Maachis (1996) – Review

There’s a general dearth surrounding this movie.

For one, it is simply hard to find, especially in good print. I ultimately watched it on YouTube, where, while not great, it is serviceable.

Culturally, too, except Chappa Chappa Charkha Chale, it has left little discernible impact – people barely know that the song is from a movie called Maachis. It doesn’t “reach into” the present like good political art should, even though its subject matter very much does.

There is also little meaningful writing on it. What I did find was full of solemn, vaguely apologetic praise, which seemed more for the idea and the theme of the movie than for the actual film we got.

Look at the movie on its own terms, and the flaws are more obvious.

The Good

Tabu.

Her character, Veera, is the emotional core of the movie, and she knocks it out of the park. I must’ve gotten up to hug my SO like three times in the middle of the movie. It’s just so moving a performance.

Veera becomes the focal point for an empathetic audience, because everything that happens in the movie seems engineered to ruin her life the most, even though the movie doesn’t always acknowledge or recognize this. Veera’s man, Kirpal Singh (aka Pali, played by Chandrachur Singh), is technically the protagonist of the movie.

The pivotal moment that sets the events into motion is Veera’s brother, Jaswant Singh Randhawa (aka Jassi, played by Raj Zutshi – also great in his role) being indefinitely detained by a pair of cops looking for a terrorist.

In addition to being Veera’s betrothed, Kirpal is also Jassi’s ride-or-die. As Jassi’s absence stretches into hours, then days, and then weeks, Kirpal, at least initially, does manage to make it look like he actually cares about Veera. They share in each other’s suffering, he tries his best to help her and her mother out, and of course, continues to relentlessly search for his friend.

But once Jassi comes back, bearing evidence of all manner of brutality on his slight, bare body, something snaps in Kirpal. Driven mad by frustration and helpless rage, he goes from being a source of love and support for Veera, to becoming yet another person who victimizes her. Eventually, he completely abandons her.

Yet, the song, Pali Ji Bula Lo, just absolutely shreds your heart. To even replay that song takes a toll, because the images of Veera’s sorrow and loneliness are genuinely hard to relive. That’s how good Tabu is in the movie. That brings me to the other thing I liked about the movie.

The songs.

They’re very nice. And they fit where they’re placed, too, like in a well-done musical. However, there is not much in the way of background music in the movie. It of course predates the Enovian era of ambient music, but even so, the movie feels eerily quiet a lot of the time. Scenes of stunning nature are devoid of sounds of birds, flowing water, etc. It can be disorienting. The sound design overall could’ve used more work.

The Bad

It’s less one huge plot-hole, and more a smattering of irritants riddled across the plot that keep breaking immersion.

Part of it is due to what I mentioned before – the movie came out about thirty years ago, and just hasn’t aged very well in light of how the subject has evolved.

But also, part of it is due to the choices made by the story itself. They feel off, and would’ve felt off in 1996 too.

Jassi is a good man. Kirpal is not

And that’s a problem for the movie.

Jassi is treated horribly in the story. And yet, he’s twice the man Kirpal is.

The first time the police detain and torture Jassi, we fear they might’ve killed the soul within. The contrast between the mirthful, good young man who went in, and the broken man who came out, was such.

And yet, he recovers. We see him again. And again. Each time, he’s better. A little more himself physically, and even more so mentally. Despite all the injustice life has meted out to him, he cares for all he’s given, and cherishes it. He is hope itself.

For every ounce of righteous anger that Kirpal carries, Jassi is no doubt entitled to twice as much. But the movie never explores this aspect. Kirpal, who for all intents and purposes was a brother to Jassi, abandons him exactly when he’s needed the most. Just like he abandons Veera. The police might’ve broken Jassi’s bones, but it’s Kirpal who truly leaves him crippled.

The movie itself, too, is uninterested in Jassi’s inner-life. I’ll give the filmmakers the benefit of the doubt and assume he did have one – they just couldn’t show it due to runtime, budget constraints etc. With that assumption, Jassi handles himself admirably.

Note, it’s not his lack of overt reaction to his trauma that makes him so good – the movie just doesn’t even give him a chance to explore avenues for justice (or vengeance!) – no.

It’s the fact that he doesn’t let rage, or anger, or self-pity consume him, and he doesn’t forget what truly matters in life – the people who love him, and still depend on him. Veera, and their elderly mother. No matter what anger and rage Jassi carries within him – and the movie is lesser, much lesser for not showing us this – he’s only ever kind and loving towards his family. Responsibility is the difference between a boy and a man. Jassi lives his responsibilities.

Kirpal, on the other hand, runs from them. He sins endlessly against his loved ones. He’s wrathful, not kind. He’s neglectful and callous, not caring. At one point, when Veera tries to stop him from doing something idiotic that would’ve definitely gotten him killed … he slaps her. The movie by the way, never brings this up again or diegetically calls him out on this. For all of its preachy takes on right and wrong, this is a devastating moral failure.

