Ms Marvel by Obaid-Chinoy :The India-Pakistan trauma

Ms Marvel has been the topic of discussion on social media for many reasons. Be it Farhan Akhtar’s cameo or Pakistani star Fawad Khan playing an Indian freedom fighter, the series has become a connecting factor between the two nations. In a recent interview, director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy spoke about the importance of the series for Pakistan and her experience helming the fourth and fifth episodes.

In Ms Marvel directory try to reveal the true picture of the partition between India and Pakistan after the end of British colonial rule in India which was the biggest moment for both countries and their peoples. About 12 million people became refugees and between 500,000 and a million people were killed in religious violence. Even though number of movies and Tv play has already been made on the topic of partition and picturizing the deep details of sad happing but Ms Marvel show the different angels of the story. 

In Ms. Marvel’s episode 4, Seeing Red, Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) visits Pakistan and finds new allies in the Red Daggers – Farhan Akhtar’s Waleed and Aramis Knight’s Kareem. As they go up against the Clandestines, Najma (Nimra Bucha) stabs Kamala’s supercharged bangle and it accidentally transports her back to 1947 – the era of India and Pakistan’s Partition.

The episode depicts the humanitarian crisis through the last train to come to Pakistan. Kamala finds herself at the crowded railway platform with people climbing into and atop packed trains. The camera follows Kamala as she gets to a vantage point before panning out to offer a look at swarms of people trying to leave on the final train to Pakistan – a tragic event in history chronicled with gut-wrenching detail in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

“I will say that my inbox is full of people reaching out from all around the world to say that their children finally have a representation of themselves onscreen,” Obaid-Chinoy tells “It does a good job of picking up faultlines from history that have continued into the present day,” she says.

The partition of the Indian subcontinent has very rarely been visualized, and even though it was one of the largest mass migrations that the world saw, it is not a world event that everyone is familiar with. So I thought that the best way to contextualize where we were and what the stakes were, was to draw from history.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy further said that Kamala Khan is a superhero in every sense. Be it her coming of age and power, or how she navigates through life, it’s a very universal experience. The director said that while Kamala may be a “brown Muslim immigrant”, she resonates with everyone with her quirky sense of humour and high school teenager issues.

“I was looking for iconic images that would be emblematic of the pain, the horror, the despair people felt when they were leaving their homes. I wanted to transport audiences right into that time – what people were carrying with them, the body language, the look on their faces,” she says.

This story of partition is the story of one family that was torn apart, and it’s emblematic of so many stories of families torn apart. So when Hasan [Fawad Khan] goes onto the platform and loses baby Sana, you hear him screaming out her name. That story of calling out your child’s name in this unfamiliar place, with the bustle and the mother who gets stabbed just a few tracks away, intercutting literally the breakup of a family in this truly chaotic time, was important. The tension had to build to a level where you could feel the pain of the father, the mother, and the daughter, as all three of them grappled with the events that were unfolding around them.