IN THE NEWS
Whither justice?
|
"Amu" is a powerful indictment of the riots that convulsed Delhi in the wake of Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984. NEETA LAL talks to Shonali Bose on the making of the film.
|
Hearing suppressed voices: Shonali Bose.
"NINE Commissions of Enquiry have been instituted, three special courts have come and gone, nine times Parliament has changed hands, yet where is justice for the riot victims of 1984? Not a single perpetrator has been punished; the guilty are still roaming free, the politicians/bureaucracy/the courts all carry on with business as usual. This apathy, this total denial of justice is what my film portrays."
The `film' being referred to above is "Amu", a powerful indictment of the cataclysmic riots that convulsed Delhi in the wake of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984.
And the incensed "speaker" is its creator, Los Angeles-based activist/filmmaker Shonali Bose (niece of CPI (M) activist Brinda Karat) whose film had all of Delhi agog last week at India Habitat Centre where it had a special screening. The film, financed by Films Division, was released worldwide on January 7.
Incidentally, it also marks the screen debut of Karat who plays the protagonist Kaju's (Konkana Sensharma) mother.
Powerful play
Interestingly, Bose's involvement with activism and theatre goes back to her student days in Miranda House College, Delhi University, where she co-wrote and acted in a street play on the Delhi riots in 1984.
The powerful play, despite its political overtones, was crafted so well that it was staged in relief camps, riot-affected areas, schools and colleges all across Delhi.
But Bose, 40, who wasn't content just playing the playwright, a mere recorder of a vast human tragedy, pitched in with rehabilitation efforts at relief camps too, organising food, clothes, transcribing postcards from widows to their relatives, writing down their stories of horror...
Many years later, in far away Los Angeles, when she finished film school (UCLA's School of Theatre, Film and Television), she knew this was one story she had to write. The one film she had to make and show to a world that was oblivious to the suppressed history of that genocide. It was the long brewing catharsis she had been waiting for...
Shot over a tight 43-day schedule in Delhi with a budget of Rs. three crores, "Amu" (Bose's husband Vedvrat Pain, a NASA scientist, is its executive producer) deals with the story of Kajori Roy or Kaju, an Indian American woman who returns to India to visit her family.
The film takes a dark turn as Kaju stumbles upon secrets and lies from her past. A horrifying genocide that took place 20 years ago holds the key to her mysterious origins...
Working as an activist outside India, one of the issues that nettled Bose, she says, was the painful question of identity that rack second-generation youth. Their yearning to be accepted both here and there, to know their roots, to place themselves. It was out of the filmmaker's empathy for young people facing this identity crisis that her protagonist Kaju was born.
But by the time Bose had fleshed out the final draft of the screenplay, much more had happened. India and the world had gone through Godhra, the Gujarat riots, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq and the filmmaker wanted to meld them all in her creation.
Angry voices
But top of the agenda clearly were the 1984 riots. "Despite a gap of two decades, those angry voices from the relief camps were still resonating in my ears," she says. "Voices like "Minister hee to the; unhi ki shaye pe sab hua. Saare shamil the, minister, police, neta, afsar, sarkar, saare' (It was all done at the behest of a minister. They were all involved,- the police, the government, the bureaucracy, the politicians, everyone...)"
Ironically, when Bose wove in these evocative lines in her 90-minute film, they were — guess what? — snipped off by the Censor Board (four other audio cuts were imposed too).
And to top it all, the film was tagged with an "A"certificate. "I accepted the cuts," says the director, "and thought them to be an even more powerful indictment for audiences to see the widows silently moving their lips. Silenced even after 20 years..."
One vision
"`Amu'," feels Bose, "is the child of a collective. It was born out of the participation of many people." Incidentally, the filmmaker's short narrative film ("The Gendarme is Here and Undocumented") and her feature length documentary ("Lifting The Veil") have been screened throughout the world.
To lead a team of nearly 100 people (from multiple countries and ethnic backgrounds) for "Amu", with all their personalities and opinions — and to make sure the vision was one — was certainly no cakewalk.
And undeterred by the putrid smell emanating from rubbish heaps, she canned scenes in Delhi's Sanjay Colony and Trilok Nagar with a 100-plus fully masked crew tiptoeing gingerly over debris-strewn terra firma!
Recalls Bose, laughing, "In retrospect it seems amusing though it wasn't so at that time. In fact, Konkana and I were the only ones not wearing masks and braving the odd conditions but it just had to be done."
Now that the film has been released worldwide, what are the filmmaker's expectations from it? "Well, none really. My only hope for `Amu' is that it should make us think. Make us probe a little, squirm a little in our seats even as we witness the unfolding of a vast human tragedy, which despite being rooted in its specific context and geography is a strong universal story."
With Bose's touching integrity, that is hardly unattainable.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
