Amu has just left MUBI in the UK. I thought I recognised the name of the writer-director Shonali Bose but it was only after I watched the film that I realised that she was the director of Margarita With a Straw (India 2014) which I enjoyed very much. The screening of Amu did not start well as I thought the print seemed to have faded and I spent a few minutes trying to adjust my TV set. I also took a few minutes to realise that I needed to select subtitles. The film is mainly in English but includes Bengali, Hindi and Punjabi in various conversational exchanges. These issues and the introduction of the central character played by Konkona Sen Sharma with an American accent made for what at that point seemed to be a ‘clunky’ opening. Thankfully, after a short while things began to settle down. The image seemed to recover a little of its colour, the subtitles worked and I began to follow the plotting.
This film is another example of a form of diaspora filmmaking and Shonali Bose has a similar history in some ways to that of both Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta, though she seems to have started her filmmaking career later, taking a political science degree in New York after a BA in Delhi, before eventually moving to UCLA. This was her first fiction feature after documentary work but she also wrote the original novel Amu which she then adapted. Her political activism came first and then her move into film. Reflecting on the film now, I think I remember moments in Amu which reminded me of Mira Nair’s recent work on Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy.
Konkona Sen Sharma opens the film as Kaju, a 21 year-old recent graduate of UCLA taking a gap year before deciding on her future and hoping to ‘explore’ more of the India she left as an infant. We first see her in tourist mode being driven around some Delhi tourist spots by her aunt and uncle. She is staying with her Bengali family, including her aunt, her cousin Tuki and her grandma. When later her mother from America makes a surprise appearance, there is very much ‘a house of women’. Kaju’s determination to see more leads her to a simple coffee shop used by university students and later to a poor area where the coffee shop owner lives with his family. Kaju is slightly disturbed by something in the backstreets and by the railway line. At this point she is accompanied by Kabir a recent graduate like herself with whom she has a somewhat prickly relationship. There is clearly an attraction of some sort but she is annoyed by his assumption that she is an American tourist ‘doing India’. Later they begin to understand each other, but when she visits his home she realises that his is a wealthy family and that he is being pushed by his father to go to Harvard for an MBA but that his mother supports him in his desire to work in the theatre. (It was this relationship that reminded me of A Suitable Boy, especially since the young man is named ‘Kabir’.)
I don’t want to spoil the rest of the plot. Suffice to say that Kaju knows that she has been adopted and that she was taken to America by Keya (Brinda Karat) as a three year-old after her parents died in a malaria outbreak in their village. Brinda Karat is an activist and latterly a politician in West Bengal, sitting as a CPI (M) member of Congress. Wikipedia suggests that she is a relative of Shonali Bose. This is her only film role and like the rest of the cast she performs very well, although the mixture of professional and non-professional actors does sometimes give an edge to scenes. By chance, Kaju and Kabir stumble across the history of the anti-Sikh riots that followed the assassination of Indira Ghandi on October 31st 1984 by her own Sikh bodyguards. The communal violence was seen as sanctioned by various politicians and government officials and many Sikhs were killed in Delhi and in other states. Estimates vary from around 3,000 to 15,000 or more. The crucial issue is that neither Kaju or Kabir know about the riots even though they happened only 18 years earlier. If this seems unlikely, it is worth noting that the events were seen as sensitive by the Indian government and the film was controversial, being initially banned in India despite proving a critical hit at festival screenings. Kaju had been in the US but it is also conceivable that a 21 year-old in India would be unaware, even if he did live close to the site of so many killings.
The second half of the film is gripping and moving as Kaju and Kabir start investigating what happened. They will eventually discover that Amu’s parents were not killed by malaria but were caught up in the communal violence that followed Ghandi’s assassination. Amu’s father was killed in the riots and her birth mother died after only a few months in a refugee camp. I’m not going to analyse the investigation in the second half of the film. Instead I just want to comment on what happened in India during partition in 1947 and subsequently in terms of communal violence. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are still relatively young nations in terms of a national identity. As of this month, India and Pakistan are only 76 years-old. There are people still living in the sub-continent and in the diaspora who experienced the pain of partition directly. Families have been split up and individuals died in 1947 (and some in 1971 when Bangladesh was created from the British-designated East Pakistan). The pain has been carried through to the diaspora and it is still felt within families. Amu concludes with a TV news broadcast about the communal violence in Gujarat in 2002 (which is the ‘now’ of the film narrative). That violence affected Hindus and Muslims. It is also a sign of what was to come with the rise of the BJP –and its promotion of the Hindutva ideology of Hindu nationalism and hegemony within India – and the eventual rise to power of Narendra Modi. Modi like other political figures was seen as implicated in the 2002 riots and it is a theme that runs through Amu – how politicians, the military and the police have failed to arrest and try those who commit communal violence. Kabir discovers something about his father’s actions during the riots. Those in power have in effect ensured that communal violence will continue and may flare up again at any moment. Amu is a brave film and perhaps could only be made by a diasporic filmmaker.
The film is available to rent on streamers and there is a free low-res version on YouTube. Here is a trailer:
itp Global Film 