It began, absurdly enough, with a man washing his car. Jaswant Singh Khalra, a prominent human rights activist, was abducted on September 6, 1995 from outside his home in Amritsar and was never seen or heard from again. Despite eyewitnesses and mounting public pressure, almost a year passed without a breakthrough. What exactly happened to Khalra? Did he become a ghost and vanish into the frosty Punjab night? Did he find employment as a wage worker in Europe or America, as the cops tend to insist? Or did he join the thousands of young men—deemed 'disappeared' and murdered in extrajudicial killings—whose cause Khalra had made his life's mission?
Whatever bardo Khalra's soul was in, it is echoed by the journey of Honey Trehan's film. Formerly titled Punjab 95, the film was pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023. It remained stuck for three years with the CBFC, who demanded as many as 120 cuts in a film about human rights violations and the steep price of citizen activism in India. Trehan, a renowned casting director, continued to hold private screenings and give interviews, relating Kafkaesque anecdotes about his wranglings with the censor board. Like Sandhya Suri's Santosh—another North-set film with frank trepidations about the police state—Satluj, as it's now called, had to forego a theatrical release in India and has been cold-dropped on streaming. It's not the saddest of destinies, I suppose. In fact, along with Berlin and Kennedy on ZEE5, it makes the perfect anxious-citizens' triple bill.
The Jaswant Singh we meet in the film, played by Diljit Dosanjh, is an ordinary bank employee and sweet-tempered family man. Six months ago, a friend of his, Kirpal, had turned up drenched and dead in the streets. Now, Kirpal's grief-maddened mother has also gone missing. Jaswant calls at hospitals, morgues, crematoriums. It's perhaps his close banker's eye that makes him notice a discrepancy: the bodies registered as 'unclaimed' in official reports are falsely or malaciously logged. This is Punjab in the fallout of the insurgency, with the police still enjoying 'carte blanche' in weeding out militants, and some of them turning it into a lucrative extortion business. "They stopped distinguishing between civilians and militants," a voiceover informs, over visuals of battered bodies being dumped in canals.
Anyone watching Satluj would be settling in for a harrowing drama. This is not false advertisement. Trehan doesn't avert his gaze from the brutality and excess of a rogue police system, while limiting the rot to a circle of bad eggs and their superiors. The death toll, in Jaswant's estimations, rises as high as 25,000. What's remarkable, nevertheless, is the chilling composure with which Trehan tells his story. Jaswant is not an idealistic firebrand but a man of the soil, invested in the community he's seeking to protect. His demand for answers and accountability is set against the socioeconomic realities of a ruined Punjab. The film is versed in the language of Indian intimidation. It unfolds as a series of tense conversations, a minefield of excuses, alibis, veiled threats and wry aphorisms.
For all their fidelity to the subject matter, down to exact dates and locations, the makers are careful not to serve a dry docu-drama. From the opening sequence onwards, K. U. Mohanan's nocturnal cinematography is sumptuous and slick. We get a handful of cinematic flourishes—a coin toss in black-and-white, for instance, filmed from above—that break the Punjab Noir hyperrealism of this world. Midway through, the film morphs into a mystery thriller, and it's fun to see Arjun Rampal—who was trashed-talked into the abyss by Suvinder Vicky in Dhurandhar: The Revenge—finally get a jump on the man.
Vicky plays SSP Sugga, a loathsome, corrupt brute, Hans Landa-like in his habit of drawing out an interrogation. Satluj is inspired by real characters and tells a specific story about a specific state. All the same, you can find in it warnings and premonitions that resonate across the nation. "These human rights people...they're foreign-funded" is a refrain familiar to all. "We are not anti-police or anti-government," Jaswant affirms. He is both setting the record straight and addressing a culture where such clarifications have become sadly necessary (and can regardless land one in jail). "The bodies are coming in in droves," confides an overworked crematorium worker to Jaswant. Strip the scene of context and he could be talking about the Covid-19 pandemic, about the mass burials in Manipur at the start of the clashes, about....
This apparently is the uncut version of the film, so we are left to wonder what exactly the CBFC found so objectionable in it. The answer, perhaps, is not in technicalities. The Indian censors have, in recent years, taken a distressingly hard line on films that interrogate the status quo. We are moving past an era of case-specific censorship; contrarianism of any kind—contrarianism as attitude, as worldview—is seen as a threat. The films that slip past use the ruse of genre, but even those have drawn post-release heat, like the Mohanlal-starrer action film L2: Empuraan, and had to be 'recensored'.
The sweet, self-effacing anchor of Main Vaapas Aaunga, Diljit Dosanjh is the calm, committed anchor of Satluj. He belongs to a breed of actors who do not rely on physical action or verbal dexterity to win over an audience. Instead, his technique is simpler: he lays out on the screen all that's decent and earnest in him, hoping that, through his presence, you can access all that's decent and earnest in you. The film closes with one of Jaswant Singh Khalra's heroic lines—"I challenge the darkness"—though I hope we carry from it a plainer utterance: "Someone has to come forward."