Review of Demons of the Punjab
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

A few hours before the episode aired, I saw someone in one of the Doctor Who-related Facebook groups I’m in express his apprehensions about the potential for an episode set in India in 1947 to be a preachy, anti-British Empire bash-fest (totally paraphrasing)—airing on Remembrance Day.

Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2018 BBC

I have rarely felt as much of a cultural divide with the UK as I did in that moment. Such a concern had never—would never have—occurred to me. I thus sat down to watch Demons of the Punjab feeling like I was about to walk through someone else’s cultural minefield. But the type of mines that were actually scattered about were completely different than what I’d expected. And unlike the Doctor and her friends, I really had no context for what was coming.

The US and the UK share an awful lot of cultural DNA. As the former colony rather than the former colonizer, though (and here I’m entirely skipping how my ancestors helped to slaughter the original inhabitants of the land I now live on as they colonized it), the people of my country generally stopped paying much attention to Britain’s affairs after about the turn of the nineteenth century, where “American history” and “British history” diverge.

Therefore, as someone with neither Indian heritage nor British education, I felt none of the dread the Doctor exhibited when she realized the date. While “the Partition of India” sounded vaguely familiar to me (my seventh-grade daughters had never heard of it), I didn’t really know that this beautiful place where Yaz’s not-yet-Nani prepared for her long-anticipated wedding was about to erupt into terrible violence.

It was this very human drama that touched me. While I’ve inured myself to the idea that Doctor Who will never again produce a pure historical (one without any otherworldly influences at work), I rather desperately wished it could’ve done so here. The inclusion of what boils down to a classic grandfather paradox should have been sci-fi enough, but at least the “demons” turned out to be nothing but witnesses to the true demons of humanity’s tragically chronic inability to see past our differences.

While there were a few elements that still bothered me (the optics of the only blonde, fair-skinned person on the farm being the one to take charge; the Thijarians barely reacting to the Doctor’s desecration of their Hive once she’d returned their relic, as if her apology were enough to make up for the fact that she took a sample of their ancestors and broke it down in a chemical experiment!), they were not enough to outweigh the impact of this excellent story.

Part of what made it work so well for me is the fact that the episode centered the people at the heart of the conflict. We got the perspective of the Punjabi people, those whose homes and lives were disrupted, not of the politicians who set the new boundaries or even of average British citizens back in England. There was some anger towards the Empire there, yes, but it was neither unwarranted nor inappropriate to the day.

In that sense, then, I think the episode successfully navigated the Remembrance Day minefield I’d anticipated. Instead, it tore my heart apart in a different, more lasting way. I’ll be chewing on this one—and remembering—for a very long time.