Chhatrapal Ninawe’s Ghaath follows its three principal characters through chapters that gets their titles from the Adivasi slogan “Jal Jangal Zameen”. Over water, in the forest and on land, Ninawe’s screenplay offers a withering view of a revolutionary movement that had set out to wrest justice for the historically oppressed.
In an uneasy corner of Central India, three men strive to change their realities. Former revolutionary Falgun (Dhananjay Mandaokar) is on a mission to murder Nagpure (Jitendra Joshi), a police officer reputed for killing Maoists. Nagpure himself is pursuing Falgun’s elusive brother Raghunath, hoping that Raghunath’s surrender will win him the transfer he seeks.
Raghunath wants out too. Fed up with his predicament and in love with a local woman (Suruchi Adarkar), Raghunath comes up with a risky ploy to leave behind a life on the run.
An Adivasi from the Halba community, Ninawe has crafted a grim film that eschews any romanticism for or hope in the Maoist cause. Ghaath is structured like a nihilistic heist thriller, the kind in which the characters as are dubious as the spoils are unworthy – more Aaranya Kandam than Kosa or Newton.
Deft performances and superb camerawork by Udit Khurana steer the Marathi-language movie, which is out in cinemas after being premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2023. The triangular cat-and-mouse contest is initially taut, suspenseful and sharp about the wear-and-tear effects of a decades-long insurgency.
Ninawe’s exploration of the breakdown of normal codes of conduct is sharpest when observing Falgun and Nagpure. Falgun can neither forgive the police atrocities he has witnessed nor forget the debt he owes to the Maoist movement. Nagpure’s untrammeled powers have pickled into meaninglessness.
The 125-minute movie wobbles, never to recover, with Raghunath’s entry. The disgruntled soldier is Ghaath’s version of the participant in a heist who will stop at nothing to get what he wants.
The film’s schema doesn’t give Raghunath the consideration or complexity with which other players the other players in a zero-sum game. The ambiguity of the title – it means wound as well as ambush – works best for Falgun and Nagpure.
Falgun has a moral clarity from the outside that Raghunath has lost being on the inside. The movie manages to drum up a smidgen of sympathy for Nagpure, a ruthless man who can and does kill or arrest at will.
Nagpure’s track also has the film’s most memorable character. The free-spirited Perku (Janardhan Kadam) lives on an island that serves as Nagpure’s sanctuary from his professional woes. Perku is the embodiment of the “jal, jangal zameen” personified – one of the few pure souls remaining in a place where ideology has run its course, to be replaced by chaos.
