- Honey Trehan's film Satluj faced a four-year censorship battle before releasing on Zee5
- The film portrays police excesses and political oppression in 1980s-90s Punjab
- Satluj is based on human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra's story with altered names
Honey Trehan's Satluj (Punjab '95 with another name but everything else intact) has finally emerged from censorship hell without losing any of its intrinsic fire. That is no mean triumph. It is a reason why the film, out on Zee5 after a four-year battle for CBFC clearance, must not be missed.
But that, to be sure, is only of many reasons. Satluj is a powerful political film that pulls no punches. It is unwaveringly focused on what happens when the state and its police force trample upon the very laws and individual rights that they are charged with protecting. The result is an unsettling film that packs a massive wallop.
Yes, Satluj isn't easy to watch but it is the sort of film that, despite its length, does not let you look away. It demands absolute attention and a willing engagement with the burden of its arguments.
The film dives into the heart of the darkness that engulfed a militancy-ravaged Punjab in the 1980s and 1990s, shies away from nothing, and comes up with an unflinching portrait of political oppression and police excesses that feels real, relevant and resonant to this day.
Although set in a specific part of India and unfolding at a defined point in history, Satluj is a universal and unsettling chronicle of terror and turmoil unleashed in a climate where lawlessness is allowed to run amok because it serves the interests of those that hold the reins of power.
The film opens with a mandatory disclaimer asserting that it is not a documentary and that its depiction of events is only a dramatised version of the story of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who paid a heavy price for persistently asking questions about disappearances, extrajudicial detentions and mass cremations in Punjab in the mid-1990s.
But Satluj, produced by RSVP and Macguffin Pictures and written by Honey Trehan, Niren Bhatt and Utsav Maitra, deviates from fact only to the extent of changing the names of some of the key figures of the era.
Director-General of Police I.P.S. Bitta (played by Kanwaljit Singh) or Chief Minister Anant Singh (who is killed in a suicide bombing a week before Jaswant Singh is abducted from outside his house in Amritsar never to be seen again), besides others, are recognisable figures.
Jaswant Singh Khalra, a bank officer, becomes aware of the dark truth that Punjab police are out to suppress when a close friend and his mother go missing. Jaswant goes looking for them. At the police station, a self-obsessed cop (Vansh Bhardwaj), hung up on getting promoted to the rank of inspector so that he can get married, refuses to register a complaint.
Jaswant heads to the morgue in the hope of finding some leads. What the doctor on duty (Geeta Agrawal Sharma) tells him shocks him out of his wits. An even bigger shock awaits him at a crematorium where stumbles upon a register listing hundreds of unclaimed bodies.
The story turns increasingly sordid as Jaswant digs deeper in the face of threats and warnings. A local MLA berates him for making his mission global. Jaswant remains unfazed. His wife Paramjit (Geeta Vidya Ohlyan) stands by him despite the dangers that the mission puts him and his family (the couple has two school-going children) in.
Jaswant has a childhood friend in the local police station - constable Satnam Singh (Saurabh Sachdeva). The latter sticks his neck out and helps Jaswant with all the information that he is privy to as a man who drives his superiors around.
Satnam faces the music for his courage. Kaale panne pe likha kaala sach joh na dikhai deta hain na padha jaata hai (Dark truths written on black paper that can neither be seen nor read), he says as he eggs Jaswant on at grave risk to himself.
A disconcerting sequence in Satnam's home about one hour into Satluj is one of the high points of the film. It gives both Suvinder Vicky, playing SSP Surjit Singh Sugga, a menacing, unscrupulous police officer who thrives on spreading terror in the name of fighting militancy in the state, and Saurabh Sachdeva (who watches terrified and sad-eyed) an entire passage to demonstrate their acting chops.
One man, drunk on power and arrogance, holds a whole family to ransom. The other, wracked with guilt and much lower down in the pecking order and, therefore, powerless, trembles. The dynamic of authority and its exercise, plays out with harrowing starkness in this superbly written sequence, with cinematographer K.U. Mohanan and editor A. Sreekar Prasad at the top of their game, as they are all through the rest of the film.
Satluj is concerned primarily with a police-versus-terrorists battle of attrition in which the cops turn into the worst perpetrators of violence and flout the law with absolute impunity. It is a cautionary tale about backsliding of democracy, about the perils of letting flagrant abuse of power become the norm.
An additional director of the Central Bureau of Investigation Samudra Singh (Arjun Rampal, playing a character who also serves as the film's narrator), arrives in Punjab from Delhi to probe Jaswant's disappearance. Earlier, a lawyer (Varun Badola) takes up Jaswant's case and files a petition in court on behalf of families of illegally eliminated men and women.
Parts of Satluj might feel a tad overstretched but given the urgency of its theme and the trenchant quality of the unflinching storytelling, it is always a riveting film that is both sobering and disturbing.
It is boosted by a slew of tremendous performances. Diljit Dosanjh leads the way, conveying outrage, resolve and a sense of foreboding without overdoing any of it.
The lead actor is visibly mindful of both the gravity of the role and the purpose of the film. He immerses himself completely into the character and the milieu that he inhabits, consciously deflecting undue attention to the star's persona.
It has already been said once in this review but it bears repetition: Satluj is unmissable. Its title may have changed, its power hasn't diminished one bit.