Jana Gana Mana

 Dijo Jose Antony’s Jana Gana Mana is not content merely to tell a story; it seeks, with almost prosecutorial zeal, to cross-examine its audience. Released in 2022 and scripted by Sharis Mohammed, this Malayalam legal-political thriller deploys a murder investigation, a police encounter, a courtroom confrontation and a succession of apparently seismic revelations to interrogate a deceptively elementary question: what becomes of justice when truth is subordinated to public perception?

Starring Prithviraj Sukumaran, Suraj Venjaramoodu, Mamta Mohandas and Sri Divya, alongside a formidable supporting ensemble, the film deliberately situates itself at the turbulent confluence of politics, policing, journalism, public outrage and the judiciary. Its preoccupation is consequently not merely with crime and punishment, but with the manner in which societies manufacture their own versions of truth. Again and again, Jana Gana Mana asks whether citizens genuinely desire justice — or merely the cathartic spectacle of witnessing someone punished. It is this duality that makes the film both compelling and occasionally exasperating: its insights can be genuinely incisive, even when they are delivered with the rhetorical subtlety of a megaphone at full volume.

The film opens with the death of Professor Saba Mariam (Mamta Mohandas), a respected college lecturer whose rape, murder and subsequent burning trigger a convulsion of public fury. Her students take to the streets; television cameras descend upon the story; political parties hasten to appropriate the public mood; and the police find themselves under mounting pressure to produce not merely results, but results that can be publicly displayed as justice.

ACP Sajjan Kumar, portrayed with considerable restraint by Suraj Venjaramoodu, is entrusted with the investigation. He eventually arrests four men whom he believes to be responsible. Yet the inquiry soon becomes ensnared in the familiar labyrinth of political influence and institutional interference. The accused appear to possess connections sufficiently potent to bend the machinery of justice to their convenience.

It is at this juncture that Jana Gana Mana executes its first major volte-face. Convinced that the formal legal apparatus is incapable of delivering punishment, Sajjan Kumar orchestrates what appears to be a reconstruction of the crime and kills the accused in a police encounter. The public response is immediate and revealing. Many celebrate the killings as “instant justice”, while more uncomfortable questions begin to surface about due process, the limits of police authority and the inviolability — or otherwise — of the rule of law.

The film then changes register with considerable audacity. Enter Advocate Aravind Swaminathan, played by Prithviraj Sukumaran. His arrival transforms the narrative into a courtroom drama in which the certainties laboriously accumulated during the first half are systematically dismantled. This structural metamorphosis is among the film’s most effective devices.

The most compelling proposition in Jana Gana Mana is that truth does not necessarily govern public opinion; perception does. The ordinary citizen encounters reality through television channels, newspapers, social media, political speeches and an increasingly febrile digital discourse. Few possess anything approaching the complete evidentiary picture. Yet almost everyone possesses an opinion, usually delivered with the confidence of omniscience.

The consequence, the film argues, is a perilous ecosystem in which outrage acquires greater currency than evidence. A heinous crime produces anger; anger demands punishment; punishment becomes political capital; the media amplify the emotion; politicians appropriate it; and the police are pressed to demonstrate that they are “doing something”. In such an atmosphere, an encounter killing can be transmogrified into a public celebration of justice.

The proposition is uncomfortable precisely because the film refuses to confine culpability to politicians, police officers or media organisations. It implicates us — the audience, the citizenry, the consumers of information. We are remarkably willing to embrace the narrative that most congenially confirms our pre-existing prejudices. The film’s most disquieting question may therefore be the simplest: do we genuinely seek the truth, or merely confirmation of what we have already decided to believe?

Suraj Venjaramoodu delivers one of the film’s most persuasive performances as Sajjan Kumar. The character is particularly intriguing because he is not constructed as the stereotypical venal or corrupt policeman. He appears sincere, conscientious and deeply frustrated by a system that repeatedly obstructs his attempts to perform his duty. His eventual descent into extrajudicial violence is therefore all the more disturbing. The film asks whether a fundamentally decent individual can rationalise an unlawful act on the grounds that the lawful system has failed him.

This is hardly an abstract philosophical exercise in the Indian context, where police encounters have at times been greeted with an almost disconcerting popular enthusiasm. Jana Gana Mana confronts the seductive proposition that the killing of an accused person outside judicial process can somehow be equated with the administration of justice.

