‘Satluj’ and the Film That Punjab Could Not Finish Watching

A film about a Sikh activist investigating extrajudicial killings in 1990s Punjab has reached screens in India, but not in the shape its director first delivered. Honey Trehan’s drama, retitled Satluj from its earlier working title Punjab 95, opened to reviewers in mid-July 2026 after years of delay, certification disputes, and quiet withdrawals. Variety’s review, published on 20 July 2026, describes the result as a moving activist drama whose provocations still register even after the cuts.

The story underneath the release schedule is older than the film. Satluj dramatises the early career of human-rights lawyer and activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who documented secret cremations carried out by Punjab Police during the counter-insurgency of the early 1990s, and who was himself abducted and killed in 1995. Trehan’s version, Variety reports, leans toward hagiography rather than historical cold case. That is the artistic compromise. The political one is the title, the certification record, and the years the film spent off marquees.

The film that became a different name

For most of its post-production life the project was known as Punjab 95. Variety’s 2023 trade reporting on the title drew a direct line from the cut to Khalra’s life and to a Punjab that has not fully metabolised the 1990s. By the time the film reached a censor board, the name had to go. Satluj, the river that runs through the state, took its place. The change is cosmetic on a poster and structural inside the film: scenes that named Khalra explicitly, or staged the cremations in forensic detail, sit differently once the protagonist is no longer a recognisable martyr from the news.

Variety’s reviewer, Devansh Sharma, judges the film on its own terms. The hagiographic hues, he writes, do not erase the emotional pull of watching a man insist on paper trails in a place where paper trails were being burned. The film conjures heavy emotions despite its compromises. That sentence is, in effect, a verdict on a particular kind of Indian state filmmaking: activist cinema that survives by agreeing to be quieter than it was shot to be.

What the censor board actually did

India’s Central Board of Film Certification does not formally ban films in most cases; it certifies them with cuts, and producers can withdraw a project from certification rather than accept the changes. The result is a softer form of suppression that does not require a courtroom. A film that goes through twelve suggested alterations and is released as Satluj is not the same film as the one that was submitted as Punjab 95. The framing matters: the state did not forbid the movie. The state altered the conditions under which the movie could exist.

This is the standard pattern in disputes over films that touch the security establishment in Indian states, Punjab, Kashmir, the Northeast. Producers do not always publicise the suggested cuts. Critics and journalists do not always get to see the original submission. The negotiated artefact is what reaches the public. Satluj is the negotiated artefact; Punjab 95 is the artefact the board was asked to certify.

The structural pattern

Read across the wider South Asian cinema of the last decade, the Satluj case fits a familiar shape. Films that depict state violence against a religious or regional minority tend to be certified, but with names changed, scenes softened, and dialogue re-recorded. Sarvam Thaala Mayam, The Kashmir Files’s quieter cousins, and several Marathi and Malayalam productions have navigated similar territory, sometimes more openly, sometimes not. What unifies them is not a single censorious decree but a climate of expected self-censorship that producers absorb long before a board member reads the script.

This is not the same phenomenon as a court-ordered ban, and it is worth saying so plainly. No Indian court has, as far as the available reporting records, ordered Satluj destroyed. The film is in cinemas. But the practice of submission, re-submission, suggested cuts, and title changes is a quieter mechanism, and it operates without the visibility of a courtroom order. The state does not need to forbid a film when producers and boards together arrive at a version of it that no longer offends.

What is at stake for Punjab

The human stakes sit with Khalra’s family and with the survivors of the cremations he documented. For them, Punjab 95 would have been a documentary-style reckoning; Satluj is a fictionalised dramatisation set against the river rather than the courtroom. The artistic stakes sit with Trehan, who has said in earlier interviews that he set out to make a film about a specific man and got instead a film about a country that has not finished arguing about him. The industry stakes sit with producers who now have a clean template: name a martyr in the script, change the name in the cut, market the river, claim the budget back.

The counter-narrative to the Satluj compromise is that art routinely survives cuts, that hagiography is a genre with a long Indian pedigree, and that audiences are capable of reading a film against its title. That is fair. The hagiographic critique in Variety’s review is essentially that argument from inside the cinema. The harder question is whether a film that could not keep its central name was ever going to keep its central argument, and whether the answer matters beyond Punjab.

What remains uncertain

The public record does not spell out every suggested cut the Central Board of Film Certification proposed. Trehan and his producers have spoken about the process in general terms, but the specific list of alterations is not in the reporting. Nor is it clear which scenes in the released Satluj correspond to which scenes in the original Punjab 95 edit. Without that side-by-side, the difference between the two films can only be inferred from the title change and from the reviewer’s note that hagiographic hues have replaced forensic detail. The sources do not specify how the dialogue was rewritten, how many minutes were trimmed, or whether the soundtrack carries new vocal cues around the renamed protagonist.

That gap is itself part of the story. When a film is reshaped to clear certification, the documentation of the reshaping tends to be the part that does not survive. Satluj is in cinemas. Punjab 95 exists mostly in the memory of people who worked on it. Between them sits a quiet ledger of changes that India’s film certification system has not been asked to publish.

Desk note: This piece leans on Variety’s trade and review coverage of Satluj and its earlier life as Punjab 95. Wire reporting on Indian censor-board proceedings is thin by design; where specific cuts are concerned, Monexus flags the gap rather than filling it. The structural frame is drawn from the pattern of certification-by-negotiation that has shaped other Indian films on state violence, not from any single precedent ruling.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaswant_Singh_Khalra