Film Review

When the Past Lives in the Present: Amu Screened in Winnipeg

Following its Canadian premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall of 2005, Amu, by filmmaker Shonali Bose, opened in Winnipeg on March 30 as part of its limited cross-Canada release.  Set both in present day India and during the 1984 Delhi massacre and riots which followed the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Amu tells the terrible story of the crimes committed by the Indian state against its own citizens through a young woman’s journey of discovery.

Kaju (Konkana Sensharma) is an Indian-American, struggling with the same issues of identity and belonging with which many first generation youth grapple with.  Visiting her family in India after graduating from UCLA, she feels both like she has come home and like she is an outsider.   She meets college student Kabir (Ankur Khanna) who ridicules her attempts to discover the “real India” and to be a part of life in India, yet who, as the activist son of an upper-class family, is also grappling with identity and his role in India.  Kabir joins Kaju on her journey through the vibrant, bursting streets of Delhi.  He is also with her as she ventures into Delhi’s slums, where she is gripped with an overwhelming sense of deja-vu.  

When her adoptive mother Keya (Brinda Karat) arrives in Delhi, she is horrified to hear that Kaju has been visiting the slums and tells her not to return, but Kaju cannot stay away.  Gradually, through Kaju’s flashbacks to her early youth, she realizes that something terrible happened and that she was a witness to it all.  Working with Kabir, she pieces together the events of November 1984, including the massacre of over 5,000 Sikhs and the riots that took place, organized by the highest levels of the state with the full cooperation of the police and bureaucrats.  

The flashback scenes to the massacres and riots are powerful - not because Bose uses gratuitous violence to convey the terror but because she takes the opposite approach and instead, while using light and sound to represent the mayhem, leaves its specificity to the imagination of the viewer.  Not only does Bose convey the terror and chaos, she also depicts the bravery of the ordinary people who refused to be complicit in the massacres and helped hide Sikhs.  

Through their research, Kabir’s father emerges as one of the forces behind the 1984 crimes.  Interestingly, though, as a filmmaker Bose rejects the convenience of creating a “bad guy” on whom the atrocities can be pinned.  It is not Kabir’s father – it is the entire Indian state, rotten to its core, which bears responsibility for the crimes of 1984.  In one scene, Kabir and Kaju meet with a group of widows whose families were killed during the massacres.  One of the widows tells Kaju that the riots were organized by a government Minister.  They were all involved, says another in the group, the police, the politicians, the bureaucrats – all of them.  The Indian censor board, which delayed the Indian release of Amu by three months, ordered these two lines of dialogue be dubbed over (Bose refused and instead the dialogue was removed from the version released in India, with only the women’s lips moving).  Even with the edit, the film was given the equivalent of an NC-17 rating, which meant that youth couldn't attend the film officially, although it has ended up being very popular with Indian youth.  A censorship board official justified Amu's rating by stating “Why should young people know a history which is best buried and forgotten?”

But of course history can neither be buried nor forgotten.  As Kaju faces the terrible reality of her past, Bose is able to depict both the horror of 1984 and the continuing tragedy of the failure to hold the state accountable for its crimes.   In one of the final scenes of the movie, in present day India, the news is on in the background, reporting on the latest state-organized massacre in Gujarat.  The failure to punish anyone for 1984, Bose is telling her audience, has only led to more tragedies.

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