‘Joram’: A Tale of Many Suspensions
Last month, Adivasi poet and journalist Jacinta Kerketta turned down an award recognising her literary achievements, to protest the “lack of respect” shown to Adivasis in India, particularly citing mainstream media’s indifference to Adivasi plight in Manipur and central India. A few weeks later, the theatrical release of Devashish Makhija’s film Joram seems almost a response to this valid and urgent criticism. Makhija’s investment in the oppression of the Adivasis of central India has made its way into his earlier works as well, notably the short film Cycle and his debut novel Oonga (adapted from the screenplay of his film by the same name), making this the third such venture.
Joram echoes several themes from Cycle — the exploitation and oppression of Adivasi folk, the struggle for power between the police and the militants, the cycle of violence that an Adivasi protagonist struggles to escape, and the assertion of individual morality in defiance of the collective. But the protagonist here is somewhat differently poised. Bala/Dasru is an ex-Maoist rebel who, in a bid to escape the violence he is complicit in, has fled to the city with his family to eke out a bare existence, which is upended when he is tracked down and his family attacked, forcing him to flee back to his village, with his infant daughter strapped to his back. As critics have pointed out, the film is a mix of genres: a chase film, a survival thriller, and a socio-environmental drama in a dystopic setting. While it is one of Makhija’s bleakest films, yet it is also gripping in the persistent intensity of its deep, relentlessness gaze into the heart of darkness.
Manoj Bajpayee’s portrayal of Dasru is unnervingly on point; he exudes a quiet dignity and resigned silence in his labouring days in the city, and as if comes to life when thoughts of home and family vitalise his protective instincts and send him on the run. Bajpayee, a frequent collaborator of Makhija, calls to mind his previous performances — as upright police officer in lawless small-town Bihar decades ago in Shool, more recently as suave intelligence officer in The Family Man, and as a retired police constable in Makhija’s own Bhonsle. In each of these, he finds himself in a position of relative power, a moral centre against which other peripheries are measured. In Joram, his character is one that exists in the margins yet is at the emotional core of the film, but whose innocence/culpability is not as clearly binary. The film’s shifting moral lens evokes a complexity of responses from the viewer, making us question motives, guilt, innocence, punishment, and making it more and more difficult to accept a single version of ‘justice’ free from notions of ‘revenge’. It also leads us to the realisation that perhaps the real moral centre of the film is the one innocent character whose safety and future is what is at stake throughout — whose name gives the film its title and who is a silent, helpless witness throughout.
At one point in the film, Dasru manages to reach his village, realises how much has changed in the six years he has spent away from it and in a dismal inversion of a father proudly introducing his childhood home to his child, narrates aloud for his baby the tragic story of the destruction of his land. With a few deft strokes, the film draws a map for the viewer — one that now exists only in its protagonist’s memory. As Dasru tells his daughter about the river that has now given way to a dam and a forest that has been cleared for a mine, we feel the physical and psychological contours of his displacement and dislocation keenly. And as the film expands its canvas to introduce several more memorable characters, we realise how many more Dasrus remain eternally suspended — not only between the state and militants, but between collective memory and official history, between the rule of democracy and brute force, between the village home that no longer exists and the city home that they help to build but might never be able to call truly their own. Where is Dasru’s home? Where is he safe? What (all) is he running from and towards what? And conversely, which path is ‘pragati’ (the discourse of development and also the name of the corporate taking over his village) hurtling down? For that matter, what are we all, as a nation, running away from, or perpetually chasing, in our race towards twenty-first century global primacy?
Another point of identification in the film — more easily accessible to Savarna, mainland conscience — is Inspector Ratnakar Bagul (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub) who is given the responsibility of tracking and capturing Dasru. As an upright and idealistic officer, Bagul immediately brings to mind the protagonist Newton in Amit Masurkar’s film of the same name. In that other film, this figure is an electoral presiding officer who is thrust into the nation’s subconscious terrains as it were, and discovers there the fissures of Indian democracy; his journey of disillusionment is also accompanied by a striking mutual incomprehension that separates him from the tribal community, isolating him from both ends of the spectrum. In Joram, Bagul’s realisation of power dynamics is similar, but he is nevertheless able to exercise his agency and compassion, and assert himself in a limited capacity in different situations. And yet, Dasru seems destined to repeatedly elude his grasp, as much as he seems to be destined to fail to offer Dasru any long-term protection. There continues to be something fundamentally irreconcilable between the pursuer and the pursued.
But the tragedy at the heart of Joram’s narrative is not the clash between the Adivasis and the state, but the pitting against one another of different Adivasis who adopt different paths. The hardened yet vulnerable politician who has lost husband and child (an electrifying Smita Tambe in one of the finest performances of the year), the desperate ex-Maoist trying to eke out a living as a labourer in the city, greedy and corrupt police constables and ‘company’ middlemen, regular peaceful people caught in the crossfire and trying to camouflage and protect themselves from the power struggle they know they cannot control. If power and ideology is what separates them, what unites them is the experience of loss — whether of home, land, family, ambition, or life. In this sense, Dasru represents their collective existential condition, trapped in a relentless pursuit of survival, increasingly isolated in their grief and fear, but determined to make it out alive.
Makhija’s films are unflinching in their depiction of violence, whether sexual or ethnic. Such a choice inevitably raises questions about the gaze which is elicited from the viewer — is it a voyeuristic gaze or a sympathetic one, does one feel gratified or repulsed by it, does a realistic depiction of violence unwittingly perpetrate violence itself? These are questions that have long been raised in different identitarian contexts and also in interrogation of Makhija’s earlier works as well. In a film that depicts the torture/murder of at least three important Adivasi characters, these are bound to be raised again. These are not easy questions to answer. Is it possible to evoke the brutality of violence without portraying it as unvarnished truth? But scenes of graphic violence in this film are not prolonged. In fact, there were other kinds of violence in it that I personally found more disturbing. A woman’s lilting song on a swing abruptly vanishing into thin air, a barren and battered landscape trying to survive human onslaught, a cis man cross-dressing and entertaining a crowd of drunken, leering men, and feeling the terror of power draining from him as he feels their lustful gaze. The film is made of many such moments that jolt us into sharp awareness of the multi-layered violence that stalks the fates of its many characters. And like the motif of the swing that haunts the narrative, it also leaves us viewers swinging, suspended between hope and despair, as image fades and gives way to sound, which in turn continues to draw us deeper into the chase.
