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#Lonely ghost driver#

Kanwar grows up to become a truck driver and develops a fine camaraderie with her doting father who now wants to marry her off.

When tribal India too begins to favour its sons.

Her father asks her not to tell her mother about this and the secret remains between father and daughter. Umber acquires the services of a wrestler to teach his youngest wrestling, who accepts everything without question, including the secret of her beginning to menstruate. To find out why, she sometimes peeps when one of them is bathing. Kanwar grows up under her fiercely protective father, confused about her identity – social, sexual and otherwise – because she is kept distanced from her older sisters. These questions are suggested throughout the film but not answered leaving the audience to draw its own conclusions. Do Kanwar’s sisters know that the little one is not their brother but their sister? Did Umber Singh bother to get his three daughters married? That too, remains hazy. Thus, the film reaches beyond Partition and folk tales to cross over to other areas of human psychology, of patriarchy strongly embedded in the mindset of the protagonist.ĭoes Kanwar know she is a girl? The film leaves this question open till she is married off. How can he? He does not even know that he is caged within his obsession. Umber convinces himself that the child is really a boy creating a tragic cage to trap himself in, never wanting to set himself free. “It would be better if you killed her,” cries his wife, in vain because she alone knows that the new-born is a girl. He remains present at the delivery, takes the new-born from the mother’s lap and declares it is a boy. When she is pregnant for the fourth time, Umber Singh is confident that this time, she will deliver a boy. Umber’s wife Meher (Tisca Chopra) gives birth to three daughters.

It speaks of Umber Singh’s manic obsession for a male heir to carry on his bloodline and how it wrecks the lives of his close ones, especially of Kanwar (Tilottama Shome), his fourth-born whose entire life is ‘manufactured’, manipulated, designed and dictated by her father’s for a male heir. The second story of displacement is incredible in its inhumanity and brutality. The first involves the forced displacement of Umber Singh (Irrfan Khan), a Sikh, and his family as a consequence of the religious violence following the Partition of India in 1947. Qissa, in fact, tells two stories of displacement. Placing the story of the film in a broader perspective, one can see a glimmer of the universal tragedy that Partition can bring about, not only in the lives of people affected by such geographical and political schisms but also in their ideology and their way of thinking. Their forced displacement is one of the main sources of inspiration for Qissa. Singh, a FTII graduate was born in Dar-Es-Salaam in Tanzania into a Punjabi Sikh family where his grandfather had migrated during the Partition. “The story and script jointly done by Madhuja Mukherjee and me flows along and invites the audience to jump into the flow and participate in the story,” says director Anup Singh about Qissa. As in that form of narration, it gets into transgressions and interventions, sometimes unpredictable, sometimes open-ended, and sometimes closed. Qissa is an Arabic word which means ‘folk tale.’ Qissa: The Tale of a Lonely Ghost is a film that presents a certain form of folk storytelling exemplified through tragic love legends like Heer-Ranjha, Laila-Majnu and so on.