The year 1984 may have a particular negative meaning to Westerners ever since the George Orwell immortalized the symbolic context of that futuristic dystopia in his writing. But for India's Sikhs, 1984 has a far more dreaded historical significance, and one oddly buried deep within the collective memory of that country, and for that matter the world. Indian-American director Shonali Bose resurrects that period marking the brutal ethnic goernment abetted massacre of thousands of Sikhs by Hindus in her film, Amu.

Between three thousand and twenty thousand Sikhs were the victims of indiscriminate slaughter over three days, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards acting on their culture's separatist sentiments. The ensuing horrific sectarian violence against the Sikhs brought such shame and indeed guilt to the perpetrators, that the incident is absent from any national dialogue. In addition, the failure to bring the perpetrators to justice, among them police and the politicians, that Bose was subjected to censorship of the parts of the movie exposing this massive coverup, while filming in India.

Amu crafts the horror of that period as a dramatic story with historical components. Kaju (Konkona Sensharma) is a recent college graduate and aspiring filmmaker who returns to her homeland to visit with relatives in New Delhi. Adopted when she was a baby and taken to the United States by an Indian family, Kaju (once called Amu by her real mother) is shocked to learn back in India that her adoptive parents' version of how she became an orphan, is untrue. Rather than her parents perishing in an apparently nonexistent malaria epidemic, Amu discovers that they along with her baby brother perished in the 1984 massacre, of which she was the sole survivor in her family.

The film is a bit drawn out, indulging in casual, cheerful family gatherings as the story far too slowly proceeds to what is its potent dramatic core, that unspoken history brought back to life. The juxtaposition of these two quite disparate narrative elements doesn't fuse well together. The emotional shift is likely meant to convey the jarring of Kaju's own complacent mood and senses, but for the audience the effect seems fractured, and diminishes the impact of the potent reality of the past that opens like a raw wound before us. The director should have concentrated instead on the serious elements in her film, for a far more effective impact.

What is remarkable about Amu, is the complex, multilayered shape Bose lends to her historical inquiry, which reveals certain universal, ambiguous aspects to the perpetration of mass violence. For not only are there the victims and perpetrators, but in far greater numbers the masses of people, mostly Hindu but also Sikhs, who stand by and allow the carnage as passivity and fear, even peer pressure take hold. But then there is always that fragile sign of human hope and redemption, as when one Hindu comments to the outraged Kaju, do you think so many Sikhs would be alive today, had it not been for the Hindus who rescued and protected them?

On a side note, the executive producer, NASA scientist Beedabrata Pain who is also Bose's husband, is a longtime activist for justice
for the Sikh population.

Prairie Miller