Suraj understands that Sajjan’s dramatic power resides not in flamboyance but in restraint. His performance captures the character’s internal disquiet with considerable delicacy: here is a police officer who believes in justice but gradually becomes an instrument of the very lawlessness he is constitutionally entrusted to prevent. The contradiction is both tragic and deeply unsettling.

And then comes Prithviraj. Aravind Swaminathan does not enter the narrative so much as make an entrance. Limping into the proceedings, cloaked in mystery and armed with an almost disconcerting intellectual assurance, he possesses the sort of courtroom charisma that Malayalam cinema has long cultivated into an art form. Prithviraj embraces the theatricality without apology, producing a performance that is, by any measure, unmistakably a star turn.

Aravind’s courtroom arguments are manifestly designed to elicit applause, and several succeed spectacularly. He is less the conventional advocate than an intellectual provocateur whose purpose is to dismantle comfortable assumptions and expose the fragility of received wisdom. His real contribution, however, is not that he “wins” arguments. It is that he alters the audience’s understanding of the case. He teaches us, in effect, to distrust conclusions that arrive too conveniently.

He challenges the proposition that numerical majorities can determine moral truth and exposes the dangerous chasm between what appears to constitute justice and what the law actually requires. Aravind therefore functions simultaneously as character and narrative instrument: he is the mechanism by which the audience is compelled to reconsider everything it thought it knew.

The second half is, in essence, an extended courtroom confrontation, and it is here that Jana Gana Mana discovers its most distinctive dramatic identity. These proceedings are not especially interested in the quiet proceduralism of an actual courtroom. They operate instead as political theatre. Arguments become orations; evidence becomes revelation; cross-examination becomes ideological combat.

The courtroom is transformed into a miniature parliament in which competing visions of India are placed, metaphorically, in the dock. This is hardly subtle filmmaking. Yet subtlety is not always synonymous with effectiveness. Jana Gana Mana understands that courtroom cinema acquires its greatest potency when legal arguments possess consequences extending beyond the individuals before the bench. Questions of encounter killings, caste, media trials, political opportunism, institutional prejudice and selective outrage are consequently drawn into the proceedings. The film’s ambition is considerable: it wants the courtroom to function as a mirror in which an entire society is compelled to scrutinise itself.

One of the more intriguing dimensions of Jana Gana Mana is its political ambiguity. It traverses several of contemporary India’s most combustible fault lines — political polarisation, caste discrimination, sexual violence, police brutality, media sensationalism, student protest and the manipulation of collective emotion — without reducing its politics to the comfortingly simplistic architecture of hero versus villain.

Its more ambitious target is the ecosystem of incentives through which institutions and individuals learn to monetise public emotion. Politicians cultivate outrage because outrage can be converted into votes. Media organisations amplify outrage because outrage generates audiences. Social-media users reproduce outrage because outrage generates attention. And citizens consume outrage because it offers the intoxicating illusion that an impossibly complicated world can be reduced to an instantly intelligible moral binary. This is a considerably more sophisticated political proposition than the mere identification of a particular party, ideology or institution as the villain.

There is, however, an almost irresistible paradox at the heart of Jana Gana Mana. The film repeatedly admonishes us not to surrender our critical faculties to emotional manipulation, even as it engages in a fair amount of manipulation itself. Swelling music, calculated pauses, thunderous courtroom declamations, strategically deployed revelations and applause-ready dialogue are all marshalled with considerable deliberation.

The irony is delicious: a film warning us against manipulation occasionally tries rather strenuously to manipulate us. Perhaps, intentionally or otherwise, it is demonstrating the very mechanism it condemns. Give people a compelling narrative, reinforce it with music and emotion, and they may willingly surrender the scepticism that ought to protect them. Whether this constitutes deliberate self-awareness or merely an inadvertent contradiction is a question the film leaves unresolved.

Sharis Mohammed’s screenplay is nothing if not ambitious. There are enough ideas here to populate several films: a murder mystery, a police procedural, a student-protest drama, a political thriller, a courtroom drama, a critique of the media, an examination of caste, a commentary on encounter killings, an inquiry into public morality and, finally, a meditation upon the elusive relationship between truth and perception.

