Demons of the Punjab

Chapter the 257th, sees a nation and a family divided, and the Doctor and friends can only watch.

Synopsis:

Yaz's Nani gives her a broken watch as a memento; it's something to do with her wedding - she claims to have been the first woman married in Pakistan. Yaz is curious, and persuades the cautious Doctor to take her back in time to see her Nani (Umbreen) when she was young. Connecting the watch to the TARDIS telepathic circuits brings them, accompanied as ever by Ryan and Graham, to near what will imminently be the India Pakistan border; it is the eve of the 1947 Partition. They bump into Prem, who turns out to be Umbreen's intended, but crucially not Yaz's grandfather. He is a Hindu, while Yaz's family are Muslim; this has caused upset, particularly with Prem's hothead younger brother Manish, but local sadhu Bhakti had agreed to marry them. Unfortunately, Bhakti is found dead with two aliens near his corpse. The Doctor identifies these as Thijarians, infamous intergalactic assassins. Prem has seen these "demons" once before, on a battlefield when he was fighting in the second world war; he found his older brother dead, and glimpsed them.

Manish has early warning of the exact partition lines and proudly shows the others: Umbreen's mother Hasna's house is now in Pakistan, so she will have no choice where to live. Tensions mount as Manish tries to persuade his brother not to marry. The Doctor helps protect the others from the Thijarians, but then she discovers that they are no longer the ruthless creatures they once were. Turning over a new leaf, they have now decided to honour the dead, travelling through time to be there when someone would otherwise die alone. Who then killed the sadhu? It was Manish. He has also called in a group of Hindu nationalists to stop the wedding. Umbreen chooses to get married holding hands with Prem across both sides of the border. The watch is Prem's, given to Umbreen as a symbolic gift, and accidentally broken. The Doctor officiates the ceremony. Immediately after they are married, Prem goes to confront the mob, while Umbreen and Hasna escape into what has become Pakistan. Prem is killed. Back in the present day, Yaz talks to her grandmother, finding out that Umbreen has no regrets at how her life turned out.

 

Context:

The children have got into a pattern of humouring their old man by occasionally watching with him a Doctor Who that's come up for the blog, usually on a Sunday afternoon. I'd run the random number search in advance and Demons of the Punjab was the next one to watch. I'd also run the search for the next few titles after that. When it came time to watch, on a Sunday in late February 2023, I decided that the Jodie Whittaker story (based on a distant memory of the last time I'd seen it a few years before) was a bit dull for the children. Instead we watched the first half of a classic series story that has a reputation for being comically terrible, and so I thought it would be more fun. I may have miscalculated (it'll be blogged next after this, and you'll see the full ordeal that I put my poor kids through). The classic story was bad in a weary way; Demons of the Punjab (which I watched alone midweek from the Blu-ray) had a lot more energy.

First Time Round:

Watched on its debut BBC1 broadcast on Sunday 11th November 2018 with the whole family except the youngest (a girl of 6 years old at the time) as she'd taken against the show at that point for being too scary. Just under a week later, I was at the BFI for a screening of Earthshock to tie in with the Blu-ray box-set release of Peter Davison's first season (see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more details). I was accompanied by fan friend David, who commented at one point about the connection between what we were watching on the big screen and the most recently broadcast Doctor Who story, as both did something different with their end credit music to hammer home the emotion of the story's denouement (Earthshock plays the credits in silence, Demons reimagines the Doctor Who theme as something of a lament). I didn't know what he was talking about as I'd already forgotten all about the new Doctor Who episode I'd seen six days before. It clearly hadn't left that much of an impression on me.

Reaction:

Who's the protagonist of a Doctor Who story? Is it the Doctor, or the companion, or a new guest character who only appears in that story? The answer is that it can be all three, but the chances diminish as you progress through the three parts of the question. It's generally expected that the Doctor will be active and make a difference in the story because they are the title character. Less often, but regularly, a companion has the vehicle role, being the audience's proxy witnessing wonders, and maybe like us at our best saving the day now and then. If one is tuning in and seeing a story driven by some new character one's never seen in the series before, though, the obvious question is why do the Doctor and their friends need to be there at all? So, a story like Demons of the Punjab, where the protagonist is Prem, a character we know for less than 50 minutes of screen time, is an exception. But exceptions can be still be, well, exceptional. The central story of two brothers falling out over partition, with the younger one radicalised and wanting to block the elder's inter-faith marriage is emotionally resonant, and meets the very earliest educational remit of Doctor Who, illuminating a point in history new to many in the audience. It's not too polemical either; the rushed nature of the British plans for India's independence and the immediate consequences this had country-wide are there in the background if you want them, but the focus is on the foreground tale of familial responsibility and love.

