Nihalani’s film on Maoist movement touches chord in Nepal

KATHMANDU - The Nepal Tourism Board auditorium in Kathmandu overflowed with people sitting on the floor as well as the stairs for over two hours patiently, watching Indian director Govind Nihalani’s film “Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa”.

Screened Saturday during the Indian film festival organised by the Indian Cultural Centre here, the 1998 movie based on the Maoist movement in India’s West Bengal state, adjoining Nepal, touched a chord in the Himalayan republic that experienced a similar armed uprising for 10 years from 1996.

Manushi Bhattarai, daughter of Maoist deputy chief Baburam Bhattarai, said she identified with the story as she herself joined the Maoist movement in Nepal as a teenaged student.

“I could relate to the tale of sacrifice by the younger generation in ‘Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa’,” she told IANS. “Both the movements in India and Nepal faced the same problems: infiltration, how to mobilise the masses. I learnt about such things from the film I first saw when I was 16.”

Though the movement in West Bengal, called the Naxal movement after a 1967 peasant uprising in Naxalbari village, was brutally suppressed by the state in the 1970s, it has now been resurrected and has spread to other states of India.

“As long as there is a need for change, the struggle will continue,” Bhattarai said. “The struggle has been continuous. Maybe sometimes it slackened and then picked up.”

“Nihalani’s film is very much relevant to Nepal,” said film journalist Bishnu Gautam, who works for the state media. “Young people became involved in an armed movement without the knowledge of their families and after their death, the families suffered repercussions. This theme of Nihalani’s film also prevailed during Nepal’s People’s War.”

The story of a mother’s grief at the death of her son, who joins the Maoist movement, has hundreds of echoes in Nepal where nearly 15,000 were killed during the insurrection and hundreds are missing still though a peace pact came into effect in 2006.

But Nepal is yet to see a mature art film on its own Maoist movement like Nihalani’s, though nearly a dozen films have been made on the revolution, Gautam said.

“A short documentary, ‘The Killing Terraces’ by Dhruba Basnet (that explores the causes of the Maoist movement and its repercussions on the people), has been one of the best records but the feature films are too dominated by party creeds,” Gautam said.

“Many of the films were made by the Maoists themselves and project the war from their perspective.”

Nihalani himself, who is in Kathmandu, urges Nepal’s filmmakers not to be in a hurry to make films on the armed revolt in Nepal since they need some more years for a sense of detachment.

“I would advise not to be hasty in making films on such a sensitive subject,” the director told Nagarik daily. “If you make the film now, it will become emotional. But if you lean back, you can make a film after detailed studies and analyses. That would do justice to the subject.”

Nihalani said he made “Tamas” - on the violence after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 - 40 years later and so, the film was able to be critical. But “Dev”, made in 2004 on the sectarian violence in Gujarat just two years before, suffered from being emotional, he said.

“Hazaar Chaurasi…”, which looks at the Maoist movement with sympathy, created a flutter for its inclusion in a state-sponsored film festival, coming after a deadly Maoist ambush in India’s Chhattisgarh state in which 76 paramilitary personnel were killed.

Nihalani said his film, based on the novel “Hazar Churashir Ma” by Magsaysay-winning author-activist Mahasweta Devi, was neither pro-Communist nor political.

“It is the story of a brave mother, who realises her son was a Naxalite only after his death,” he said.