'Satluj', Now Withdrawn From OTT Platform, Has the Scope of a Novel and the Restraint of a Poem

Honey Trehan's Satluj (previously titled Panjab 95) was supposed to have its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival 2023. It's been locked into a battle with the Censor board. The film got a brief release on Zee5 (which doesn't require a CBFC certificate) on July 3. Two days later, on July 5, the film was pulled down. Zee5 announced this on multiple platforms through a statement. Trehan has said he has full faith in the platform, and he's praying the film will be back soon.

Late into the film, a ghost enters a room. It speaks to a man, a state witness who turned hostile in the scene before. The ghost recounts the harrowing circumstances of its death. The eeriness of the scene reminded me of a film by Gurvinder/Anup Singh. A grounded police procedural about a missing human rights activist till then, Trehan’s film boldly cuts across into surreal territory. And yet, it’s his emotional honesty that ensures the wild swerve doesn’t feel jarring.

The soul-wrenching scene awakens the conscience of the hostile witness, Kuljit (Jagjeet Sandhu). He goes back to the CBI and says he’d like to redo his testimony, truthfully this time. “Why should I believe you?” CBI’s Samudra Singh (Arjun Rampal) asks Kuljit. “Main darr gaya tha police se (I was scared of the police),” he says. And now? “Rab se.” (I’m scared of God).”

Poetry flows through most of the chilling dialogue in Satluj (Trehan thanks the late Punjabi poet Shiv Kumar Batalvi in the credits). Based on the life of the human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, the film follows the reason for his abrupt disappearance in September of 1995, and the aftermath. Earlier titled Panjab 95, the film has been battling censorship for nearly four years. Now, quietly released on Zee5 in its original form, the film is set during the peak of the insurgency era, when Punjab became a police state.

Satluj follows Khalra (Diljit Dosanjh) – an ordinary bank manager – blowing the whistle on some corrupt cops of Punjab police, who indiscriminately picked up civilians, labelled them as ‘militants’ and then shot them in ‘encounters’. It’s such a chilling period in Punjab’s history that the censor board tried to mutilate it by ordering 127 cuts for its theatrical release.

It feels like a minor miracle that Trehan’s film comes out of an industry infamous for its handling of true story adaptations. Satluj appears to have the rigour of a documentary (the corpses being carved open before they’re thrown into a canal, so they don’t float is among the many blood-curdling details), but also the deft hand of a storyteller with a firm grip on the drama in a scene. Trehan grew up in Tarn Taran (where a majority of the film is set), and at the risk of sounding sappy, I’d say his whole life has led to the making of this film. He seems to be in command of each and every punctuation in the screenplay.

Being a renowned casting director, it shouldn’t be surprising Trehan has managed to assemble an ensemble like this. An average Hindi film would be satisfied with one performance of such high calibre; Trehan’s film has six, at least. An average Hindi film would give its right arm for one or two memorable scenes; Satluj has a dozen.

I had watched the film once at a private screening in June last year. After finding out the film had released on Zee5, it took me a day to summon the courage to rewatch it. However, I’m glad I did, before writing this. I picked up little things that made the film so affecting for me the first time around. Like the two scenes featuring Gurpej (Jyoti Dogra). In the first, she comes slamming on the front door of Jaswant’s family home in Tarn Taran.

She’s crying incessantly, screaming incoherently. It takes Jaswant some time to decipher what she’s saying: her son, Kirpal, who had been missing, is lying dead in the middle of the chowk (town square). It puts into perspective the tragedy befalling thousands of families across Punjab. In the second, Gurpej slams the windshield of a vehicle of the local police of Tarn Taran. Unsurprisingly, she goes missing after that, and Jaswant becomes involved while looking for her.

While looking for Gurpej, Jaswant chances upon the artificially-induced climate of terror. After he finds her name as an ‘unclaimed body’ at the crematorium in Tarn Taran, Jaswant puts together a chain of evidence about what was happening. Punjab police would round up civilians as suspects for having links to ‘militants’ of the Khalistani movement. They would kill them for sport, intimidate government hospitals to issue quick postmortem reports, cremate them, and then get promotions for their ‘valour’.

As if this wasn’t enough barbarity, they would also dangle hope in front of some parents of their “disappeared” children, saying they’d been taken hostage by militants. And they would charge a bribe to deliver the ‘ransom’. In most cases, the children would never turn up, leaving elderly parents not just without hope, but also with massive debts.

Once someone understood the depth of corruption at play, most would have looked away. 42-year-old Jaswant Singh Khalra couldn’t. In one scene in Satluj, Dosanjh’s character tells his wife Pammi (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan), “I can’t unsee what I’ve seen.”

In this tale of astounding courage, it would have been easy for Trehan to characterise Jaswant as a Bollywood ‘hero’ (like most biopics tend to do). Unlike many peers, Trehan never gives into that temptation. Dosanjh plays Jaswant as a man grounded in his convictions, afraid of the consequences too, like anyone would be. He just doesn’t let fear dictate his actions, the cause for the wronged family members of the “unclaimed bodies” is simply too important in his eyes.

Kanwaljit Singh as DGP Bitta, a possible stand-in for real-life cop KPS Gill, is frighteningly sophisticated in letting the genocide of Punjab’s civilians take place under his watch. He unleashes the loose cannon, SSP Sugga (Suvinder Vicky; close to the best he’s ever been on screen), as Jaswant’s voice for accountability gets louder and reaches the corridors of Delhi.

After Jaswant is kidnapped by members of the Tarn Taran police station, CBI sends Samudra Singh to investigate the case. There are two excellent scenes between Sugga and Samudra, at two different stages of the investigation, where the power-play comes from a simple act: making tea. Whoever is on top, asks “how much sugar?”, while the other one looks dazed.

Like most whistleblower films taking on seemingly invincible powers, even in Satluj, witnesses disappear on the night before the trial, some are killed, some turn hostile. It’s a frustrating journey of one step forward and two steps back. Sugga gets two terrific scenes, one of them being a leisurely 8-minute sequence, where he saunters into the home of constable Satnam (Saurabh Sachdeva) – who passed on documents to Jaswant to help prove the case of killed civilians. It has echoes of Tarantino’s glorious opening stretch in Inglourious Basterds (2009). Here, Sugga gets Satnam to confess to his betrayal over some roti and saag (mustard greens).

At a runtime of around 163 minutes, Satluj moves along at a glacial pace, with the mindful editing of A. Sreekar Prasad. An image (by cinematographer K.U. Mohanan)  I’ll remember for a really long time is of Jaswant’s ghost standing at Kuljit’s door, telling him how cold he feels as the canal water gushes into his open wound. Rarely does a film come along in mainstream Hindi cinema, which has the sweep of a novel, and the restraint of a poem.

As Pammi says, about the movement started by her missing husband – “it’s a war to awaken the conscience of a nation.” It seems Jaswant’s story has never been more essential for India.

Satluj is no longer streaming on Zee5.

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