Desi Making Waves

By Elaine G. Flores

Film Director Shonali Bose's Labor of Love, Amu

Mother/daughter bonds and histories that won’t be denied are the themes of Amu, the first feature film from Shonali Bose, whose deep connection with her mother and own experience with historic tragedy, gave birth to the thought-provoking drama.

It’s the story of Kaju, a 21-year-old Indian-American, who uncovers buried details about her own past, while learning of a dark and suppressed moment in India’s history.

Bose was a 19-year-old student at Delhi University’s Miranda House College when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in October 1984. Subsequently, thousands of innocent Sikhs were killed, burned and raped in a government-fueled frenzy that still goes unpunished.

“That was a big shock, and the first time I’d confronted death in that way, comforting the widows,” recalls Bose, who worked in relief camps and helped the victims write notes to relatives.

Less than two years later, personal tragedy struck when her beloved mother, actress Junie Bose, died following what should have been a routine hospital visit.

Bose shares, “She was very young. She was my age today, 42. There was medical negligence and the hospital essentially killed her. They butchered her. A doctor perforated her intestine with a finger by accident and she was in a coma for two months. I was extremely close to her; she was the center of my whole life. In fact, that’s the reason I came to America…. It was so painful and I was so angry at the system and everything that I just needed to leave. And I got the scholarship and came to Columbia University.”

Bose, who earned a B.A. in History, enrolled in New York’s Columbia University in 1987, where she obtained her PhD in Political Science. Not content with academia, Bose then headed to UCLA Film School. By 1997, she was a mother of two and had completed her MFA program.

She says, “When I graduated from film school and I had to write the first film, I was so nervous. I just felt I should go to the hardest place for me as a writer, and for me to write about anything having to do with mothers and daughters was the toughest thing. I just felt I had to have the courage to do that, for it to be honest.”

And so began a four-year process of writing the story of Kaju, a young, adopted woman, who discovers buried secrets about her birth parents and their connection to the 1984 riots during a family visit to Delhi. Bose’s decision to write a movie with a political bend was not an easy sell, which she discovered when appealing to wealthy members of L.A.’s Indian community for funding.

“For a few years, just so many people turned it down and said, ‘You can’t make a film on this. You can’t. You should not.’ And it just wasn’t happening. People made promises, commitments and they pulled out. Even within the Sikh community.”

By 2003, an independent producer promised to bankroll the entire budget, but reneged midway through casting. Bose received the disappointing news via an e-mail, in which the producer explained that the subject matter was too risky, so he was backing a Bollywood film instead. That’s when Bose’s family stepped up. Her youngest son offered the money he’d received from the tooth fairy, and her older son pitched in with his piggy bank. That very same evening, Bose’s husband, a scientist, showed her a letter he’d just received with a royalty check from NASA for his invention of the world’s smallest camera.

“So when my husband got this we decided we were going to spend it all. I just said we are going to make this film one way or another, the way we planned. I went to India; I cast. I got the crew together as if I had all the money I needed.”

Despite years of closed doors, Bose eventually got money from the Indian community.

“Interestingly, the most wealthy ones are not the ones that backed it. In the final analysis, it is that I persisted. There was one couple who feel very strongly about the issue, so they gave. They matched how much money we had. Once you get the first $100,000 and then you keep moving on as if you have all the money, then you do get it because you are kind of in motion. In the final analysis, I did get the money largely from the Sikh community in Los Angeles. And even to release the film, the film is only releasing because I raised the money from the Sikh community in Canada, which was basically taxi drivers and people giving $50 donations.”

When it came to casting the movie, Bose encountered resistance for the second female lead to play Keya, Kaju’s adoptive mother, who has lied to her daughter about her biological parents. Bose insisted on Brinda Karat, who is known throughout India as an activist for women and workers, but not as an actress since this is her film debut.

“And that’s my mother’s sister,” says Bose. “She’s my adoptive mother since my mother‘s death,” explains the director, who grew up quite close to her mom's two younger sisters. Bose notes, “She used to act when she was an undergrad, but she went into politics. My mother, who went into acting and was brilliant on the stage, would always tell me that she was not the most talented one in the family, that her sister who went into politics was a great actor blah, blah. So when it came time to cast that role, I really felt that her face had the vulnerability and the strength and all that, and my mother’s voice came back to me that she was really good, and I just fought. She said, ‘No, I’ll ruin your first film. I’m not an actor and I’ll ruin it and blah, blah.’ I said, ‘No, I really think that you should be the one.’ ”

Bose drew on family history to help her aunt through a climactic scene in Amu. “We had some emotional moments during the [filming]…. What happened in the most difficult scene, when the mother and daughter have to break down and cry in the car, it was like two in the morning. She was just like, ‘I’m feeling like a stone, I can’t emote right now.’ And it was the most important scene. I took the place of the other girl, of the lead actor; it was a close-up on [Karat]. Off-camera, I started talking [about] just [before] when they switched off the machine [keeping my mother alive]…, We were all together holding [my mother’s] body. And then they just switched off the machine. I just relived the death for her because that was the only way I could get her to [cry]… and I was crying off-camera.”

In the same way that the film’s protagonist is stunned to learn about the 1984 massacre, the real-life tragedy is one that many people still do not know about. And certain factions want to keep it that way. Aware that the government did not want a story about the shameful episode told, Bose used stealth to get the movie made.

