Author: Shobha Warrier
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: October 1, 2004
URL: http://inhome.rediff.com/movies/2004/oct/01kaya.htm
[Note from Hindu Vivek Kendra: Will
those who show films, all over the world, projecting Hindus in bad light,
will give this effort the same exposure?]
Inside the pupa the butterfly might
have longed for day to dawn, to flap its tender wings among the flowers.
Nobody knew if it yearned for freedom
or felt more secure in the pupa's warmth.
What we know is that Preet, a young
Sikh boy, feels strangulated within the confines of his childhood memories.
The images of his father and brother
being butchered before his eyes haunt him after 18 years.
The long run he and his mother undertook
to escape the rioters and their precarious climb over the high walls of
a nunnery in Meerut are fresh in his memory.
What confuses him most is how the
nuns changed his identity.
What still terrifies him is his
bumpy ride inside a coffin to escape the terrorists' wrath.
That was in 1984, when Preet was
a child. He could not comprehend the events unfolding around him.
In 2002, as a 24-year-old journalist,
he could understand what was happening in Gujarat, when the Bharatiya Janata
Party state government allegedly supported a brutal offensive against a
minority community.
Preet travelled from Delhi to his
birthplace Meerut to research a 'story' on conversions and to talk with
the superior Sister Agatha, who had taken care of him and his mother 18
years ago.
It turns out to be a journey that
liberates his mind from terrifying memories. He no longer feels strangulated
by them. He is unafraid to come out of his pupa.
The butterfly is liberated.
Preet's liberation and his 'conversion'
back to the identity he was born into is at the core of Sashi Kumar's maiden
directorial venture, the Hindi feature film Kaya Tharan (Chrysalis).
Kumar, the wellknown television
personality, is also chairman of the Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
Kaya Tharan is a loose adaptation
of a short story written in Malayalam by N S Madhavan, an officer in the
Indian Administrative Service.
Madhavan titled his story When Big
Trees Fall, an allusion to the infamous statement uttered by Rajiv Gandhi,
then India's prime minister ('When a big tree falls, the earth is bound
to shake') on November 1, 1984, the day after his mother Indira Gandhi
was assassinated.
In it, Kumar saw the fear a young
boy felt inside and titled the film Kaya Tharan.
"As I am a contemporary person,
it is natural for me to move into this question of when your identity is
about to slip from your hands and you just about manage to grasp it again,"
he says. "That is the process of a butterfly emerging from a pupa. It is
the process of a regeneration or apotheosis. It is also an exhortation
not to be pessimistic, that you can reassert your identity and go forward."
The 1984 riots in India unleashed
terror against the Sikhs, allegedly by ruling Congress party activists.
But those horrific events, where over 3,500 Sikhs lost their lives, have
remained anathema to filmmakers who prefer to talk of the freedom struggle
and the subsequent Partition of India.
Why are filmmakers reluctant to
tell the truth?
Kumar is nonplussed.
"We have had films on everything
but the 1984 riots, for some reason, have not figured in films," he says.
"It was a scar on the identity of the Sikhs. Unlike other denominations,
for example the Muslims, who have a larger bonding to look at, the Sikhs
are our own. What is nice is, except for fringe elements of some extremist
groups, there is no vendetta in them. There is more of inexplicable hurt.
I have tried to capture their sense of hurt in the film."
Although he has Leftist leanings,
Kumar's film maintains a balance in the political message it conveys.
He has tried to encompass issues
that worry Indian intellectuals, like minority bashing, reservations for
the so-called lower castes and religious conversion in the form of political
statements, or the arguments of journalists at the Delhi Press Club, from
where the film starts.
"The film is politically autonomous,"
says Kumar. "It is not a pro- Congress or pro-BJP film at all; it is not
even a pro-Marxist film. I feel Marxists in Kerala are as guilty about
what's happening to the tribals in Wayanad (in northern Kerala) as anybody
else.
"I tried to look at these issues
in an autonomous, artistic mode, also not in a totally removed or totally
ivory-towerish fashion. This film is about identities; it is about identities
in a plural society, and the dilemmas especially when you belong to a denominational
identity. To the vast majority of Hindus, this is not a conscious problem."
Though the narrative moves back
and forth, Kaya Tharan is like a smoothly and silently flowing river, redolent
of the silent journeys the late filmmaker G Aravindan undertook in his
works.
Kaya Tharan is more personal, like
a fine work of poetry, or a powerful short story or a delicate painting.
In these days when filmmakers talk about 'money and compromises' without
qualms, here is a filmmaker who dares to use a surrealistic ballet choreographed
by the renowned dancer Chandralekha.
"I made the film in a dialectic
mode. I used a lot of surrealistic elements," says Kumar. "The narrative
is disrupted every once in a while through some alienative mechanisms,
which help you to empathise more with the content rather than emotionally
plunging headlong into it, and then getting lost and choked and then coming
out and forgetting about it."
Preet's search for his identity
receives its impetus one morning in 2002 as he lathers his face to shave
off a two-day-old stubble. He decides not to shave, and washes off the
lather.
In Meerut, he learns from Sister
Agatha about the events of 1984. The nun explains that she could facilitate
his and his mother's escape only by destroying the Sikh boy's identity.
The nuns forcibly cut his hair and
took him out of the nunnery in a coffin. (One of the most understated moments
in the film is the scene of Preet feeling breathless inside an elevator
when the power goes off. Only later do we understand the reason for his
suffering.)
After 18 years, ruffling his hair,
Sister Agatha says, 'I hope you no longer feel angry when I touch your
hair.'
Except for Seema Biswas (Bandit
Queen), who delivers a powerful performance as Sister Agatha, the film
unveils several new faces.
Kumar extracts excellent performances
from them, especially from those who played the nuns.
Angad Bedi (Indian cricket legend
Bishen Singh Bedi's son) plays Preet to excellence. Neelambari Bhattacharya,
great-grandson of India's first elected Communist chief minister, the late
E M S Namboodiripad, is a scene-stealer as the young Preet.
This feature first appeared in India
Abroad, the newspaper owned and published by rediff.com
