In Diljit Dosanjh’s Satluj, the state writes the obituary but the river remembers the truth

It is haunting. It is terrifying. It is Shakespearean. Satluj is a film that mourns before it accuses. Long delayed and once titled Panjab 95, Honey Trehan’s film is to Punjab what Haider was to Kashmir. The influence of Vishal Bhardwaj, (whom Trehan considers a mentor), runs through its veins. Both films are haunted by the same grief: about those who disappear in broad daylight, and those who are left to search for them long after night has fallen. Both are about lands where blood has flowed more freely than rivers, where water has become an archive of the dead.

They are stories of landscapes where rivers remember what official records refuse to. Say, like in one moment, a corpse rises from the river, drenched and bruised, to complain that its wounds grow unbearably cold beneath the water at night. Perhaps that is why Satluj is the only title this film could have had. Water is everywhere. It reflects faces in the stillness of a gurdwara. It receives bodies thrown into canals. But the same waters eventually vomit back what they have been forced to carry. A man who has spent years drowning his conscience finally allows it to surface. After all, the river, having witnessed every crime in silence, remains the only place where truth can still rise.

Truth is what Satluj searches for. It pursues it, safeguards it, and insists upon it. Much like its protagonist, Jaswant Singh Khalra, (Diljit Dosanjh), who devoted his life to documenting extrajudicial killings and fighting for those who had disappeared in broad daylight, leaving behind families condemned to live without answers. It is perhaps through this pursuit of truth that the film’s screenplay (co-written by Niren Bhatt, Utsav Maitra and Trehan) reveals its most fascinating design. So at the very centre of it, Satluj is the story of three men, each inheriting the burden of resisting an establishment that writes history by first erasing its witnesses. The first half belongs almost entirely to Jaswant.

We watch an ordinary bank manager slowly surrender the comforts of an ordinary life to become a human rights activist willing to risk everything in the service of justice. His journey unfolds with inevitability, each discovery pulling him deeper into the machinery of violence. There are a lot of parallels with Haider here. Much like Haider Meer (Shahid Kapoor) wandering through morgues and graveyards in search of his missing father, Jaswant, too, walks among the dead with the hope that they may finally speak. But where madness eventually consumes Kapoor’s Hamlet, Satluj imagines a different tragedy. Here, it is the system itself that abducts Jaswant.

A still from Satluj which was initially titled Punjab 95.

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And so, as the second half begins, the film shifts its point of view. The burden of the story passes to Samudra Singh, (Arjun Rampal). Even his name, Samudra, the sea, extends the film’s enduring conversation with water. What begin as one man’s fight becomes another man’s inheritance, the truth passing from one pair of hands to the next like a relay baton, refusing to disappear even when the men carrying it do. With the shift in point of view comes a shift in tone. The film no longer chases the truth.

Instead, it begins assembling it, piece by piece. Its anger gives way to observation, taking on the shape of a procedural, following Samudra as he investigates Jaswant’s disappearance, only to uncover the larger conspiracy that had long been operating across Punjab. It is here that Trehan stages two of the film’s finest scenes, both between Samudra and SSP Sugga (Suvinder Vicky who can do no wrong). It is interesting to recall that Rampal and Vicky also shared two scenes earlier this year in Aditya Dhar’s Dhurandhar: The Revenge. There, they were written to persuade. Here, they are written to contend.

Both exchanges unfold around the simple act of making tea. By the second encounter, it is Samudra who walks away with the final word. Yet Samudra is never promised the victory of dismantling the system. The film understands that institutions built over decades do not collapse at the hands of a single righteous man. His task is not to end the darkness, only to carry the flame a little further. And so the screenplay turns to its third man. Kuljit, (Jagjeet Sandhu), is the film’s quietest, and perhaps its most important, point of view. A newly inducted constable, he is there from the very beginning, though almost invisibly so. The film opens with his initiation into violence, as his seniors coerce him into becoming complicit in a killing. From that moment onwards, he becomes what the river has always been in Satluj, a witness. He watches. He remembers. He laments. Like the Satluj itself, he is forced to hold what others are desperate to bury.

Only in the film’s final moments does that burden become unbearable. Conscience finally rises to the surface. Kuljit chooses to speak. And perhaps that is what Satluj has been moving towards all along. Truth may be born in the courage of a Jaswant and safeguarded by the conscience of a Samudra. But it changes and challenges the world only when it finds a Kuljit.

Kuljit is not simply a character. He is the film’s appeal to everyone who has watched, remained silent, looked away. After all, in the end, Satluj believes not in extraordinary men, but in ordinary consciences. It tears open the idea of a police state. It exposes a machinery that governs through extortion, disappearance and unchecked power. A machinery that first kills, and then writes the story of why the killing was necessary. Many have wondered why a film like Satluj has been denied its rightful place for so long. The answer is relatively simple. They do not want another hero like Jaswant to rise from the minority. They fear a Samudra who refuses to stop asking questions. And, more necessarily, they are intimidated by a Kuljit who chooses to remember. For there is nothing a violent state fears more than a people who remember.