Like most stories of this period, it looks amazing - the sun-kissed Spanish locations standing in for the Punjab are colourful, and the verious departments contributing to the production design create time and place effectively. Writer Vinay Patel in his first script for the programme produces something wonderful in the main plot. The characters are well defined in an economical fashion, and the guest cast ably translate what's on the page. Shane Zaza as Prem is effective in the lead (for this week only), but he is matched by Amita Suman as Umbreen, who appropriately as one of the star-crossed central couple earns her place in the spotlight next to him. The script is careful to give her character agency, rather than just be a complicating factor emblematic of a religious or political divide - she's a vivid, dynamic character in her own right. Hamsa Jeetooa plays Manish sensitively, one is not blocked from empathising, if not fully sympathising, with his radical point of view; his murderous and treacherous actions don't come from nowhere, and make one sad rather than angry as he is almost as much of a victim of circumstance as anyone else. Smaller guest roles are also handled with aplomb, with special mention to Leena Dhingra playing the older version of Yaz's indomitable Nani.

Mandip Gill as Yaz finally gets a bit more to do. With four regular characters in this period, stories are crowded, and at least one companion is usually superfluous to the plot. It's tended to be Yaz in the previous five stories since the character's introduction, so it's a nice change for a story to be built around her family. Most of what she has to do is just react wordlessly to events, but Gill does it well, with emotion but restraint. In fact, everyone in the regular cast can only react to events. It's built in to the story. Like in Rosa earlier in the year, the history being presented is too important and too recent for alien intervention. Imagine if the younger brother Manish was radicalised not by the people and the circumstances around him, but by some alien ray; it would be crass. So, what are the aliens and the Doctor to do? Patel decides to tuck them away in a harmless subplot: the Doctor misunderstands their nature at first, but then her investigations prove that they are benign. It's a bit of a sideshow, and could almost lift out completely without impacting the rest of the story, though it does set up a nice reversal (that it is Manish not them that has killed the holy man in an attempt to prevent his brother's wedding). The Doctor then gets to officiate the wedding herself, which is cute.

A flaw with the alien subplot, though, is that the Thijarians are set up as having worked all through time and space on their mission to honour the fallen; this being so, it seems like an almighty coincidence that they manage to get themselves spotted twice, and both times by the same human. It's teased at first as of possible significance when there's still a mystery about the aliens, but once the truth is revealed it turns out to definitely to be only an almighty coincidence. One could retcon it that Prem's destined for death, so the Thijarians don't mind allowing him a peek, but it isn't played like that in the moment. It also wouldn't explain how the Doctor sees the aliens at the site of the sadhu's demise. One doesn't want to pull on this thread too much as things might unravel: for people who were supposedly dying alone, they sure seem to have a lot of people around. I think all of this can be forgiven, though, when at the end Prem is left on his own to die and the Thijarians come to him, then his holographic face joins the thousands of others in their ship representing the previously unrecognised dead. A big emotional surge ties everything together at least at the 'feels' level. It's not something the show could get away with every week, but as a one-off it works.

Connectivity:

Both Demons of the Punjab and The Woman Who Lived are adventures in Earth history that involve a tragedy impacting a woman known to the Doctor and/or their companion.

Deeper Thoughts:

The History of Historicals. As most people know, Doctor Who's very earliest stories tended to oscillate between those exploring Earth's past and those set in the future with strange, strange creatures. (There was also the occasional 'sideways' story exploring a strange concept that didn't quite align to either of the 'back' or 'forward' types, but they were rare enough to forget about for today.) What people don't necessarily remember - even possibly some people who later made the show - is that this format didn't really work, and certainly didn't last. There is ample evidence from the start that audiences didn't care for the historical stories nearly as much as anything that featured alien monsters. The recent Blu-ray box set of the second season of the programme, containing the stories that aired from October 1964 to July 1965, is a reminder if one were needed that the production team started to tweak the formula as early as one year in. The historicals of the first season (adventures with cavemen, Marco Polo, Aztecs, and spies during the period following the French revolution) are a full 50% of the season, and all played it pretty straight. The following year, though, it is four stories in before there's a historical setting, and it is definitely not played straight. The Romans is experimental for the treatment of material in a comedic fashion, and also it features the first ever scene of an extra-temporal influence creating history as we know it, with the Doctor inadvertently planting the idea of setting Rome ablaze.