Which brings me to my next point.

Treatment of Veera

It’s terrible, in a word.

I suspect Gulzar had an axe to grind with some real Randhawa family, and decided to take it out on these poor fictional souls.

Om Puri’s character, Sanatan, is supposed to be some flavor of a leftist guerrilla, and also Kirpal’s mentor in his descent into militancy. He is shown to commit close to every form of treachery in the movie, but all of these are intentional and deliberate. His treachery is diegetic, and is meant to serve as further proof of his zealotry. He isn’t shown to have moral blind-spots as such.

However, he does have moral blind-spots, and they’re not diegetic. The movie doesn’t know them or see them, because they’re the writer’s own moral blind-spots. And they become most obvious in the movie when it comes to the treatment of Veera.

Sanatan yaps a lot in the movie. Waxes poetic on all sorts of social issues (e.g. education) that the Punjab insurgency was really not about. But the moment Veera arrives at their hideout to join their militant cell, what does he do? He makes her the housewife.

Note that these guys already had a designated cook among them, and that at this point in the story, Veera is a bona-fide, Lashkar-trained, honest-to-Waheguru militant herself. A specialist in rockets, even. But even so, as soon as she gets there, she’s the one doing the cooking.

It’s never explained. Sanatan simply says to their former cook something like, “Teri toh aish ho gayi? Khaane ki duty bhi khatam, aur ghar ka khaana bhi mil gaya”. It’s never explained, because it didn’t occur to the writer that it’s something worth explaining.

I kid you not, Sanatan doesn’t even wash his own dishes. This almost three hours long movie, took the time to show this. In one scene, Sanatan walks up to Veera with his dirty dishes and sheepishly says, “Uh … yeh प्लेटें”, and she replies with “Aap rakh dijiye, main dho loongi”.

…. “yeh प्लेटें“?! Abhi tak kya karta tha apni प्लेटों ka buddhe?

It’s disgusting. The juxtaposition of such behavior with all of Sanatan’s jeremiads makes it all the more enraging. He even says to her at one point, “Main ghar ka bada hoon”, like a useless two-bit patriarch.

Again, this is not noticed or even thought twice about, by any character in the movie, least of all by Kirpal. Fiancé-of-the-year right here.

Sanatan makes no sense

Neither as a character, nor when he speaks.

Might be a weird point after I said that Sanatan has no diegetic moral blind-spots, but bear with me, it’s actually part of the problem. His character has a very consistent ideology, yes. But his diagnosis of the sociopolitical situation of the time, is completely unhinged, for the lack of a better word.

In certain parts, he’s clearly meant to be a stand-in for the writer himself (aka Gulzar). One such setting, is a series of interspersed, one-on-one conversations between Kirpal and Sanatan on the history of Punjab, Sanatan’s background, the mechanism of radicalization, what they truly want out of these violent delights etc. And suffice it to say, it was severely lacking, to the point of being nonsensical.

The problem isn’t just that Sanatan is wrong. It’s that the film treats him as a serious political diagnostician, while giving him a background that makes his own stated motivations incoherent. Here’s what I mean.

Sanatan is supposed to be from West Punjab originally, his family having moved to the East during the partition. He also mentions in the movie that he’s from a Hindu family, but that his eldest brother was Sikh. To anyone who knows anything about anything, this is enough to say with certainty that Sanatan is from a Khatri background.

The movie seeks to explain the multi-layered phenomenon that was the Punjab insurgency, and yet, never utters the name of a single caste group, ever. This is borderline sociological malpractice. And here, it makes for a story that is awkward, contorted, and hard to believe.

One of Sanatan’s complaints is that when his people moved to “India” (he rightly says they moved “from India to India”), they were ill-treated, and that he’s fighting for his rights. The reason this is awkward is that:

• They were treated very well! This feels like an attempt at stolen valor, appropriating the struggles of the Muhajirs of Pakistan. There’s simply no comparison between their treatment in Pakistan, and that of West Punjabis who came to the East in 1947. I’ll not belabor the point.
  
• It makes zero sense for a Hindu Khatri (by background) to be on the side of the insurgency if maximizing his rights is the goal, which Sanatan affirms is for him – one that he intends to achieve within his lifetime, no less. It actually makes negative sense. He should’ve been doing exactly the opposite of what he had been doing.
  
• Almost as if to drive home the point about how incompatible Sanatan’s narrative is with actual history, the two main villains in the movie – the cops who detain and brutalize Jassi – are shown to be Hindu Khatris themselves. They’re literally the establishment!
  
