In 30 Seconds
When institutions decline to assemble an era’s narrative, culture eventually attempts the assembly itself, and Punjab’s dark years have been fought over on screen for four decades with an intensity that is itself part of the era’s history. The battle’s most recent engagement, the three year censorship war over the Khalra biopic released in 2026 as Satluj, was covered by this journal at the film’s release and gave this series its opening occasion; this article sets that film in the longer history of how Indian cinema has remembered, misremembered, and been forbidden to remember the Punjab years.
The Long Silence and Its Exceptions
For the era’s own duration and long after, mainstream Hindi cinema handled Punjab principally by avoidance, and where it approached, it approached obliquely. The parallel cinema produced the period’s enduring exceptions: Govind Nihalani’s television adaptation of Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas addressed the Partition trauma underneath the era, and Gulzar’s Maachis in 1996, the first significant feature to enter the insurgency directly, framed the militancy through a young man radicalised by police brutality, a framing that drew both acclaim and the accusation, from the era’s other constituencies, of selective sympathy, an argument every subsequent film would inherit. Punjabi cinema itself, closest to the wounds and to the censors’ anxieties, stayed largely silent for a generation.
The Memory Boom and the Censor’s Long Arm
The past two decades reversed the silence into contest. Diaspora financed Punjabi cinema discovered the era as both grievance and genre, producing a wave of films on 1984 and the militancy years whose treatments range from the elegiac to the openly hagiographic, and the Central Board of Film Certification answered with a parallel wave of cuts, delays, and refusals: films on the pogrom held for years, biopics of militancy era figures denied certification outright, and titles containing the era’s very vocabulary contested, a pattern documented across cases from Kaum De Heere, on the Indira Gandhi assassins, banned from release, through Punjab 1984 and its successors, to the long detentions of documentary work on the disappearances. The censorship’s own record thus reproduces the era’s central condition as this batch’s opening article named it: the truth exists, and its assembly is officially regulated.
Satluj as Test Case
The Khalra film’s passage, from its original title Ghallughara through twenty one demanded cuts and a forced renaming to Punjab 95, the Toronto withdrawal of 2023, and finally the uncut global streaming release of July 2026 under the title Satluj, condensed the whole contest into one production, and its eventual release uncut marks, on the evidence, a genuine boundary shift: a mainstream Indian platform now carries, with a global star, the documented account of the state’s machinery of disappearance that this series’ third batch assembled. The film’s reception has repeated the era’s alignments, celebrated as overdue truth in Sikh and rights constituencies, protested as one sided by police veterans’ voices noting the militancy’s absent victims, and the criticism, whatever its motives case by case, states accurately what this series has found: no single film, made from within one constituency’s grief, can perform the assembly, and the demand that each film carry the whole era is the demand institutions displaced onto culture when they declined the work themselves.
What Cinema Can and Cannot Settle
Cinema has done for the era what this batch’s opening article said journalism does: it has kept the fragments alive and moved some into the common culture, and the Satluj release suggests the moving continues. What it cannot supply is the common ledger, the narrative all constituencies must answer to, and the films’ very proliferation, each community commissioning its own dead onto screen, entrenches the sectarian memory the era left. The screen, like the courtroom, has said true words; the assembly remains, as the series’ final article will argue, work that only an institution can be made to finish.
