Kalpana Wilson

Even as Calcutta's Ananda Bazar Patrika was beginning its serialisation of the graphically detailed autobiography of notorious police torturer Runu Guha Niyogi, CPI(M) Rajya Sabha MP Biplab Dasgupta was joining hands with the BJP's K.R.Malkani to demand the banning of Maachis, Gulzar's film about Punjab, for its portrayal of the police 'in a poor light'. The very fact that it attracted such a response, and the fact that for the first time in 12 long years the storming of the Golden Temple and the Delhi anti-Sikh riots are being mentioned (however indirectly) in a film, and that too in a commercial blockbuster whose songs have topped the charts, makes Maachis worth a closer look.

The first half of the film is set in a Punjab village, an idyllic pastoral setting of golden wheat fields, gleaming tractors and affluent, educated young farmers, which is from the outset however, undercut by the sinister presence of the police. The hero, Kirpal (Chandrachur Singh) is visiting his fiancee's family when her brother is abducted by two sadistic senior police officers, and disappears for several weeks, despite all efforts to trace him, finally returning permanently debilitated by the torture he has suffered. Kirpal, seeking to avenge himself on these particular police officers, eventually finds his way to a small group of militants. In the second half, the action shifts to the mountains of Himachal, where the group of which Kirpal is now a member has its base from where various actions are planned. While this shift provides a dramatically beautiful setting for the film's most popular songs - the haunting Chhor aye ham wo galiyan and the exuberant Chapa chapa charkha chale, it also transfers our attention away from Punjab itself, abruptly casting us into a fantasy world of rugged adventure and male camaraderie in which the young militants' lifestyle seems to have more in common with a college trekking holiday than an armed struggle.

More significantly, not only does Khalistan find no mention in the film, but Gulzar assiduously steers clear of any suggestion that any of these young men are fighting for any goal wider than personal vengeance. Like Kirpal they have all experienced torture or brutality at close quarters, and have blindly reacted.

On the one hand, the horror of these experiences is conveyed uncompromisingly and without sensationalism, and the attempts at revenge with a measure of sympathy - most strikingly when a (clearly Congress) politician who led the Delhi massacres of Sikhs is assassinated when travelling in an official convoy. But by showing individual experiences of this kind as the root cause of 'terrorism', the film refuses to acknowledge, sympathetically or otherwise, the existence of social movements with their own causes and dynamics, capable of inspiring people to act other than in direct response to very specific individual experiences.

Some critics have argued that Maachis should not be regarded as a film about the Punjab question but simply as a film about police brutality and human rights abuses. From this point of view, they suggest, the lack of any social context for the film - which could almost as well be about such abuses in Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Kashmir or any other corner of the country where the state is at war with the people - is not a major failing. Yet its absence is a symptom of a specific underlying assumption - that it is not the contradictions or weaknesses or outright reactionary nature of certain specific social movements which leads those who participate in them down blind alleys towards tragedy, but the very act of resistance itself. In the world of Maachis, while state brutality leads naturally to an instinctive resistance, this reaction in turn leads inevitably to disaster and death.

Thus the film takes pains to emphasise both the naivety and ultimately the incompetence of its 'terrorist' protagonists. On one level this is consistent with the film's apparent rejection of commercial cinema values - for example when the hero in a state of despair finally rashly confronts his arch enemy, police officer Vohra, one to one, instead of overwhelming him against all odds, as any seasoned commercial cinema-goer would have expected, he is actually outwitted and captured by the unarmed Vohra. Yet this liberal humanist 'realism' serves to reinforce the underlying structure of the film which portrays the militants as doomed neither by the escalation of the repressive response of the state nor by the contradictions of their own organisation, but by a sort of inescapable tragic destiny which leads to the death of every single one of the central characters.

