Quote:
"With one hand [Deepa] Mehta offers the familiar gesture of memory as commemoration and forgetting—the neat national narrative of partition as the cost of independence, as a part of a national history that exists only in the past—and with the other hand she takes away the comfort of resting in this narrative. By refusing to resolve either Shanta's abduction or Lenny's experience of loss and trauma, Earth constructs a form of partition memory that is as much about the present as about the past and that speaks to the necessity of engaging with divisive and violent histories in order to enable new kinds of community in the future."
-- Jeannette Herman

Source:
Herman, Jeanette. "Memory and Melodrama: The Transnational Politics of Deepa Mehta's Earth." Camera Obscura 20, no. 1 58 (2005). (pp. 143-144)