West is West is a story of a family’s reunion and reckoning with its past. Jehangir Khan (Om Puri) left Pakistan for England when still a young man. But along with his homeland he also left his wife and daughters. In England he married a Caucasian woman, and had three (male) children and became George. Yet, Jahangir had an uneasy relation with his past; he could neither shut it out, not fully except it. George, for 35 years, never visited his family in Pakistan, but fulfilled his “duty” by sending them money regularly to buy land.
A major challenge in Khan’s life is his youngest son Sajid, born and raised in 1970’s England, has no sense of identity. He doesn’t speak Punjabi; he can’t even point out where Pakistan is on the map. Bullied in school for being a “Paki” –a highly derogatory word for a South Asian in England, and at home for not being Pakistani enough he is thrown into a pool of pubescent confusion.
At last when Sajid is jailed for shop-lifting, Khan decides to take him to Punjab for a “holiday”. But it is no holiday, neither for Sajid nor for Jahangir. Once at home, Jahangir is confronted by his past, especially his estranged wife Baseera, while Sajid is forced to study with a tutor, a pir ji. Throughout the movie both father and son grow up. High comic drama of everyday takes place when the two worlds collide. In the mundanely of everyday life there is hope.
Some of the key themes in the movie are: the nationalism within the diaspora community: Jehangir Khan wants to maintain his Pakistani-ness even though his children are English, he has been in England for 35 years, and he himself is married to an English woman. His sometimes extravagant display of his Pakistani pride makes him a tragically irritating yet lovable character. It is his mythical representation of Pakistan that also blinds him to the chronic poverty, inequality, and desperation of that country, while trying to glorify its inequities and complexities.
Another clichéd theme in the movie was the notion of the “unchanging East”: even though Jehangir Khan returns to Pakistan after many years, the cultural ethos has not changed, as if Pakistan remained the same because Khan wanted it to remain that way. This point is furthered driven home by the scene in which the pir-ji takes Sajid to the old dargha, “where people from all faiths have come from time immemorial to pray” as if to suggest that the dargha and people have not and will not change.
Then there is the tragedy of the women in the move. The most tragic figure being Jehangir’s first wife Baseera: abandoned and left to fend for herself and her daughters she finds no place in Jehangir’s life. Her youth and beauty wasted, she is compelled by the logic of societal norm to hang on to him, accept his second wife, and even forgive him for his transgressions.
But out of the misunderstanding the movie emerges an ethos of understanding if not love. What this story says is the East maybe East and West maybe West but in a globalized world the twINs have started to meet. Or rather that they must meet for those far away from home yearning to be part of a collective.