Maachis completes 25 years: Gulzar displayed commendable journalistic objectivity in telling a story of Punjab insurgency

Gulzar, who completes 60 years in Hindi films this year, remains one of the few filmmakers who effectively explored non-linear narrative format in popular cinema. His films have often had stories that unfold in flashbacks, with protagonists looking back at their lives with either romance or melancholy.

These are people mostly on a personal journey, either wandering off to a new start or away from their home or roots, as we see their stories unravel. The 1996 film Maachis is that rare bonafide political film in Gulzar's oeuvre (along with his debut Mere Apne), that sublimely uses these familiar devices and themes to tell one of the most important stories of India's contemporary political history.

Revolving around the multi-layered subject of Punjab insurgency, Maachis is essentially about people with uprooted lives who are on a constant run, suffering from a sense of alienation in their own land, occasionally looking back at the sheer normalcy of times gone by. Gulzar chooses a very minimal canvas to plot his narrative. Linearly speaking, the story begins with visuals of an idyllic household in rural Punjab, representing countless of those that eventually became the undeserving victims of state-sponsored brutalities. A warm vigour permeates through the courtyard — of childhood bondings rooted in love for hockey, of an impending union, of years-old friendships that now feel like family — before the bliss abruptly makes way for brute, as Jassi (Raj Jutshi), the family’s son, is taken away by police on suspicion of aiding a terrorist.

This is the only scene where we prominently see police figures, but it is an important one because of how suddenly it arrives and shakes everything up. Police excess was the trigger that further fuelled the insurgency in Punjab, and it is the catalyst for the narrative here too. The rest of the film is the aftermath. and Maachis is a rare film that justly chooses to focus on the aftermath, the tragic consequences of a conflict that hovered over almost a decade and a half as the whole of Punjab suffered dire consequences of actions that never belonged to them. Gulzar sums up the gargantuan context with three newspaper cuttings "Golden Temple Stormed," "Indira Gandhi shot dead," and "Mob burns Sikhs alive" (accompanied by still graphic images), expecting us to connect the rest of the dots about the dark, brushed-under-the-carpet chapter where thousands of young men were endlessly subjected to police brutalities over several years, under the garb of routine inquiries.

Despite clearly telling the story from the militants’ perspective and being compassionate to their plight, Gulzar never picks any side, displaying a rather journalistic objectivity in his telling.

He doesn’t refrain from acknowledging the significant involvement of Pakistan in aiding and training many of the militant groups. There also are emotionally charged monologues — about the broken state of affairs, the wounds of partition, the forced subservience upon the Sikh community, the staged encounters driven by greed for promotions and yet it never seems like the narrative is peddling any of it to justify the militancy. We understand their plight, yet never find ourselves rooting for their actions. (The narrative makes more than one attempt to establish the humaneness of the power-abusing policemen as well, like SM Zahir's Khurana, who shops for vegetables with his wife on his off-days, or Kanwaljit's Vore, who remembers his affinity for poetry in college days.)

What does feel a little cloudy is the nature of the militants’ rebellion. Unlike the stereotypical portrayals of terrorists in other films, Maachis does not paint them as a bunch of cold-blooded ideological extremists. Soon, we realise that this group might have sprouted out of common wounds, but is not driven by a common goal in particular. After narrowly escaping the police bullets, Kuldeep (Ravi Gosain), one of the militants, says, “I joined this group because it all seemed thrilling at first,” before confessing that the fear of death facing him was too much to handle.  At one point, Sanatan (Om Puri), the militant group leader, himself admits, “I am not doing these for the coming generations.. I am doing it to battle the injustice meted out to me and win back my rights,” even going on to add that none of it has anything to do with religion or statehood.

And yet it becomes evident that Palli (Chandrachur Singh) was just one of the many men instigated by Sanatan to take up arms in his seemingly personal fight against the system. When Palli returns home after killing Khurana, he is questioned by his fiance Veera (Tabu), "Is your anger quenched now?" Balli does not have an answer to that, for deep down, he knows that he let himself and others exploit his personal anger, and now he is too far off the deep end. The sense of scattered anger also reflects in the final act when the militant group implodes violently, in the midst of executing a major attack on a parliament member’s life, owing to suspicions of internal foul-play.

And caught in between are the innocent natives, who neither support the violence undertaken by the militants nor are in denial about the unrest caused by the system that continues to fuel and enrage innocent bystanders into some form of retaliation.

Maachis effectively captures that sense of chaos, encapsulated in an off-hand moment as Nanoo (Amrik Gill), the wise old man of their group, tries to comfort Palli by saying that God will make everything alright. Palli innocently asks, “But what will he make alright?” Palli realises at that point, just like we do, that their land has entered a conflict that can never have easy resolutions again.

The film hits the hardest when Veera lands up at the same place as Palli, after being orphaned and having no purpose of leading the solitary life in the village anymore. And yet, the film also beautifully comes around here, as in their final days together, Palli and Veera find themselves sharing banter and warmth over mundane stuff like drying clothes like a newly-married couple, longing for normalcy snatched away from them years ago, joking about a cyanide pill being the mistress in their lives while being fully aware of the end that might arrive any day.

Maachis does not boast of very eye-catching production values, but Gulzar saves up the visual lyricism for his staggering song sequences. (Vishal Bhardwaj, credited as Vishal, made one spectacular debut here as a music director, marking the first of many glorious collaborations with Gulzar.) While the more popular numbers like 'Chappa Chapp' and 'Chhod Aaye Hum Wo Galiyan,' shot against the snow-clad Himachal landscape, brim with nostalgia and melancholy, it is the collection of pensive Lata Mangeshkar solos ('Pani Pani Re' and 'Piya Ji Bulaa Lo' among others) that truly leave a haunting impact.

Picturised on Tabu against backdrops of a deserted backyard or in the silent shadows of night, they carry the heavy heart of the film, conveying a great sense of loss and melancholy to its imagery. (It is with this film that Tabu catapulted herself into the A-league, establishing credentials as that rare star-actor who could also do the heavylifting of off-beat cinema. Maachis also marked a stellar debut by Chandrachur Singh, who unfortunately did not live up to the potential in his later films.)

Apart from great critical acclaim, Maachis went on to achieve box-office success as well, which came as a huge surprise for many, considering how non-formulaic and languorously paced it was by mainstream-cinema standards, not mentioning the discomforting political theme, something no filmmaker had touched upon till then, and very few has delved into ever since. Maachis is believed to have also influenced the course of the Punjab elections in 1997, reminding the voters of the atrocities aided by the ruling government over the years.

However, what is alarming is the heavy prejudice that possibly still persists about the Sikh community, as felt evident a couple of months ago when the mainstream media, as well as the commonplace public, suspected the presence of the Khalistani movement in the ongoing farmers’ protests. While the protesters gracefully moved past the allegations, it only reminded us that Punjab Insurgency is a subject we simply have not had enough discourse about, resorting to casual referencing to the Khalistani movement discarding its massive complexities. Our worst presumptions about the community have somewhere prevailed, not realising that little effort has been made by the system to correct the wrongs of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, or to grasp the nuances of what kept Punjab under such darkness for several years.

Perhaps that explains why a film like this was felt necessary to be made back then, against all norms and unsaid traditions of a film industry that almost systematically stayed away from political issues for decades. Maachis is undoubtedly Gulzar’s most personal film as well, and classifies itself as a mandatory watch, especially for these times where we find ourselves increasingly consumed in the binaries of social media aggression, too trigger-happy to label each other as the extreme — forgetting that truth, more often than not, lies somewhere in the middle. Maachis serves as a riveting reminder of the same.

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