On Monday night, celebrated director Mira Nair was on hand at Cinema Village to introduce a preview screening of first-time director Shonali Bose’s film “Amu”, the story of a young woman, raised in California, who travels to her native India to discover more about her origins and her birth parents, whom she believes to have died in a Malaria epidemic but who she begins to suspect may have been victims of the anti-Sikh riots that followed the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi. Nair spoke poignantly of the period, in which upwards of 10,000 Sikhs were murdered with government approval, explaining “it was like India changed before my eyes - everywhere you saw hatred, gangs, sectarian violence”.
In her Q&A which followed the screening, Bose described the unbelievable resistance she met while making the film. “People asked ‘why are you bringing up this issue, when it happened 20 years ago?’ But there are still widows waiting to be rehabilitated, and nobody has been brought to justice.” India’s censorship board insisted that all lines indicating the government’s involvement be removed, and Bose responded by leaving the footage in and having the film go pointedly silent during those lines. The board countered by rating the film NC-17, thus preventing it from ever being shown on Indian television. When Bose asked why a film that had no sex and essentially no violence was being rated NC-17, she said the censorship board told her “‘Why should young people learn a history that is better dead and forgotten?’” Nair’s introduction may have provided the answer to that question - “If we don’t tell our stories, no one else will.”