Amu- The story that must not be told and the film that must not be shown

I had noticed the DVD of ‘Amu’ displayed at Habitat, the Mecca for the lovers of good cinema and music in Bangalore. But I gave it a miss every time, thinking sooner or later, I’ll catch it on television. It seemed to belong to a genre that is telecast repeatedly on film channels. I have watched Deepa Mehta’s ‘Earth’ twice on television in the past one year. Amu appeared to be similar.

Yesterday, while walking on Church Street I found myself in that DVD rental shop after months. I was looking for a particular Swedish movie they didn’t have and ended up borrowing four DVDs impulsively. One of them was Amu, the film on the Sikh massacre of 1984, following Indira Gandhi’s assassination. The film is directed by Shonali Bose who was 19 and studying in Delhi when the horror unfolded. She was living in a college hostel and went through the trauma of knowing that hundreds were being butchered in her neighbourhood and she was helpless to do anything about it.

I have never really understood why we term these shameful acts of violence riots. For me the connotations of a riot are that two equally powerful groups of individuals attack and destroy each other. This is not true in our country. Typically it is the majority that singles out the minority in a city to rape, murder and plnder with the active connivance of police and politicians. In some pockets the minorities retaliate but the scale of that is miniscule compared to what is happening to them elsewhere in the city.

Amu is a political film. It has Brinda Karat playing a crucial part in the film as a woman who adopts a little girl from a Sikh refugee camp. I am no fan of the Karats. They look too well heeled to be leftists to me. And Brinda Karat always gets my goat when she is on television talking in that shrill uppity voice of hers. But she endeared herself to me in this film. She is the director’s aunt and may have bagged the role solely on grounds of nepotism but she has justified her niece’s faith in her as an actor. Her care and concern for her adopted daughter is evident even in the scenes where she doesn’t have any lines.

Amu is played by Konkana Sen Sharma, an actor I am ambivalent about. I liked her very much in ‘Wake up Sid’ but disliked her interpretation of the south Indian wife in ‘Mr and Mrs Iyer.’ That Tamil accent she affected was extremely off putting although Konkana seems to be rather proud of the fact that she sounded exactly like a Mylapore housewife, whatever that means.

In Amu too, Konkana does this ABCD accent initially but decides to give it up somewhere in the middle. Apart from that jarring note, she’s very good in this one. She even underplays the confrontations and that is brilliant. It makes it that much more powerful. When she asks another actor in the film in a confused, matter of fact manner ‘Come on, you are saying 5000 people were killed in three days. That’s more than the 9/11 count and you mean to say the police didn’t do anything about it,’ it makes for one of the most compelling moments in an Indian film.

The massacre of the Sikhs in Delhi in 1984 is as shameful a chapter in the history of independent India as is the genocide of Muslims in Gujarat after the Godhra incident. In both cases, an entire community had to pay the price of a crime committed by one or two or a handful of miscreants. For the massacre of the Sikhs in 1984, the Congress politicians drew their daring from their leader Rajiv Gandhi whose reaction to the violence that followed his mother’s assassination was ‘If you chop off a giant tree, there are bound to be tremors.’ The rogue politicians of Delhi took that statement to be a battle cry against all Sikhs and engaged in the kind of senseless bloody orgy only politicians understand and unleash with the connivance of the uniformed men who are meant to protect the citizens of this country.

A film that depicts this reality was never in any danger of finding favour with the establishment and the predictable happened. Despite winning accolades in film festivals across the world, the censor board in India found a lot of faults with the work. The primary one being that the film depicted a shameful chapter from our history that all of us would much rather forget.

Is that correct? We may not want these wounds to fester but forgetting them or wiping them out, sounds like a very Nazi response to me. Like saying we will own and showcase everything that’s grand and beautiful in our country like the Taj Mahal or the 11% growth, but not these shameful episodes as we don’t want anyone to stop us from having another bloody orgy in our backyard the next time we feel like it.

What is interesting is the film was made in 2004 and was released in 2005 when Sharmila Tagore was the chairperson of the censor board. Three years later, Nandita Das’s ‘Firaaq’ came out, an equally powerful indictment of the Gujarat genocide and no one saw that as an unacceptable depiction of modern India. This whole mess has one message for me and it is that the Congress is as communal as the BJP and Sharmila Tagore who’s always trying to talk like an intellectual is a big fraud.

Next the Censor Board made the telecast of the film in India impossible by demanding that the film chop off any reference to the 1984 violence to get a U/A certification that’s mandatory for a film to be shown on television. Apparently films with an A certificate cannot be telecast. How can a film that’s all about a young woman coming of age in the context of her discovery that she was adopted not because her parents died in an epidemic but because they were victims of a state backed massacre not have any reference to the violence? The film makers gave up at this point of time and released the film on DVD. If you haven’t watched the film as yet, please head to the nearest store and borrow it...better still buy it. The film is by no means perfect and has the excessive earnestness many films by first timers have but it appeals to the heart. It’s the sort of film first timers should be encouraged to make. The funny thing is they also gave two national awards to the film but made sure it didn't reach too many people.

