One of the most brilliant films to have graced the screens the previous year was Devashish Makhija’s crime thriller Joram. A director who is known for making hard-hitting but niche dramas with a pinch of the macabre has now ventured into a slightly mainstream territory. Some people believe that Joram too is a niche film because it talks about the almost unheard struggles of the tribals and the skewed politics regarding their welfare in places like Jharkhand. But it’s in the filmmaking that Makhija experiments a lot this time around, going out of his way to make Joram into an edge-of-the-seat manhunt thriller which is not seen much in Indian cinema.
Spoilers Ahead
What Happens In The Film?
We see Dasru with his wife and are given a clear sense that they once lived in their village in Jharkhand but due to some problems, arrived in Mumbai, the financial capital of India. Laboring through the day, Dasru and his wife were raising their daughter, living in some small corner of the building they were constructing. The daily wage laborers have a tough existence but Dasru was hiding something traumatic from his tribal life back in Jharkhand. He was running away from his past and one day it caught up to him.
Why Did Dasru Escape To Jharkhand?
Phulo Karma, an MLA from Jharkhand showed up at the construction site where Dasru and his wife were working. She had a political agenda, distributing clothes and solar panel-operated lights to the workers. Her interest was piqued when she saw Dasru, who had the same tribal mark on his forehead, signifying that he was from the same village as Phulo Karma. Dasru however did not behave as if he had recognised her and showed any interest whatsoever. He took the offering and went away, only to later find his wife dead in his dwelling. Not only that, he was attacked and when in act of self-defense, he managed to kill the attacker, he realized it was a setup and a man had recorded a video of him. Dasru, who had taken the name Bala when he came to Mumbai, now had a dead wife and an infant daughter named Joram, on his hands. Dasru had no real friends in Mumbai and the folks he did know from the construction work had no resources to help themselves, let alone Dasru. His best bet was to return back to Jharkhand, and he decided to make a run for it, with Joram tied on his back.
Why Did Phulo Karma Leak The Video?
The men who murdered Dasru’s wife worked for Phulo Karma. She benefitted from making the video available to the media channels, as then she could milk the ‘Maoist’ angle to the case. Dasru had once joined a Maoist gang, for there were a few people who wanted the tribals to give up their land in exchange for jobs in factories that would be set up in their villages. There were Maoists groups that were against the pseudo-progress and warned the people to not sell their land for money or jobs. Dasru was part of one such group, but after he saw the violence committed in the name of protecting people’s welfare, he grew afraid and ran away with his wife.
Phulo Karma was the wife of the first tribal minister of the region, and it was Madvi, her son, that had been killed by the Maoist rebels. Now that Phulo was in power, she had a perfect guinea pig in Dasru to make into a violent Maoist agent in the heart of Mumbai. This way she could spread her propaganda and make herself popular riding the wave of the Maoist terror, paving way for a meatier political career.
Why Did Dasru Want To Meet Phulo Karma?
The cops were onto Dasru as the news about the murder had spread on news channels. Dasru only knew one way to reach Jharkhand in the least amount of time possible and that was by the train. But Inspector Bagul, an honest cop, was after Dasru. Dasru, with Joram on her back, wanted to reach his rebel commander because she was the one who had killed Madvi. Only after reaching Jharkhand and contacting an old friend did Dasru get to know about Operation Green Hunt. It was a military operation and the rebels had been neutralized by the Indian Army. There was no one to help Dasru.
Bagul on the other hand was given the order to be the Mumbai Police Liaison and try to capture Dasru with the Jharkhand Police. Upon reaching Jharkhand, he figured that nothing seemed right. The officials in the Jharkhand police were acting as if they were given orders to shoot Dasru on sight. They didn’t seem to care that he had an infant tied to his back. A local man explained the whole political saga of the land to him and it was then Bagul understood that the man Dasru had killed, worked for Phulo. The naive Dasru was trying to meet the very woman who had killed his wife. Dasru just knew that Phulo was a powerful minister and only she could take care of Joram if he perished. Little did he know that she was the one ordering the local police to shoot Dasru, even against the will of Bagul, who was officially handling the case.
The whole situation had become a gut-wrenching comedy, and Dasru’s situation had the pathos of smothering proportions. He had left the rebels and become a daily wage laborer in Mumbai, but the very woman he was now willing to help had killed his wife. Bagul tried his best to interrogate Phulo Karma about the leaked video and his beef with Dasru, but Dasru interrupted the tete-e-tete. He asked Phulo to take care of Joram, but Bagul told him the truth, after which Phulo tried to snatch away Bagul’s gun, but was shot and that marked her end. Dasru continued to run, but the police as well as the army were on to him and it is highly unlikely that either he or his daughter survived.
Phulo’s trying to snatch away Bagul’s gun hides a lot of motives. Was she surprised that Dasru had not come to kill her but ask for help? Did she want to kill herself because she was ashamed of her actions? Perhaps. The tears in her eyes, seeing that she had killed Joram’s future when she had ordered her men to kill Dasru’s wife, indicate that she had realized the futility of her revenge. But for a brief moment, her anger seemed to have overpowered her and she might have remembered about her own son Madvi, who was killed by the group Dasru had once been a member of. Perhaps she wanted to shoot Dasru, but accidentally shot herself. The story had begun when ‘Pragati’ (Progress) Company wanted to start its production on the tribal land, so in a sense, the whole struggle had been a result of capitalist expansion. Makhija doesn’t take sides and simply states the unsolvable knots in a system that makes villains and heroes out of everyday, ordinary humans just for some industrialist’s profit.
