Kaya Taran (Chrysalis)

On October 31, 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. Over the next few days several hundred Sikh men, women and children were killed in Delhi and other places in northern India. On February 27, 2002, a coach of the Sabarmati Express was set on fire at Godhra railway station in Gujarat, killing 58 Hindu pilgrims. Over the next two months several hundred men, women and children were killed in retaliatory anti-Muslim riots in the state. ‘Kaya Taran’ (Chrysalis) is set against the backdrop of the two riots, but does not frontally engage with either. It is a distanced look at the dilemma of nurturing one’s identity in a multicultural society that borders on the volatile. “What happened to thousands of Sikhs in India in the wake of the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 sits uneasy on our national conscience. It has always struck me as peculiar that even so many years after that carnage we have not looked it squarely in the eye. There is an unnatural sense of ellipsis in the way we tackle it in our social discourse. But the film is not so much a look back in anger as in search of answers. It does not seek to rontally depict the violence. Nor is it a bleeding heart engagement with the situation. It seeks to contextualize the riots of ’84 with those in Gujarat in 2002 and see these as symptomatic of a deeper and more insidious challenge, from within, to our multi-culturalism. What drew me to Madhavan’s short story, ‘When big trees fall’, was that it was already at one remove. I sat on it for some years looking, like any journalist tends to, for an entry point, a news peg. Post Godhra and Gujarat in 2002, it all suddenly fell into place in my mind. The film does not have a linear narrative form. It is not so much about story telling as about the connections that lend new meaning to our lives. It is about the search, the craving, for identity. I try not to plunge emotionally headlong into it and to keep others from doing so as well. I don’t know if I have brought my peculiar baggage to the film, but there is a lot of self-reflexivity about the media and journalism in the film as well.” -Sashi Kumar Director, Kaya Taran.