Quote:
"Earth is a story about human harmony expressed through the desire for fairer gender, social, and religious relations. Although caste is surprisingly bypassed, by focusing on the relationships of characters from different religious and social backgrounds, [Deepa] Mehta seems to suggest that people are victims of artificially fabricated political tensions rather than the cause or catalyst of such tensions. In that sense, the film is based on the premise that religious and ethnic relations in Lahore deteriorated only after and as a result of Partition."
-- Sekhar Bandyopadhyay

Source:
Bandyopadhyay, Sekhar, and Giacomo Lichtner. "Indian Cinema and the Presentist Use of History: Conceptions of 'Nationhood' in Earth and Lagaan." Asian Survey 48, no. 3 (2008). (p. 439)