Joram Review: A Gripping Social Drama Disguised as a Survival Thriller

Director: Devashish Makhija
Writer: Devashish Makhija
Cast: Manoj Bajpayee, Smita Tambe, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub

Runtime: 119 minutes

Available in: Theatres

Revenge is the primal protagonist of a Devashish Makhija film. It is the refuge of the marginalised, but also an act of deep sacrifice. In Ajji (2017), an old arthritis-afflicted woman cuts off the genitals of the local politician who raped her granddaughter. In Bhonsle (2018), a cancer-afflicted police constable spends his final hours taking out the bigot who raped his migrant neighbour. Both the films are named after creaky adults who defend disenfranchised victims. They go down swinging at a system rigged against them — the villains are sick manifestations of this system. 

In Joram, an Adivasi lady sets out to avenge the brutal murder of her son. In fact, she does it in the language of the tormentors — as the ruling party’s first tribal MLA. You’d think Joram is her name, but it is not; she is Phulo (played by Smita Tambe. Naturally, ‘Karma’ is her surname). Joram is titled after the infant daughter of the disenfranchised man Karma wants to kill. This man, Dasru, is a fellow Adivasi from Jharkhand who quit his life as a naxalite to work as a labourer in Mumbai. When his wife is found dead at their construction site, he goes on a run with their infant daughter. The roles are reversed. Phulo is a sick manifestation of the system that was once rigged against her. Her son was killed for being a ‘traitor’, a corrupt broker of tribal land for the government. So she chooses her oppressors: Not the establishment, but the rebels. In doing so, she becomes a parallel portrait of the oppressed. Revenge becomes the primal antagonist of this film. Politics becomes her refuge, and development — she turns her former village into an iron-ore mining site — becomes her weapon. 

Navigating the Bureaucracy

This self-cannibalism of minorities is scattered across Joram, a film in which almost everyone is erased from the reality they occupy. Nobody knows who they’re hunting or what they’re escaping. It unfolds like a bleak circle of subjugation, where the term ‘orders from above’ is the faceless villain. Dasru flees back to Jharkhand with baby Joram in a sling, dangling like the rifles he used to wear. He presumes that his former commander ordered a hit on him for abandoning the rebels five years ago. He has no idea that it’s Phulo, the MLA who broke bread with his family in Mumbai under the pretext of scanning his past. He expects to find his village and jungle, but all he sees now are power lines, mines and barren land. 

Ratnakar (Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub), a Dalit policeman from the city who’s dispatched to nab Dasru, is a reluctant enforcer. He is unclear about whose instructions he’s following – or why he’s after a man and his baby. When a duty-bound colleague dies before his eyes, he wonders if it’s only the uniform that creates an illusion of chasing; Without it, they’re just running into the dark like Dasru. When he arrives in the hinterland, he’s not sure about which ‘side’ he’s on anymore. Phulo, too, is willing to squash her own people to erase the naxalites that spoke for them. Her alliance with the central government is rooted in personal rage rather than political ambition. She almost hopes that Dasru, formerly known as Bala, is her main offender. If not, her grief might lose its purpose. If not, she’s just another widow who finds it difficult to eat her meals alone. 

Internalised Oppression

The film resists the temptation of a suspenseful plot. The writing doesn’t keep Phulo’s plan a secret for long. We know, almost immediately, that she is behind the slaying of Dasru’s wife. She isn’t staged as some messiah who, for the sake of a final twist, turns out to be a devil. She activates the entire system — including the cops and media — to smoke him out. The difference is that Dasru isn’t aware of her involvement. This creates a strange dissonance between the viewer and Dasru’s desperate journey. Every time we see him hiding in the wild and seeking the help of a former rebel, it feels as though he’s on a quest for counter-revenge. It looks like he is hustling towards a confrontation with Phulo. The climax even features him clinging onto the back of a car to reach her. 

That his agency remains a smokescreen for his subservience is a testament to Bajpayee’s performance. The oppression is so internalised that, when Dasru sees Phulo’s face on highway hoardings, his face looks incapable of expressing his intent. He wants to meet her, but not for the reasons we are conditioned to imagine. Dasru is the kind of character that has more in common with the central character of Makhija’s first film, Oonga (2013) — an innocent Adivasi boy who projects his love for the ‘Ramayana’ onto his conflict-torn region. Dasru, too, is stuck in time. He returns to his village under the impression that the rebels are still thriving; that the locals are still revolting against systemic apathy; that the conflict is still in balance. Bajpayee exudes a child-like delusion — as a man in denial about the dimensions of his battlefield. As a result, Dasru’s victimhood wears the garb of a survival thriller. Even when he’s dodging the police in a moving train, his focus is so untrained that it makes for an unnervingly messy sequence. 

