Documenting the Pain of 1984

Sometimes, for sociological reasons, a film will become more important for certain segments of the audience than its creative entirety could lay claim to. Shonali Bose’s first film, Amu, is redeemed by its last 30 minutes or so - when its docu-drama recreation of the carnage of the Sikhs in 1984 reminds us graphically and agonizingly of one of the more sordid chapters in contemporary India. Amu is the second film – Sasi Kumar’s Kaya Taran being the other – which focuses on the ordeal and distress that visits the young who manage to survive the massacre of a communal riot.

It is deeply ironic, and needs to be explored, why our first films on the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 should relate, obliquely but unmistakably, to the prolonged gruesome slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002. Both Amu and Kaya Taran are set in circa 2002, the year of the Gujarat bloodbath. Did the mass-murders of 2002 remind the artistic elite that it had callously ignored the victims of 1984 for some two decades? The similarities between the two holocausts were not coincidental, because in both 1984 and 2002 we saw methodological “communal cleansing” at the behest of politicians in power, and the passivity of the police and the para-military forces and the connivance of the bureaucracy.

However, to pay homage to one set of victims is, ipso facto, an acknowledgement of the pain of other victims as well. The more important factor is that an event of such cataclysmic importance has been documented and put on record in a communications mode that can be easily accessible to large numbers of people; therefore the fact of such an event having taken place cannot be easily marginalized in posterity.

Amu takes its name from Amrit, a young Sikh girl’s name whose father and kid brother were purged by fire in the Delhi slums of ‘Triloknagar’ (i.e. Trilokpuri) and whose mother is unable to bear the tragedy and commits suicide shortly after – bequeathing the orphaned Amu to the care of a social activist, played with a precise élan by none other than Brinda Karat the CPM leader, who one is told was in her college years a respected actress on the stage. Indeed, Brinda Karat as the single mother and Konkona Sen Sharma as Amu, alias Kaju, provide the film with its only professionally qualified performances. It is between them that, in its last thirty minutes, they create the cinematic tenor that gives the film Amu a cathartic, unnerving finish.

Amu, i.e. Kaju’s journey back to her painful origins begins through the device of a typical excursion of a Los Angeles student’s first visit to India. Here, for atavistic reasons, Kaju is drawn again and again to the environs of a Delhi slum. It is an obsessive attachment that is quite contrary to the upper middle-class ambience of her grandmother’s family and the material world of her young cousin’s Delhi University friends. Her first visit to the slum seems to overwhelm her with the sudden explosion of eerie images, as visual memories occasionally flash through her subconscious. It is her bid to understand the secret behind these photographic echoes that leads her to realize that her foster mother had lied to her about her real parents.

As Kaju teeters on the brink of a bizarre personal abyss, her foster mother finally crosses the barrier of New Delhi’s upper-class inhibition about acknowledging the unpalatable truth about one’s own life. She tracks Kaju down in their labyrinth of dim secrets and recounts the details of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and how Kaju, i.e. Amu, figures in the forested chessboard of New Delhi’s affluent neighbourhoods and unsightly slums.

Conceptually, the upper-class New Delhi protocol of the intellectual conflict between reality and manners, and between emotion and acknowledgement, and the city’s upper-class masquerade of appearances, ought to have provided for the appropriate milieu in which Kaju Roy, a USA-based member of an upper middle-class Indian family, comes to terms both with her personal tragedy as well as an identity interpolated between a comfortable New Delhi suburb and the Triloknagar slums.

Regrettably, the film’s sixty-minute long build-up to its forceful confessional confrontation, between mother and daughter, lacks the intensity and the cinematic application that is artistically required. The last half-hour of the film is undoubtedly more compelling than the film in its entirety. These flaws are, perhaps, rooted in the constraints of this being the young director’s first film; as well as – I daresay – by a conspicuous absence of a cutting and critical vision into the family life in Indian suburbia.

The delineation of the incongruities between respectable goody-goody appearances and the materialism as well as the injustices that we camouflage in our person is, in cinematic terms, unnecessarily muted and detracts from making Amu a film that is compelling in its entirety. But, as we have often noticed in the popular genre of the cinema, its outspoken finale and, even more so, the significance of its references to social history, redeem the film to a considerable extent from the limitations of its script, editing, acting quality and directorial worth.

One is inclined to infer that Shonali Bose’s Amu is a film intended primarily for the film-maker’s own class of westernised, upper-class Indians. Not only is it primarily in English – with a smattering of Bengali, Hindi and Punjabi dialogues located out of respect to the needs of “representational realism” – the film’s textual and sub-textual idioms in their half-articulate, aloof, allusive, guarded tones synchronise flawlessly with the taciturn etiquette of upper-class New Delhi; without divulging upper-class New Delhi’s spinelessness, its inability to risk its materialistic stability and its incapacity to speak its mind out against injustices when these are being perpetrated.

In recent times we have been witness to New Delhi impotencies during the 1975-77 State of Internal Emergency, the massacre of the Sikhs in 1984, and in the obeisance paid to the “communal cleansing” policies propagated by the Sangh Parivar from the mid-nineties to the middle of 2004. Nowhere does Shonali Bose’s film suggest that New Delhi’s non-Sikh citizens failed to protest, in numbers of any significance, against the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, or earlier against the Emergency, or later against the bloodthirsty atmosphere spawned by the prolonged agitation for a Ram Mandir at Ayodhya.

Had Shonali Bose’s script more explicitly identified upper-class New Delhi’s preordained acquiescence to the powers-that-be, its muted conceptual framework would have been easier to perceive and the film as a whole would have had greater layers of meaning. The film would, then, have also perhaps understood, and explained to us, why New Delhi’s idealistic students go on, in facile fashion, to become materialistic cogs in the bureaucratic and the market machines.

Amita Malik, the New Delhi establishment’s most celebrated film critic, has been unrestrained in her praise of Amu: “With the help of the disgruntled son of a smug bureaucrat, who wishes to break away and become a playwright, she (Kaju/Amu) slowly gets to the bottom of the mystery (italics mine – A.S.A.) And in the process, with quiet understatement, Bose underlines the horror as well as the involvement of ministers, bureaucrats and the police.” (‘Revisiting 1984’, The Hindustan Times, January 13, 2005.)

However, contrary to Amita Malik’s opinion, these facts have been repeatedly declared by newspapers, magazines and journals, both Indian and foreign. Does the film Amu actually bring forth the ‘unspoken facts’ of those dreadful days and get to the bottom of the mystery? I am afraid such was not the impression that the film made on me. There is only a minor aside to which Shonali Bose’s script can lay an original claim to – the fleeting questioning of a senior bureaucrat’s role during the anti-Sikh riots, by his writer-son. Here, again, Amu chooses not to pursue its interrogative potential. The son’s questioning seems to me but an echo of the post-war generation’s intense debate in Germany, about what their parents did during the atrocities of the Nazi regime. For me as one filmgoer, Amu does not seem as committed to its cause as it is in Amita Malik’s eyes.