Dijo Jose Antony demonstrates considerable assurance in orchestrating such disparate ingredients within the architecture of a mainstream thriller. The film moves from investigation to protest, from police drama to courtroom confrontation, without surrendering its narrative momentum. The director also possesses an instinctive understanding of the mechanics of revelation and anticipation. The first half encourages the viewer to inhabit Sajjan Kumar’s investigation; then Aravind Swaminathan arrives and effectively demands that we reconsider the entire edifice. It is a risky structural gambit, but it succeeds because the film has already persuaded us to invest emotionally in the first version of events.

The technical departments furnish the film with the requisite scale and urgency. Sudeep Elamon’s cinematography gives the proceedings an appropriately grave visual texture, while Jakes Bejoy’s music performs an important function in constructing the film’s emotional architecture. The background score frequently propels scenes towards heightened emotional intensity. At times, this is precisely what the material requires; at others, it can feel as though the music is instructing the audience what to feel rather than permitting the scene to earn its own emotional response. Nevertheless, Jana Gana Mana remains an accomplished mainstream production, and its technical polish undoubtedly assists its political arguments in reaching an audience considerably larger than that which might have been available to a quieter, more austere political drama.

Mamta Mohandas brings dignity and gravitas to Saba Mariam, although the character is inevitably more symbolic than psychologically developed: her death is the narrative detonator that sets off the film’s wider inquiry into justice and public morality. Sri Divya, Vincy Aloshious and the supporting cast contribute effectively to the film’s institutional, student and social milieus.

Yet the film is unmistakably dominated by its two principal male performances. Suraj provides the emotional and moral centre of the first half; Prithviraj appropriates the intellectual and theatrical centre of the second. Their contrast constitutes one of the film’s principal strengths. One embodies the policeman who believes the system can still be made to work, only gradually to lose faith in it; the other embodies the lawyer who understands the system sufficiently well to exploit its contradictions. Neither is permitted the consoling simplicity of conventional heroism. That moral ambiguity renders both considerably more compelling.

Is Jana Gana Mana realistic? Not particularly — and that distinction is worth making. The film is best approached not as a documentary exposition of the Indian legal system but as a political courtroom thriller. Some courtroom exchanges are evidently calibrated for dramatic impact rather than procedural authenticity. Certain characters are deliberately heightened; some speeches sound more like political essays than spontaneous human utterances. Yet to demand absolute realism from the film may be to misunderstand its principal ambition. Jana Gana Mana is interested in ideas. It wants its audience to leave the theatre arguing, disputing and reconsidering. In that respect, it succeeds rather emphatically.

Its greatest achievement is that it refuses to permit the audience the luxury of remaining comfortably on one side of the argument. Initially, one sympathises with the protesters. Then one finds oneself understanding Sajjan Kumar. Then his actions begin to trouble that sympathy. Aravind arrives and proceeds to dismantle the assumptions on which the viewer has built his certainty. Eventually, one begins questioning the architecture of the narrative itself.

That is clever filmmaking. The movie effectively turns the viewer into an unwitting participant in its own experiment. It offers us one version of truth, and we believe it. It then withdraws that certainty and supplies another, compelling us to revise our conclusions. Finally, we are left confronting the possibility that the easiest thing to manipulate was not the evidence, nor even the narrative, but our own confidence in our ability to distinguish between them.

Jana Gana Mana is therefore an ambitious, provocative and undeniably entertaining political thriller that aspires to considerably more than the mere mechanics of a crime story. It interrogates justice, vengeance, policing, politics, journalism, public opinion and the dangerous seduction of instant gratification. Its central warning is particularly pertinent: a society that applauds punishment without insisting upon due process may one day discover that, in its zeal to defend justice, it has quietly sacrificed the very principle it claimed to uphold.

The film’s most potent insight, however, is not that institutions can be corrupt or politicians manipulative. It is something far more disconcerting: we are often willing collaborators in our own manipulation. We believe the headline. We accept the television narrative. We participate in the social-media outrage. We demand immediate punishment. Only afterwards — if at all — do we pause to ask whether we ever possessed the truth in the first place.

And therein lies the enduring relevance of Jana Gana Mana. Beneath its courtroom theatrics, political rhetoric and deliberately engineered revelations lies a film concerned with the psychology of collective outrage. In an age in which television studios convert complexity into confrontation, social media converts indignation into currency and public discourse increasingly rewards certainty over scrutiny, the most dangerous threat may not be the absence of truth. It may be our astonishing willingness to accept a convenient substitute for it.