The Embers Are Still Burning

GURTEJ Singh, a Patiala businessman’s happy-go-lucky, jeans-clad, English-speaking, college-going son, was only a little boy at the time of the cataclysmic events that constitute the narrative core of Maachis—Operation Bluestar, Indira Gandhi’s assassination, the anti-Sikh riots. The memories of those blood-spattered days are, understandably, a bit of a haze—stray, floating, inchoate bits and pieces of information garnered from hearsay and dinner table conversations of family elders—but the strapping, turbaned youngster, no more than 18, is grim-faced as he leaves Patiala’s Harbans Cinema after a three-hour cinematic tour of Punjab’s troubled past. Gulzar’s drama of guilt and expiation, brutality and tenderness, hatred and love has clearly been a painful experience. Maachis seems to have lived up to its pre-release publicity hype—"from the thousands of tales of terror from Punjab, a story to set your conscience afire" is what it had promised.

But did the film really ignite the young man’s conscience? Gurtej responds with a query of his own: "Did all this really happen—innocent young men tortured, maimed and killed by the police with such impunity?" There is a hint of anger in his shrill voice. But he seeks to play it down: "I’m not angry. I’m sad. Perhaps even proud of the resilience of my community—only the Sikhs could have emerged from such a nightmare with their heads held high and their sanity intact." As he gets chirpier by the minute and Gulzar’s unsettling images recede from his mind, he makes his point with the flourish of a young man who is keen to live down the past and move on. He does. His two-wheeler revs up and heads off into the chaotic traffic.

But not all of Punjab is as young as Gurtej Singh. Or as forgiving and optimistic. The wounds have healed, but the scars remain. So, Maachis, highly romanticised, overflowing with lyricism, full of stunning visual compositions but, in the end, benumbingly close-to-the-bones for people, both Sikhs and Hindus, who actually lived through the violence, the terrorist strikes and the bloody police encounters, has struck a chord. Deep down. In virtually every urban centre of Punjab where the film has been released, it’s been declared a runaway hit. In Ludhiana, in Amritsar, in Jalandhar, in Chandigarh, in Patiala, Maachis is drawing huge crowds: predominantly, educated, well-off people, college students, professionals, police officials, bureaucrats and, perhaps, militant sympathisers as well. With the exception of the distributor and the theatre managers, nobody seems to be aware that some members of Parliament, notably the BJP’s K.R. Malkani and the CPM’s Biplab Das-gupta, have suggested that Maachis, in its present form, deserves to be banned.

A section of the Punjab police would love nothing more. For Gulzar’s purportedly sympathetic depiction of the terrorists has kindled their ire no end. Says one of Punjab’s seniormost police officials in Chandigarh: "It is unfortunate that Gulzar has opted for this kind of melodrama. The subject is close to reality, but the treatment isn’t." The film, he adds, doesn’t present the full picture. "It inexplicably overlooks the sacrifices that the police force made to contain the militants. Over 1,700 security personnel died during the period and their acts of bravery should have, at the very least, been alluded to in Maachis." 

The film’s producer, R.V. Pandit, a publisher-entrepreneur who is often described as a friend of the BJP and is known to have conducted a concerted campaign for the restoration of peace in Punjab in the turbulent ’80s on the pages of his now-defunct magazine, Imprint, disagrees with the view that Maachis does not give the men in uniforms their due. "Gulzar portrays the policemen as real human beings. They, too, are victims of the system almost as much as the militants are. Take the policeman played by Kanwaljeet Singh. He is a sensitive soul, a man who would have wielded the pen as a poet hadn’t fate ordained a policeman’s job for him." 

But that’s rather wishy-washy, says a Punjab Police SSP who saw the film with his family and was embarrassed by its content. "True, some excesses may have been committed by the police in the course of duty. But the atrocities that the terrorists perpetrated on the people were much worse. Why does the film gloss over the ‘whole’ truth? Maachis is too superficial to be taken seriously." The police officer feels that the motives of the Punjab terrorists have been completely misunderstood by Gulzar. "These boys were from the lower middle class. They had no ideology and joined the militant ranks primarily for money." 

The Punjab audience obviously doesn’t agree. Neither do the film’s Punjab territory distributor and the managers of the halls where the film is doing roaring business. Says Balbir Singh Kataria, the Amritsar-based distributor of Maachis: "The film has no vulgarity or violence, yet it is drawing crowds. Do you think it would have struck a chord if Gulzar’s interpretation of the Punjab unrest was inaccurate?" Indeed, big-budget, much-hyped films like Ghatak, Rakshak, Dastak and Uff Yeh Mohabbat have paled in comparison. "The only film that’s any competition for Maachis in Punjab is Raja Hindustani," says Kataria. Only five prints of Maachis were initially released in the Punjab territory (which includes Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir and the Union Territory of Chandigarh). Following the overwhelming popular response to the film, two more prints have been added.

