The killing fields of Punjab: representing the Sikh militancy in cinema

The Sikh Militancy was a violent movement that began in the northern Indian state of Punjab in the late 1970s and lasted through the early 1990s. The movement consisted predominantly of Jatt Sikhs, who waged a bloody campaign for an independent, theocratic Sikh state, Khalistan. Despite the sanguinary nature of the conflict and the highly influential role that Punjabi culture plays in India's mass entertainment culture and even the large numbers of Punjabi directors in India's mass film industry, Indian language films about this period are relatively sparse. In this essay, we study two films about the Khalistan conflict: Maachis and Punjab 1984.