Shonali Bose also turned her screenplay into a novel and I plan to read it. However what surprises me that the media largely ignored the film and the book. But then the Indian media, especially the ones who work in English publications and channels have not grown up as yet. They only value the big brands or those who come hyped from the west. Since Amu adhered to neither of these types, they didn’t have much to say about it.

Bose didn’t have an easy time making the film either. The Indian production house that backed her initially, deserted her at the last minute. When she approached the American studios, they wanted it to be a story about an American girl. None of Bose’s reasoning that the film was about an American girl with Indian origins cut any ice with them. Maybe they felt if Anne Hathaway can’t be cast as the protagonist, the film wasn’t worth it. Finally she made the film from the money her husband who is a scientist at Nasa, had earned by getting a patent on the smallest camera he had invented.

Bedabrata Pain, Bose’s scientist husband has also made a film ‘Chittagong’ based on the Chittagong uprising. He had approached Jaya Bachchan and Abhishek Bachchan with the script and apparently Jaya Bachchan loved the script. The next thing we knew is that Ashutosh Gowariker, who had earlier made the historical ‘Jodha Akbar’ with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, swung into action and made a film on the same subject with Abhishek Bachchan . He claimed he had based it on Manini Chatterjee’s book. Anurag Kashyap left a disgusted note on FB about how the Bachchans were influencing the distributors not to release Chittagong before Gowariker’s film, even though it had been completed earlier. I am sure you can put two and two together like I did and figure out what really happened behind scenes in this sorry mess.

Not that Gowariker’s film helped anyone including him. I can’t recall the film’s name but I know it sank like the Titanic and doomed the Junior Bachchan’s career forever. It flopped so badly that it has had a reverberating impact on every film Bachchan has come out with subsequently. They have all bombed. Now no producer is likely to invest money on either Bachchan or Gowariker unless Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan decide to fund the film from their personal wealth.

But all this must be of small consolation to Pain whose film is still stuck in the cans.

Ajeeb Amar ki Gazab Kahani

Amar Singh is a real clown. He imagines he is on a comeback trial. He was all over the television channels yesterday. This time he has found himself a brand new brother in Digvijay Singh. Together they held a press conference to discredit Shanti and Prashant Bhushan. And Singh forgot he was implicating himself as a patron of corruption when he decided to bell the Bhushans. I think the man is beyond caring now. All he wants to do is to claw back into public consciousness. He has met the predictable end of all fixers who outlive their purpose. They make the mistake of believing they have formed deep enduring bonds with those who they service. But once they have served their purpose, they turn into embarrassments for the very same folks they were on backslapping terms with. Like in the case of Singh, the Bachchans who never tired of acknowledging that Singh was family were quick to dump him no sooner did he have a fall out with his political mentor Mulayam Singh Yadav.

A couple of years ago we had a journalist from Lucknow visiting us. She had me in splits over stories of Amar Singh. Apparently he had this palatial house built for his good friend Jaya Prada on the banks of Gomti. Whenever they are in Lucknow, they are found in the balcony of this ‘Taj Mahal,’ soaking in the sunset. The whole thing sounded like my favourite fairy tale- Beauty and the Beast.

Singh is a born entertainer. He has even acted in a Malayalam film with Dimple Kapadia. Imagine the man keeps on getting humiliated and snubbed in public by someone or the other be it Sonia Gandhi or Jaya Bachchan or Mulayalam Singh Yadav. And then he gets to spend time with the most beautiful women in the country. I guess life always finds a way to compensate. The journalist also told me that there are these ‘Amar Chalisas’ available in UP. They are a bit risqué but very entertaining. If anyone has a copy, please mail it to me. I am dying to read it and since I am an adult I am allowed to.

Singh is in good company when he decides to give himself more importance than he deserves. Arvind Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi and Santosh Hegde are faring no better. What is all this nonsense about the government trying to discredit them and how hurt they are by the whole thing? They opted to take on the responsibility of framing the bill. Surely they weren’t naive enough to believe that they can take on the establishment and the system will respond with a lot of grace. They should get real and get on with doing the job they are meant to do. We all have skeletons in our cupboards and no one is naive enough to believe that the members of the civil society as they like to refer to themselves are an exception to this rule. They should stop throwing these silly tantrums. Besides they are just going to be drafting a bill. No one has empowered them to do anything more. For that they have to go and fight an election and win without bribing the electorate. It’s as simple as that. And the Bhushans should be replaced in the committee by some young and upright lawyers. Maybe someone who has just graduated from the National Law School and has all the legal knowledge to make a valuable contribution. By being rigid on this, they are just mirroring the behaviour of the politicians they oppose. Bas...bahut ho gaya. Ab kaam karo. Press conferences mat karo.

If I am sounding irritated, it’s because of this new Tanishq advertisement that has Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan in it. They are terribly affected...even more cloying than they were in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. I hope it’s not one of those sequel kind of ads where Abhishek and Aishwarya would also make an appearance at a later date.

If that happens I will definitely smash my television set.