments in history in which our world, and our lives, have hinged upon. At the heart of the story though is a deeper world in which to seek redemption. We are so caught up in living in the now, of seeing the world through our own experiences, that we forget our parents, grandparents and all those before us, had their own stories to tell, we forget that they lived before us, our myopic sense of self is perhaps our own downfall when we don’t honour those who witnessed the world before us.
Demons of The Punjab is a story of beauty, of honesty, one that deserves fully to sit in the pantheon of great stories told by the makers of Doctor Who.
Ian D. Hall