On Monday, Assam released the final draft of the National Register of the Citizens (NRC) of India, with 4 million people listed as “illegal” immigrants and sparking fears that it would lead to forced migrations and creation of more immigrants in a world overwhelmed with it. While refugees have always existed, in small or large numbers, the current upsurge began in 2015, at the height of the Syrian civil war, when millions from the once-prosperous West Asian nation fled to Europe. At first, the European nations, especially Germany, opened their doors and welcomed the migrants, but soon enough the rhetoric changed. Some experts have claimed that Brexit as well as the rise of populist right wing parties in Poland Hungary and other countries, is a direct result of this crisis.
In other parts of the world, too, violence directed against minority communities over the past few years has created refugees, the most notable of which is perhaps the Rohingya crisis currently affecting Bangladesh, and to a lesser extent, even India. The NRC, with a potential of creating another 4 million refugees, has sparked a most polarised debate, with Bangla Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee — the loudest voice in the Opposition — threatening “blood and civil war”, and the Bharatiya Janata Party Chief, Amit Shah, asking in Parliament if those aiming barbs at the government supported the so-called illegal immigrants over legal citizens. The defenders of the NRC have couched their rhetoric in the familiar dichotomy of “us and them” and the “citizen versus foreigner” dialectic, thus betraying their reductive nationalism and xenophobia.
The one Hollywood movie about refugees that has stood the test of time is Casablanca. Released in November, 1942, this classic, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, is a romantic melodrama set in the exotic backdrop of war-torn Europe of the previous year, serving at times as a metaphor of American isolation (even indifference) about the global conflict till the Pearl Harbour incident. Rick (Bogart), the cynical owner of a nightclub in Casablanca, Morocco, puts up an act of indifference towards politics. “Your business is politics, mine is running a saloon,” he declares pretty early. But the demeanour cannot withstand the call of love in the form of Lund (Bergman). “Of all the gin joints in all the towns of the world, she walks into mine.” This has been held up as an example of delightfully romantic coincidence, something many of us would dream of, but it is also a metaphor for something else.
The gin joint, though more comfortable than any refugee camp or holding centre, has all the uncertainties that accompany travel or transit under duress. Casablanca begins with a montage of columns of humans, whole families or individuals, trekking over long distances, their belongings stuffed into bags and suitcases. Along with it, a grave narrator tells us: “With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas. Lisbon became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Lisbon directly, and so a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up. Paris to Marseilles, across the Mediterranean to Oran, then by train, or auto, or foot, across the rim of Africa to Casablanca in French Morocco.”
These images are, of course, not unfamiliar to us; we have, in fact, seen worse, such as the photograph of the dead refugee boy washed up on the beach, being a searing symbol of our indifference. In the film, the refugees wait out their time in Rick’s Cafe American, selling off their jewellery to fund their trips ahead or falling prey to sexual predators. It is an imagined space — there were never any Nazis in Casablanca — but what is a nation if not an imagined space? The question is: How do we imagine it? As a sort of homogenous composition of people who look similar and speak the same language, or as a melting pot, like Casablanca is, full of a babel of tongues? The film gives a subtle hint: Cafe American is not in the US, and is full of non-American people, so what does that tell us about America? And, to extend the argument a little, what does that tell us of India or Assam?
One of the reasons perhaps why Casablanca has continued to be so poignant is that almost all its cast — except three: Bogart, Dooley Wilson (pianist, Sam), and Joy Page — were born outside the US. Paul Henreid, an Austrian Jew, came to the US from England. S Z Sakall (Carl, the waiter), also Jewish, came from Hungary. His three sisters and his niece died in concentration camps. Conrad Veidt — SS officer Strasser — was a staunch anti-Nazi, married to a Jewish woman. Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, who played a German officer, was homosexual, and escaped Germany in 1933. In the current climate, it is easy to imagine that only people from the south and east are pouring into Europe, but less than a century ago, the human traffic had moved in the opposite direction. Perhaps this movie can remind us of that and make us a little more sensitive to the plight of those who have had to take flight.