“I anticipated that it was going to be hard to pull it off because I was shooting in the capital city, but the Congress Party was still in power, so I knew I had to make it secretly. I did some research and found out that with a foreign film shooting in India you have to submit your script to the government beforehand. So being an Indian citizen still, even though I live here [in the U.S.], I formed my company in India with my sister, who lives in India. So we did it as an Indian film, in which case the government has no idea until you finish the film and are going to release it. So that was one precaution, otherwise, I wouldn’t have been allowed to make the film, period. There’s no way I would have been allowed to…. When we started shooting, the whole cast and crew had to sign in their secrecy clauses that they were not allowed to speak to the press, which is the opposite of what is usually done.”

Still, with the cast including an activist and lead actress Konkona Sensharma, who won the National Award for Best Actress in India in 2003, the movie did not go unnoticed.

“We did draw a lot of press, but we didn’t speak at all so we had no pre-publicity.”

To prevent scrutiny, the director scheduled the riot scenes at the very end of the filming. But within one hour of shooting the riot scenes, some goons under the orders of a well-known politician showed up and warned Bose to stop shooting. The official they were working for is reputed to be linked to the slayings.

“Victims have told me how he organized the killings etcetera.,” says Bose. “The threat came saying, you can’t make a film on 1984, you have to stop. But, luckily, I had planned it that I just had that one day to shoot that sequence. And then I had only two more days…Then I finished the filming and came back to America.”

Bose’s next hurdle came from the Censor Board, who rated the movie with an “A” certificate, which is the equivalent of an NC-17 rating and prevented children under 18 from seeing the movie. Ironically, the film was a hit on the festival circuit and went on to win the Teenage Choice Award in Torino, Italy in addition to National Awards in India for Best English Language Film and Best Director, English Language Film, as well as other prestigious honors.

As for the rating, Bose says the film board’s reasoning was, “‘Why should they know this history?’ It was really true that the young people did not know it. I was amazed that they had absolutely no idea, including my lead actors and even the young people in the crew. Young people would come up to me and say they had no idea about the Sikh killings. They knew the prime minister had been assassinated and that there was some rioting, that’s all. They had no idea that there were thousands killed and that nobody had been punished. Not just young people, there were many people outside of Delhi, people older than me who did not know.”

Thanks to Bose’s efforts, that’s changing. She has shown the movie to school students in Delhi and also Canada, which has a large Sikh community.

“For me, what was wonderful was the Sikh youth there. They felt it was a part of themselves and their history that even their parents hadn’t told them. They all knew about the attack on the Golden Temple [Operation Blue Star, a 1984 military operation to flush out Sikh separatists], but this was something they themselves didn’t know even though they are Sikhs. Actually, many of their parents came across to Canada because of ’84 and also because in Punjab, Sikhs were attacked. These were reasons why their parents had even migrated in the first place. You know how it is; you keep painful history from your children, so they didn’t know. And these kids know everything about Sikhism. And they said [they were] empowered. They would just hug me, especially young women, they just identified so strongly with the character.”

Bose is proud of the movie’s unifying tone, which she hopes will bridge a gap.

“It was done in a positive way, without hatred. I found that many Sikhs wouldn’t call themselves Indian; they would call themselves Sikhs. And I would say, ‘Why do you feel so alienated from India?’ They would say, ‘Hindus have done terrible things to Sikhs; we are different from the Hindus.’ I think telling them the facts about how Hindus defended and hid so many Sikhs, and that it wasn't ordinary Indians [who attacked the Sikhs as that time]. It wasn't people like me.
We are on their side. It was the government who did it. There’s the Bhopal gas disaster, there are so many terrible things and Hindus are being affected or Muslims or other Indians. I said, ‘I am connected to my country and my people; you can’t let a government alienate you from that.’ So then they started feeling oneness with other Indians who struggle with different things. So that’s what I explain with them. You can’t blame all the Indian people because the government did this. The [Indian people] are the ones who came out and worked in the camps. I feel there is a lot of disservice that has been done by portraying things in a communal way and pitting people against people.”

Bose’s next movie is Chittagong: Strike One, the first in a trilogy. It’s the true story of a Bengal schoolmaster, who organized a teen rebellion against the British Empire. Something tells us, she’s just warming up.

“At the time that my mother died, she was only a year older than my current age. But I remember thinking when she died that she was old, and at least she had lived her life and her children were grown up and that the tragedy was ours and not hers. But now at the almost exact age when I feel that I am so young, I realize that she was just starting life. Just as I have just finished my first film, she had just acted in her first major international film and was beginning to get recognition. I realize now that it is only when one turns the glorious age of 40 that one starts to really live and enjoy and experience and do things in one’s life to the hilt. She used to always quote Robert Frost to me: ‘The woods are lovely, dark and deep; but I have miles to go before I sleep.’ I hope I can reach those miles both for her and for me.”

For more on the U.S. release of Amu, which begins in New York on May 25, 2007 and will appear later in other major cities, visit www.amuthefilm.com.

Elaine G. Flores is a feature writer for Soap Opera Digest, columnist for the St. Louis American and freelance writer. She is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and lives in New York.

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