The next historical story, The Crusade, is the only other 'pure' historical of the year (I'll get onto the concept of purity in this context in a moment). The final two stories of the season would revolutionise the use of history in the programme. The Chase was the first to show that other alien creatures than Gallifreyans can time travel to Earth's past (though it was restricted to just the Daleks initially). This story - a peripatetic adventure that takes in many locations, most futuristic and/or alien - sees the Doctor and Daleks briefly make a stop on the Marie Celeste in the 1800s, causing the crew to abandon ship. This was another 'explanation for historical event is time travelling aliens' story beat as seen in The Romans, and this would become a regular trope of this kind of story in subsequent years. Following directly on after The Chase, The Time Meddler is the first full story using a setting of Earth's past as a backdrop for the Doctor tussling with an out of this world problem (in this case, a meddling time traveller of his own race with their own TARDIS). With this quick one-two at the end of its second season, Who gained the 'pseudo-historical' story type, as it came to be known by fans later. This is as opposed to a pure historical that contains no elements unknown to history, except for the Doctor and friends.

Like many mini-genres created in the Hartnell period, when Doctor Who was trying out new story structures every week, the pseudo-historical was used sparingly at first. The Daleks and the Monk from The Time Meddler would appear together in an ancient Egypt section of the Dalek Master Plan story in season three. Mostly, though, the past-set stories were still pure; a good few used humour like The Chase, and then there was a short run where they were not trying to recreate history for its own sake but sampling classic adventure book texts (like Treasure Island in The Smugglers, or Kidnapped in The Highlanders). After that, from early on in the fourth season, that was your lot. There would be a rare pseudo historical (Daleks in the Victorian era in the last story of that season The Evil of the Daleks, for example) throughout the rest of the 1960s and 70s, nowhere near the every other story frequency of the very earliest period of Doctor Who. And the idea of having a story that just depicted history without any monsters or sci-fi was gone for ever. Well, very nearly. Obviously none of these fan terms is officially defined anywhere, but some online wags have interpreted a pure historical very literally as "no aliens except the Doctor" meaning they can claim stories like Thin Ice and Legend of the Sea Devils (where the monstrous creatures are confirmed as or likely to be indigenous) as fitting the bill. I'm assuming this is just a bit of fun, and nobody really believes there were giant fish creatures in the Thames during the London frost fairs, nor reptile pirates in the 19th century.

From the 1980s to the present day, the frequency of historical stories has increased for certain periods, maybe, as mentioned above, because someone in a production role had a vague idea that regular historical stop-overs were expected. In Peter Davison's first year, which has markedly more trips into history than the seasons surrounding it (to the beginning of the universe, the 1600s, the 1920s, and Earth circa the Jurassic period), there was even one pure historical, the first and last (to date) after the mid-60s. This was Black Orchid, but an examination of that story will show that it uses the visual grammar of a Doctor Who monster story to tease the audience and keep them interested. Plus, it's only two episodes long, very brief in classic Doctor Who terms: consciously or subconsciously, those making that story didn't want to risk challenging the audience's expectations for long. Some fans still hanker for a similar experiment again. Probably, the nearest the show will ever come was in the first Jodie Whittaker series of which Demons of the Punjab was part. It's not quite alternating frequency, but three out of ten of the season were set in the past and the stories were unabashedly exploring that history, mostly without too many sci-fi trappings getting in the way. In Demons of the Punjab, the monsters are a red herring and a distraction; in Rosa, the villain is just a racist white bloke from the future - he's more emblem than antagonist. The reason I don't think the show will go further is what was touched upon elsewhere in the blog post above: without monsters to fight, and with history respected and unchangeable, there's nothing left for the Doctor and companions to do but be tourists.

 

In Summary:

An interesting and important story, but it's not really a Doctor Who story as the Doctor doesn't (can't) have anything to do except experience a historical in the sun: a holiday in someone else's misery.