31 October Review: It Opens Up Wounds That Never Healed

Starring: Soha Ali Khan, Vir Das

Directed by: Shivaji Lotan Patil

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I was very young on the day Mrs Indira Gandhi died.  I remember the nationwide horror of losing a beloved leader and how it was overshadowed by the horror of watching Sikhs being dragged out on the streets and burnt alive for the ghastly assassination.

I remember everyone said, ‘How can the country go on without her?’

But it did. History  of genocide has a way of repeating itself, unless we learn  from the mistakes we make in the past.So here we are 32 years later looking at a film that recreates the chilling carnage of an innocent community made vulnerable by the crimes of a few.

The  film made with touching earnestness , opens on the morning of October 31 depicting an ordinary day  in the life of an affable Sikh family.The cut-and-dried treatment of the film, and our knowledge of  the dreadful events that transpired on the day,give to the narration a kind of authority and power to move and shake us even when the goings-on on screen are quite often underwhelming , both in terms of execution and performance.

Made on a meager budget , 31 October is a big-hearted attempt to bring us the ghastly incidents on that fateful day through the eyes of a traumatized Sikh couple, played with reassuring sincerity by Vir Das(very convincing in his turban) and Soha Ali Khan(whose Punjabi accent makes a guest appearance at the start and then vanishes as we go along).

Their two little sons and their  austere  yet idyllic low-income existence in a Sikh-dominated locality of Delhi is ripped apart by communal violence so savage it shakes us to even see  it on screen so many years later.

Like Mani Ratnam’s Bombay, this film humanizes the terrible violence by throwing in two little boys and sundry characters who are chillingly real either in their demonized avatar or their humanism during the days of acute malevolence.Specially gripping is the Sikh family’s car journey from imminent death to relative safety with the Sikh patriarch locked in the trunk of the car  to avoid detection.

For all its made-to-shock manipulation  the scenes of violence and savagery shock as they are rude reminders of how vulnerable we all are as individuals and as a community.That day it was the Sikhs. On another day it is the Muslims or Hindus. Who is safe from separatist violence in this country?

The melodramatic yet moving film makes this point with telling  affect. It also shows the psychological warfare that human beings unleash on one another when political crimes intervene in ordinary lives. When the assassination happens the stunned nation is shown glued to the radio while the affable Sardar-hero is instantly isolated by his office colleagues.  Outside, his wife out shopping is caught in the sudden eruption of violence. Elsewhere a drunken NRI mona Sardar pleads with the rioters to be killed like his friend was, and a  drunken lout offers asylum to  a panic stricken Sardarji in exchange for his cash and gold chain,  only to hand him over to the mobs.

Such characters and incidents belong more to a long-running Doordarshan serial than a  feature film.Much of the drama  is theatrical and the  acting is plainly amateurish. But 31 October is  a film that must be seen more for what it tells us rather than how it says it,  about a shameful chapter from Indian history. The language is staccato and often crude. But the message is way too powerful to be ignored.

At the end we see  the now-old Sikh couple , trapped in a web of frustration and rage ,still waiting for justice . Some of the key riot-instigators in the film look exactly like politicians from the Congress who had allegedly instigated the riots after Mrs Gandhi’s assassination. There is some justice to be had in the forthcoming elections in the Punjab.