About a year ago, a friend asked me if I could spare a couple hours to talk with her film director friend as well as a lead actress who needed to conduct some basic background research on a film about the 1984 riots against the Sikhs in India that they were working on. They wanted mostly for us to give them our impressions upon returning to India after a long absence. In my case I talked about living in Delhi and doing volunteer work there and how my perceptions of India had changed between the 14 years that passed between the time I visited as a child and when I returned as an adult. The other person she interviewed happened to have been Sikh, and was a small child in Delhi at the time of the Riots. His recollections were perfect for the type of research they needed. It seems that the director, Shonali Bose, is set to release her film next month. From the AFP:
US-based Shonali Bose is set to release a film next month depicting anti-Sikh riots that hit India following the assassination of then prime minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, after accepting cuts demanded by Indian censors.
She told AFP that “Amu”, based on her novel of the same name has been shot in English and cleared for release in India by the Central Board of Film Certification.
“Amu” tells the story of an orphan named Kaju [Actress Konkona Sen Sharma], adopted and brought up in Los Angeles by American parents, who returns to India to discover her roots and finds that her real parents were killed during the anti-Sikh riots.
As you would expect, the censors felt like they needed to start cutting:
The latest film’s hard-hitting dialogue however came in for cuts demanded by the censor board, Bose said.
The board vets feature and documentary films and advertising shorts to check content deemed anti-national, anti-minority, excessively violent or sexually exploitative.
“I was told that dialogue which speaks of violence against minority communities was not allowed in the film,” Bose said.
The board however left most visuals intact such as killings and mob violence, she said.
It did cut some scenes of a widow blaming the government for turning a blind eye during the anti-Sikh riots and also to some extent encouraging it.
Amu will of course be influenced mostly by the director’s own memories and experience of the ‘84 riots. Bose was a first year history student in Delhi at the time. She is also writing a book set to be released concurrently with the film on January 5th.
