A night at Tarn Taran, Punjab; February 2022

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Satluj (Punjab '95): Memory, Fear, and a Village That Refused to Forget

Some time ago, a film titled Satluj, also known as Punjab '95, was quietly released on ZEE5. Directed by Honey Trehan, produced by Ronnie Screwala, and starring Diljit Dosanjh, Arjun Rampal, Geetika Vidya Ohlyan, Saurabh Sachdeva etc, the two-hour-forty-nine-minute film revolves around the enforced disappearance and presumed murder of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra in Tarn Taran, Punjab, in 1995.

After being denied a theatrical release, the film has now vanished from OTT platforms as well. The government's position is that the controversy surrounding the film is little more than a publicity gimmick designed to malign the state. Whether that is true remains open to debate. An equally compelling question, however, is whether this disappearance reflects an attempt to erase one of independent India's darkest chapters of state violence from public memory. That question deserves to be asked. If the opportunity ever arises, every Indian should watch this film at least once. Even today, some gurdwaras in Punjab continue to screen it privately.

Life often gives us experiences whose significance we fail to grasp until much later. One such experience, for me, was leaving Tarn Taran in 2022.

That year, our studio, Photoscope, had begun receiving a steady stream of assignments. One of them came in the run-up to the Punjab Assembly elections. We were hired to handle social media and audiovisual content for one of the prominent faces of the 2021 Farmers' Movement. The pay was modest, but we accepted because we, too, stood in solidarity with the movement.

Three of us from the studio were responsible for audiovisual production, while two others joined as researchers. Five of us boarded a thirty-six-hour train journey that ended at Beas railway station.

Punjab welcomed us with remarkable warmth. It was the first truly immaculate railway station I had ever seen. Everything felt strangely familiar. The fields, the ponds, the echoes of Partition, and the effortless generosity of strangers. Bengalis and Punjabis, despite speaking different languages, share an uncanny resemblance: both are peoples shaped by rivers and agriculture, loud in speech, generous in spirit, and deeply wounded by history. No two regions paid a heavier human price for India's independence than Punjab and Bengal. Both were carved apart by Partition; both carry fractures that have never fully healed.

Why, then, should Punjab have felt foreign?

Anyone who has read Feluda knows that before entering a place, one must first understand its history.

Our assignment was supposed to keep us in Amritsar. Instead, our contractor, hoping to save money, drove us into a village in Tarn Taran where we could barely even power our laptops. But that is not really the story.

The twenty-four hours I spent in Tarn Taran remain among the strangest of my life.

After finishing work in town that afternoon, we were taken into a village.

It was unnervingly quiet.

Not the quiet of peace, but the quiet that settles after generations have learned to fear sound itself.

The boundary walls around every house stood improbably high, often taller than the houses they enclosed. At first I assumed it was because Pakistan lay nearby. But that explanation never convinced me. A missile or shell would only turn those walls into deadlier rubble.

The house where we were lodged was almost entirely abandoned.

Standing on its rooftop, I felt as though I had wandered onto the set of an Anurag Kashyap crime thriller. The entire village seemed frozen in anticipation.

Whenever we asked for food, we received the same meal: chickpea curry and plain parathas. Breakfast, lunch, dinner—it never changed.

Our social media team had no internet connection. Mobile signals appeared only if we climbed onto the roof or walked deep into the fields.

After eight every evening, we were instructed to lock ourselves indoors. Under no circumstances were we to step outside.

The next morning, children stopped us on the road and asked, with complete innocence:

"Are you from Pakistan?"

Soon anxiety overwhelmed me. I called the contractor and protested that this was never the arrangement—that this place felt profoundly unsafe.

His response was intimidation.

He threatened to tell the local farmers that we had stolen their money and have us beaten if we refused to obey.

Even without that threat, it was painfully clear that we were not welcome there.

My mind wandered elsewhere.

What would happen to the cat I had left alone at home if something happened to me? What would happen to the two colleagues who had trusted me enough to travel together?

Before accepting the assignment, countless warnings had come our way. We ignored them all.

Now they returned with frightening clarity.

We packed our bags in haste and fled.

Ironically, it was the two researchers—working for the contractor's own team—who quietly helped us escape.

By then we knew two things.

We would almost certainly never be paid.

And whatever work remained could be completed far more safely from home.

We boarded a bus out of the village, travelled through Amritsar, Jalandhar, and Delhi, and caught an early morning train back to Kolkata.

Years later, after watching Satluj, I finally understood where I had been.

I had unknowingly stayed in a village of martyrs' families.

A village whose people still lived beneath the long shadow of disappearances.

A village where fear had hardened into routine.

Even today, after eight at night, doors are shut—not out of custom, but from the lingering terror that a government vehicle might arrive and someone might never return.

When I visited, twenty-six years had passed since 1995.

The country had witnessed more terrorist attacks, more security laws, and more stories of ordinary citizens crushed beneath the machinery of the state.

Those in the village who possessed the means had already sent their sons and daughters to Canada.

Luxury cars—Audis and others even more expensive—stood parked before empty mansions.

Yet nearly seventy percent of the houses stood abandoned.

What remained were towering walls, woven rope cots resting in deserted courtyards, the solemn cooing of pigeons through endless afternoons, vast fields stretching to the horizon, and an ancient farmer who still coaxed harvest after harvest from the same soil.

These fields remember.

They remember that the old man once stood here with nothing but a sickle in his hands, facing water cannons, rifles, and the full force of the state—not because he sought power, but because he believed that dignity, like the land beneath his feet, was something worth defending.