The City is a Haven

This grammar of perspective defines the film. For instance, it opens with Dasru and his wife in the village, a typical happier-times moment. When it cuts to a contrasting scene in Mumbai five years later — to the dehumanising chaos of a concrete jungle — the rural-urban divide is obvious. It takes us a while to notice that it’s actually the big city that is their sanctuary. It’s their migrant identity (the cops use “Bihari” as an all-in-one slur) that might be the real happier-times moment. Similarly, Ratnakar, who feels like a minority in his own habitat, reaches Jharkhand to realise that his problems pale in comparison. His stay at a makeshift police station with makeshift humans is Makhija’s most mainstream swing at film-making yet. Ratnakar’s track is on-the-nose stuff, with the locals constantly spelling out their condition to this wide-eyed outsider. The tribal constable in charge of his hospitality becomes his education. Some of it brings to mind the Panchayat setting – the cityslicker getting his privilege checked by a landscape of proper turmoil. The arc is familiar: He goes from being taunted for wanting mineral water to jolting the place out of its own ruins. 

At some point, he looks on the brink of turning into an Ayushmann Khurrana-style rescuer. He is in a dysfunctional marriage, too. Early on, when his wife calls, he shows her the corpse next to him as proof of his whereabouts — a gesture that hints at a history of lies and perhaps infidelity. But the reason it all works is because, through its climax, the film delivers a humbling reminder of Ratnakar’s original status. It doesn’t allow him to become an ‘upper-caste’ saviour — his keypad heroism means nothing in the larger scheme of things. If anything, he’s still a cog in a wheel that’s designed to run over those who run. His complicity is baked into the food chain. The perspective that enabled him on his arrival mutates into the perspective that humbles him during his exit. Just as the political inclusion that enables Phulo becomes the cultural exclusion of her roots. 

The Camera Movement

The filming of Joram defines its view-point narrative. Some of the visual metaphors in Jharkhand are too curated: The backdrop of a concrete dam or the Constitution of India signage, a lone tree at a mining site, a rock-crushing machine resembling a fire-breathing dragon feasting on soil. But Makhija’s movies share a telling relationship with technology. Cell-phone cameras have played a key role in some of his shorts (Tandav, Agli Baar, Cycle). Recorded footage is employed to convey the chilling link between seeing and believing; between historical context and social immediacy. It’s like a horror trope infiltrating the real world. In Joram, for example, the aspect ratio of a video call is used to reflect the dichotomy of development. The film often breaks into footage format, almost as if the characters are hijacking the story to remind it of its documentary parameters — whether it’s Ratnakar speaking to his wife, Dasru’s ‘crime’ being captured live, rebel training videos, or Jharkhandi cops shooting a night of debauchery. 

This is mirrored in how a lot of the film itself unfolds – in jittery, hand-held style. At times, it’s hard to tell if it’s the crew or characters behind a shot. It’s as if the makers are using the film camera as an ironic extension of the technology that’s supposed to empower society and election campaigns alike. It also implies that there’s nothing to tell between fiction and reality anymore. There’s a sense of farce about the way it perceives truth and politics, which adds to the tragic continuity of the story. Consequently, the wheel doesn’t stop rotating. The narratives don’t stop changing. Bullets don’t stop becoming the triggers of progress. A tribal baby doesn’t stop surviving. A rebel doesn’t stop running. A film like Joram doesn’t stop existing. It’s only the cameras that stop recording. 

This is mirrored in how a lot of the film itself unfolds – in jittery, hand-held style. At times, it’s hard to tell if it’s the crew or characters behind a shot. It’s as if the makers are using the film camera as an ironic extension of the technology that’s supposed to empower society and election campaigns alike. It also implies that there’s nothing to tell between fiction and reality anymore. There’s a sense of farce about the way it perceives truth and politics, which adds to the tragic continuity of the story. Consequently, the wheel doesn’t stop rotating. The narratives don’t stop changing. Bullets don’t stop becoming the triggers of progress. A tribal baby doesn’t stop surviving. A rebel doesn’t stop running. A film like Joram doesn’t stop existing. It’s only the cameras that stop recording.