Godhra to Goa: Film provokes, angers

The importance of ‘Parzania’, premiered to a bursting house on the third day of the 36th International Film Festival in Goa, lies not only in the fact that it is earnest about what it wants to say about religious fanaticism, and intolerance. It is also in the way director Rahul Dholakia is completely fearless in the way he re-creates the cold-blooded riots which led to the Gujarat riots, and the terrible days during which more than a thousand people were killed and several thousands were left without homes and hope.

The bloodletting is seen through the eyes of a Parsi household in Ahmedabad. Cyrus, played by Naseerudin Shah, is a projectionist in a local theatre, whose family is attacked by enraged Hindu activists. His wife and daughter escape; his son, Parzan disappears. The little boy becomes a chilling metaphor for the loss of innocence, and an aching awareness that life will never be the same again.

‘Parzania’ goes the distance in the way Govind Nihalani’s ‘Dev’, also a commercial Bollywood enterprise, also based on the Godhra riots, did not. First off, it does not have the artifice caused by the presence of such stars as Amitabh Bachchan and Kareena Kapoor.

The actors in Dholakia’s film are subsumed by their parts: keeping pace with Naseer in a career-best performance, is Sarika, who plays Shernaz, the devastated wife and mother with fine understatement. And the child actors are absolutely first-rate.

So what you get is no trumpets, no fanfare, just plain, unvarnished story-telling minus embellishments. The attacking Hindus, with their menacing ‘trishuls’, and warcries of ‘Jai Sri Rams’ belong to the ‘Parishad’ ; the chief minister of Gujarat who goes live on TV promising that the ‘guilty will not be spared’ sounds eerily like Narendra Modi, and the National Human Rights Commission ( NHRC) so named, conducts hearings just the way we were told it did, both in print, and in television.