A very happy Adivasi man, squatting on the ground, sings a folk song as he watches his wife on a rope swing. The frame captures just enough of the area to suggest that it is a clearing, perhaps in a forest. The swing goes back and forth, back and forth, past a tree – and then, suddenly, all we see is the tree. We wait for the swing to retrace its return path, but it has vanished. And we cut to another setting, another “swing” – this time in a cramped room, in a Mumbai construction site. This swing has the couple’s infant daughter, Joram – and it is clear that the passage of time between the two swings has resulted in the couple’s migration from their open lands in Jharkhand to this world of steel and concrete. The happiness, too, has been displaced. The man and the woman (Manoj Bajpayee as Dasru, Tannishtha Chatterjee as Vaano), they hardly smile.
The end credits tell us that Joram has been loosely adapted from a couple of director Devashish Makhija’s short stories, Mine and Ambush. When you watch the movie, the titles seem self-explanatory. The lovely open lands of Jharkhand are being sold to a mega-company for mining iron ore. The trees have vanished. In a very funny and also very sad line, a man – after shitting – is asked to wipe his butt with leaves and mud, and not use the bottle of mineral water he has with him. The rivers have vanished, too, and so has natural water. It is an Adivasi named Phulo (a superb Smita Tambe Dwivedi, who can reduce you to ashes with her unflinching glare) who sold this land to the corporate, but is she a villain whose motive is just greed or is she someone who wants malls and multiplexes for her people, so they can live like the “city folks” do?
Joram goes back and forth in time, like that swing, and we see Dasru in his village and in the present. In the past, we get a scene where the tribals are being coerced into vacating their land. “We have lived here for 2000 years,” they say. But it doesn’t matter. Do they have a title deed, a voter ID – heck, an Aadhar card? No? Then it doesn’t matter. Another detail from the past is that Dasru used to be a Maoist, until his conscience could no longer take the violence his fellow-Maoists were inflicting on others. Manoj Bajpayee is wonderful, as always, and never more so than when he says, pitifully, “Gaon se nahin bhaaga. Bandook se bhaaga.” (I didn’t run away from my village. I ran away from the guns.) And then, in the present, in a twist of irony, he is forced to run back to his village.
Like in Ajji and Bhonsle, Devashish folds his politics into a genre movie. Joram, in the present, turns quickly into a thriller, the story of a man on the run. Dasru has no home. In Mumbai, a cop refers to him as a “baahari”, an outsider – but he is a baahari in Jharkhand, too. His village isn’t “home” anymore. At least, it isn’t the home he knew. The reason Dasru is on the run is a horrifying tragedy, but the real reason is that the State has no sympathy for people like him, people who live on the fringes, people without power. In Ajji and Bhonsle, the powerless learnt to become powerful. They either trained themselves or gave into the heat of the moment, when they just could not take it anymore. Joram is a bleaker movie – or maybe we should say it is a more realistic movie. The man keeps running and running – and even through the end credits, you hear the panting, the gasping of a man on the run.
Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub wears a very effective stoic face as the cop sent to capture Dasru. I loved the scene where he almost catches Dasru, and says that the man has nothing to be afraid of if he is truly innocent. Even he doesn’t seem convinced by his words. When he travels to the hinterlands in search of Dasru, he asks a tribal if he was a farmer, too. The sardonic reply: “Who wasn’t?” In a way, this cop is a mirror-image of Dasru. Just like Dasru could not take the inhumanity of the Maoists he was with, this cop cannot handle the way his fraternity functions. In the guise of a cat-and-mouse thriller, Joram questions the cost of progress, or “pragati”, which is the name of the company out to mine the tribal lands. The film’s most ironic shot has Dasru climbing into the back of a truck in order to flee, and the boxes he hides behind have this label: Pragati Steel. Progress is everywhere. It engulfs you. You can run, but where can you hide?