• This makes more sense at the national level than in Punjab. In Punjab, the police forces, as well as the militancy, from top to bottom, were predominantly Jatt Sikh. The late DGP of Punjab, KPS Gill, who oversaw the crackdown on the Punjab insurgency, once framed it as a battle between “the good Jatts and the bad”, as narrated by Shekhar Gupta.

So basically, Sanatan’s character is not just somewhat out of step with reality. He has it exactly backwards in every respect.

Why though?

This confusion, in my opinion, is a symptom of Gulzar trying to merely “locate” the radicalization process inside the Punjab insurgency – using the latter as a generic backdrop or a frame for exploration of the former. He’s not quite dealing with the insurgency qua itself. As a unique, specific phenomenon.

The framework itself isn’t inherently flawed, and can work (say if you were making a romantic movie in some historically epic setting). However, in Maachis, the subject and frame are too entangled, too co-dependent for this approach. Instead of affording the subject the level of localization it needs, Gulzar tries to “universalize”, or at least pan-north-India-ize it, and in the process, compromises it.

This even shows in the dialogue. One example is when one of the Randhawas’ neighbors uses the phrase “a zamindar with his lathait” to refer to prowling cops. Lathait, both the word and the social role, is much more a thing in Purvanchal and Bihar – where relations between landlords and peasants are very starkly hierarchical due to differences in caste, land ownership etc – than in Punjab, where, at least during the time of the movie, the peasant-proprietor model was the norm. People both owned their land and worked it. It would be unusual for a Punjabi farmer to know the word lathait, and to use it so handily.

To put a bow on it, the common pattern here is that Gulzar tries to apply a very “Ganga-Jamuni” lens to a situation that isn’t really separable from Punjab. Not without significant distortions.

A Moral Swamp

There does come a point where this unreason becomes too unreasonable to reason about. At one point, Kirpal – in a moment of moral uncertainty – shows Sanatan a piece of news about a terrorist attack on Hindus, carried out by some other militants. “Are we the baddies?“, he means to ask.

Sanatan, using a hundred words where ten will do, offers a variation of “terrorism has no religion“, and dismisses the attack as a state-sponsored conspiracy.

This spiel is another one of those moments in which Sanatan is acting as a stand-in for the writer, which makes what I’m about to tell you next even more confusing:

The very first time we see Sanatan in the movie, we see him blowing up a passenger bus.

A regular, ordinary passenger bus, full of regular, ordinary people. Kids, old women, some Sikhs, mostly Hindus. Zero agents of the state. Just, people. And he blows them up. It’s never stated why, for what purpose, or to what end. Just, boom.

I just, don’t know what to make of this. I don’t know what the writer is trying to tell us when he shows us this. As the first scene of a character, no less. And I know least of all, just why he would pick this guy, to deliver his sermon.

I don’t get it. It’s just, not reasonable.

Did I mention Kirpal sucks?

The fact that Sanatan did this, by the way, isn’t hidden from anyone.

Every other militant in this group was in-fact involved, and they’re shown helping him escape right after this. Even though Kirpal hadn’t joined the group yet, he was there too.

It was only a stroke of luck that saved him from being one of the victims, in-fact. He was a passenger on the bus too. He gets off just before the blast happens, and actually manages to figure out that Sanatan – who also gets off with him and books it – is the terrorist who planted the explosive (a camera). He even sees him escape in a car with the other militants, who are shown carrying AK-47s.

What was, then, Kirpal’s reaction to all this?

Fascination.

He doesn’t even flinch. He doesn’t call for help. He doesn’t try to help. He doesn’t try to stop or apprehend Sanatan, who he’s just clocked as the man responsible. He just, stands there, watches Sanatan drive away, and watches the bus burn. Following this, he makes it his mission to find Sanatan. Not out of moral or civic duty, no. To obtain his help.

You may disagree, but in my opinion, Kirpal was always destined to be a terrorist. There is such a darkness in the hearts of the supposed protagonists of this movie, it staggers the mind.

The question that staggers it even more, is exactly what process of thought leads Kirpal to implore the moral sense of a guy like Sanatan. Why would you show him that piece of news? What, you were looking for a condemnation? Have you known the guy to be above harming innocents or something?

I wonder if I understated the case when I said the reviews of this movie are usually just for the idea itself. The idea of a movie that showcases the militants sympathetically. If the reviewers had actually watched this movie, I refuse to believe they’d have seen it as anything other than a total disservice to their cause.

Conclusion

I’ll end by making one final observation.

When Jassi first returns home after his detention, some of the neighbors happen to catch a glimpse of the messed up state he’s in. After he goes inside, one of them says, “Yeh dekha? Aise paida hote hain aatankwaadi”, laying bare the thesis of the movie.

Jassi belied this thesis. He was a good man, and stayed good until the end.