Despite this however, Maachis does convey a pervasive sense of disillusionment and betrayal, most powerfully expressed by the character of Sanatan (Om Puri), the leader of this particular militant unit. His own experience symbolises the alienation of the Sikh community - while half his family were killed in the Partition riots, he lost those who remained in the 1984 pogroms in Delhi. The only person in the film to give voice to any wider perception beyond their own experience, he also speaks of how little the people as a whole have gained in all the decades of independence, still lacking water to drink and land to till. Yet ultimately this insight is shown to have only served to turn this man into a ruthless and nihilistic killer - the other face of the Indian state's history of betrayals of its people - the constant struggles and multiple forms of resistance, progressive and otherwise, has been written out of the script, leaving a gaping hollow at the film's centre.

The clearest illustration of the contradictions of the film is the character of Veera, the fiancee of the hero, sensitively portrayed by Tabu. In the first half she remains within the boundaries of the traditional heroine, instinctively trying to prevent her lover from getting involved in violence and later pining cinematically for him (although she is glimpsed driving a tractor when her brother is incapacitated by his torture). Her entry in the second half of the film, when she is brought as a new recruit to the hideout of Kirpal's unit marks a turning point. Her very appearance - she has exchanged the tasteful but spotless and glowing orange and white outfits of the first half not for jeans or combat fatigues but a realistically baggy sweater over her salwar kamiz and training shoes on her feet - suggests the emergence of a real person attempting to shape her own future. Once again however, this exterior actually masks a very different message. It is soon revealed that she has joined the militants not of her own choice, as an expression of anger, or even in search of her fiance, but in sheer desperation: her brother has been rearrested, her aunt has died of shock and she has been left alone to face sexual advances from the sinister Vohra. For Gulzar it seems, the fact that a woman has joined the group underlines both her own despair and hopelessness and that of the group, and after Veera's entry the earlier carefree all-male atmosphere evaporates and events spiral rapidly downwards into tragedy. In fact it is Veera, the only central female character, who more than anyone else personifies the doomed destiny of those who have chosen this path. She is shown wearing a cyanide capsule around her neck and in a highly symbolic scene tells Kirpal - think of this as my mangalsutra. Ironically, neither the cyanide capsule nor the mangalsutra have been prevalent in Sikh Punjab, but for audiences fed on composite stereotypes of 'terrorism' from Sri Lanka to Kashmir, it is clearly a highly potent image.

Many nationality movements in South Asia, steeped in semi-feudal ideology, have portrayed women as both symbols and property of the nation, the repository of its collective honour, as well as (notably in the case of the LTTE) potentially invincible fighters whose femininity itself suits them to self-denial and to making the 'ultimate sacrifice'. The Maachis perspective accepts these basic assumptions, the only difference being that instead of glorifying the movement it laments its very existence. Thus Veera's participation can only be a forced one, a source of shame, and her energies can only contribute towards the inevitable ultimate self-destruction of the whole group. She never actually takes part in any of the group's terrorist actions: as the film ends, her courage and initiative keep her alive, not to fight on, but only long enough to deliver the deadly capsule to the imprisoned and tortured Kirpal, and commit a kind of cyanide sati herself.

The concept of 'human rights', as defined by the United Nations or for that matter by India's own National Commission for Human Rights, has been contrasted with the concept of 'democratic rights' developed by the revolutionary left. An understanding of democratic rights, which grew out of campaigns against repression unleashed against people's movements, inevitably involves an understanding of the underlying causes of resistance to state power. In Maachis, Gulzar has resolutely stuck to the limited concept of 'human rights', which is why, for all its sympathy for its helplessly trapped heroes, the only politically motivated character (the turban-wearing, truck-driving leader of the outfit) remains indistinguishable from any other media 'terrorist': sinister and ruthless, shadowy and incomprehensible.

'Human rights' of course is now a global buzz-word. Meanwhile the Indian state is seeking to gloss over the realities of Punjab and increasingly also Kashmir by projecting them as 'democratically' resolved. In the circumstances, it is not averse to acknowledging some regrettable violations of human rights by its own apparatuses - so long as these can be condemned as aberrations and then consigned to history. Perhaps after all, despite the failed attempts to ban it by the most hardline defenders of state violence, and its exclusion from the 'official' film festival this year, Maachis is truly in tune with the times.