The Mumbai-based Pandit vehemently denies that Maachis resorts to glorification of the terrorist. "In fact, it does just the opposite," he says. One crucial misconception that Maachis seeks to dispel is that the terrorists were some sort of supermen, says Pandit, who is also the producer of Kalpana Lajmi’s upcoming Darmiyan. "During the Punjab unrest, I spent days with these boys. Always on the run, they were a scared lot." Indeed, an important character in Gulzar’s film is a young terrorist who, after an encounter with the police, wants to give up arms and return to his village. "It was thrilling from outside," he confesses, "but now I am scared." 

Maachis, says Pandit, is also an exploration of the very nature of terrorism. "Terrorism," he asserts, "is always self-defeating. The leaders survive but the foot-soldiers have to lay down their lives. It has happened everywhere in the world—Palestine, Latin America, Ireland." In Maachis, the chief of the terrorists’ gang, played by Kulbhushan Kharbanda, goes scot-free while his boys are all dead by the end of the film. 

Khushwant Singh, a self-avowed admirer of Gulzar’s latest film, has "one reservation about Maachis". In his syndicated newspaper column, the veteran writer says: "Gulzar traces Punjab terrorism to Operation Bluestar and the anti-Sikh violence of 1984. He overlooks Bhindranwale’s role in creating a gulf between Sikhs and Hindus and role of men like G.S. Tohra, president of the SGPC and responsible for maintaining the sanctity of the Golden Temple." 

Scenes outside all the five Punjab cinema halls where Maachis is showing for over eight weeks—Mini Lal Rattan in Jalandhar, Nandan in Amritsar, Harbans in Patiala, Batra in Chandigarh and Kailash in Ludhiana—substantiate the distributor’s claim that the film, shot on a budget of Rs 2.5 crore, will make profits in the long run. As does the feedback from the general audiences. "The police officers are upset because the film exposes them," says an employee of one of the cinema halls. Unhappy as they are, senior police officers aren’t exactly passing up the opportunity of watching the film. "Not a show goes without at least one senior police officer in the audience," says Kataria.

THE call for a ban is meaningless now, says S.N. Dass Gupta, manager of Jalandhar’s Lal Rattan Cinema. "The censors have cleared the film and it’s been running for several weeks without leading to any trouble at all. If a film’s to be banned, it should be banned right at the outset and not when half the world has already seen it." "What’s all the fuss about?" asks A.K. Sharma, assistant manager of Batra Cinema, Sector 37, Chandigarh. "Gulzar has made a beautiful film and people are responding to it. Isn’t that reason enough to leave the film alone?" 

Pandit, however, has no quarrels with those who are questioning the film’s intentions. "Only a handful of people have misunderstood the film. Most critics have got it right: it isn’t our intention to denigrate the police. In any case, we’ve done a movie about only one aspect of the problem of terrorism. We haven’t claimed that it’s a comprehensive film about Punjab. That would have required going back to Ranjit Singh’s time."

In Jalandhar’s 300-seat Mini Lal Rattan, the night show hasn’t drawn a full house—the region is in the grip of a severe cold wave—but it is clear that the crowd has a middle class skew. Maachis, after all, is not a film for the masses. So it has, and will, remain a strictly urban phenomenon. Forty km off Amritsar, a truck driver ferrying wheat to Delhi from the Wagah border has no clue about the existence of the film. "I am always on the road. I have no time to watch films," he says. But on being told what Gulzar’s film is all about, he announces that he would definitely see it when he has a day to spare in Delhi.

On the way to Jalandhar, a young policeman put on VIP duty on the route that Punjab Chief Minister Rajinder Kaur Bhattal is to take on a visit to the district, is a trifle better informed than the Amritsar truck driver. But time, besides the distance to the nearest cinema hall showing Maachis, is an obstacle. "I might have to stand here for 24 hours, may be more. Who knows?" 

But Maachis is a film that people in Punjab are going miles to see. Amritsar’s Nandan cinema, for instance, has been drawing viewers from Majitha, Tarn Taran and Batala, towns which spearheaded the extremist movement and, therefore, bore its brunt as well. Maachis, after all, is the first film ever to be made about the problem of terrorism in Punjab. The Mumbai riots of January 1993 has its Bombay, the Babri Masjid demolition its Naseem, the Kashmir imbroglio its Roja. The Punjab unrest had nothing. Until Gulzar, himself a Sikh, turned his attention to those benighted years. The fire has been reignited and the people of Punjab are voting for Maachis with their feet.