Images of 1984:
A matter of identity

ON which story is your film based? In what ways have you modified/departed from the original script?

What drew me to N.S. Madhavan’s short story in Malayalam, titled When the Big Trees Fall (Rajiv Gandhi’s pusillanimous metaphor to explain the riots), was that it was already at one remove. The story was set in Meerut in a convent for aged nuns. It is about how they protect a Sikh mother and her seven-year-old son who seek refuge in the convent. I sat on the story for many years. But post-Godhra, it all seemed to suddenly fall into place.

The film was shot in about 35 days between mid-February and March-end. The outdoor locations were in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi. There is some camera verite footage of places like Tilak Vihar, where the victims and their families live.

What happened to thousands of Sikhs in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 sits uneasy on our national conscience. Even so many years after that carnage we have not looked it squarely in the eye, politically, socially or culturally. But the film is not so much a look back in anger as in search of answers. It does not attempt to frontally depict the killings. Nor is it a passionate engagement with the situation. It seeks to contexualise the violence of 1984 with that of 2002 in Gujarat and see these as symptomatic of a deeper challenge to our multi-culturalism. The film deals with the vulnerability of identity in our pluralistic society.

How does the storyline weave together both the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and the post-Godhra riots, which are otherwise far apart in time?

Stylistically, the film is, as I have hinted, about distancing. There is a Brechtian alienative undercurrent that ultimately compels greater, not lesser, and more enduring engagement. In such a scheme, the distance in time between 1984 and Gujarat of 2002 actually serves the treatment well.

Over the years, I did meet people who were affected by the 1984 riots. I also spoke to journalists Rahul Bedi and Joseph Maliakan, who had covered the riots in Delhi and the Trilokpuri killings. Even today, the event unleashes a flood of memories among the inmates of Tilak Vihar’s widow resettlement colony in Delhi. Exposure to what they carry in their hearts has, for me, been traumatic.

Seema Biswas was a strong contender for the role of Sister Agatha, the main nun, from the very outset. I did consider Taboo and Deepti Naval but Seema seemed to fit the role more instinctively.

It took me a while to zero in on Angad. My friend Madan Gopal Singh, who has also done the dialogues, told me one day he knew the person who’d fit the role and arranged for Angad to meet me. When Angad strode in, even before he had approached our table, I told Madan that this was our man. Although his mileu has been modelling, he has a strong screen presence and sensitivity.

Cameos have been played both by first-timers and veterans from the Delhi and Amritsar stage. Neeti Mohinder, a theatreperson from the Amritsar, plays the Sikh mother. Journalists Rahul and Maliakan play themselves in the film.

The role of the seven-year-old Sikh boy, who seeks refuge along with his mother, has been played by Neelambari Bhattacharya, a grandchild of the late E.M.S.Namboodiripad. Neelambari has lived the role with subtlety and maturity.

The film does not have a linear narrative form. It is not so much about storytelling as about the connections that lend new meaning to our lives. The treatment switches from the objective to the subjective and back.

I would certainly like the film to be seen as widely as possible, but to make it the simpler or the easier for that would, I think be an insult as much to myself as to others.

I don’t know if I have brought my peculiar baggage to the film, but there is a lot of self-reflexivity about the media and journalism in the film as well.

The impinging social concern for me is really the way the media is setting the agenda and being prescriptive about everything. This coupled with the growing corporatisation of the media makes for a lethal mix. I would think the timing of my move to celluloid is partly a reaction to the inexorable nature of contemporary media and the stifling superficiality that we are all asked to celebrate. I feel compelled to reflect on events that have affected our society in more than an ephemeral ‘news’ sense. If this is, as Guy Debord predicted even in the late sixties, the Society of the Spectacle, we need conscientious efforts towards the counter-spectacle, which, paradoxically, is celluloid space today.