Even as Akshay Kumar's Kesari Chapter 2 shows an imagined past, it ends up confronting the present

Indian Express

07-05-2025

If anything has come close to capturing the horrors of Jallianwala Bagh, it is the final thirty minutes of Sardar Udham. Shoojit Sircar's version is intimate, visceral, unlike anything Hindi cinema has attempted before. Mind you, it is not a recreation but a reckoning. The violence isn't staged; it unfolds. You're not watching from a distance; you're placed within the frame of 13 April 1919, as if history bleeds into the present. There's Vicky Kaushal, who delivers one of the most physical performances in recent memory, and DOP Avik Mukhopadhyay's camera, which too seems to be grieving. But at the heart of it all is Sircar's gaze — almost journalistic in how it observes, almost elegiac in how it refuses to look away.
Now, when you watch Karan Singh Tyagi's rendition in the newly released Kesari: Chapter 2, the depiction feels comparatively dated. The problem isn't the mainstream gaze; it's the tiredness of the form. There's a clear effort, like Sircar, to personalise the moment through the eyes of a young boy, but the impact is dulled by the choices around it. The cuts are rushed, the score overwrought, the slow-motion indulgent. What could have been genuinely affecting is lost to noise. What unsettles more is its distorted sense of the past. Or more accurately, an imagined one. Kesari: Chapter 2, as the credits state reads, is based on the book, The Case That Shook the Empire by Raghu Palat and Pushpa Palat. Yet the story it chooses to tell is neither part of the book, nor of the historical record. The film fabricates a trial where Sir Sankaran Nair (Akshay Kumar), a prominent lawyer of his time, takes on the British Empire — specifically Brigadier General Reginald Dyer — for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
There's no crime in blending fact with fiction. History, at times, invites interpretation. But when a film claims to be based on a real account and then veers into invention, it becomes something else entirely. Not a reimagining, but a rewriting. For argument's sake, one might call it creative liberty or a loose adaptation. But there's a difference between bending the truth and inventing your own. If you anchor a story to a book, you must be prepared for the weight of that choice; for the questions it demands, and the responsibility it brings.
In reality, Nair never fought a legal battle with Dyer. His conflict was with Sir Michael O'Dwyer, the former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab and one of the key architects behind the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. O'Dwyer appears just once in the film. The blame is placed squarely on Dyer, painted in broad, villainous strokes (with a hint of backstory thrown in, perhaps, for a touch of nuance). The choice is puzzling. Maybe it's because Dyer is the more familiar name, easier to centre a story around. What's clear is this: for a film that insists on the importance of remembering the truth, that calls out the erasures of colonial history, to then offer its own version of revision feels… confounding.
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Perhaps they could've simply called it historical fiction. Instead, it's positioned and marketed as a historical legal drama, with the entire second half devoted to courtroom theatrics. But even if one sets aside questions of authenticity, the trial itself plays out in broad strokes: predictable and familiar. R. Madhavan, as Adv. Neville McKinley, representing the crown, is positioned as a formidable adversary to Nair. Yet, he never truly delivers a strategic blow. His arguments lack bite, his strategies fall flat. And whenever he does make a move, Nair always seems to have an ace hidden up his sleeve. What makes the courtroom portions fall apart isn't just their flatness, but the fatigue of the genre itself. We've seen it all before, from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly to countless other iterations. And with Kumar at the centre of it — an actor who's already done this more compellingly in Jolly LLB 2 — the film begins to resemble less a piece of history, and more a franchise.
This is not to say that Kumar's casting feels misplaced. If anything, it's what adds a necessary layer to the film. There's something about the arc of Nair — and the way Kumar plays him — that speaks less about history and more about the present. For most of the first half, Nair is shown as a British loyalist. His first scene has him labelling an Indian revolutionary poet a terrorist. He dines with the Empire. He's knighted by the Crown. It's only when the massacre unfolds that something changes. His certainties crack. What follows is the story of a man confronting the system he once stood by. On paper, it's a conventional arc. But with Kumar in the role, it becomes harder to ignore the subtext. For over a decade now, he's been seen as an actor closely aligned with the establishment: endorsing its leaders, echoing its slogans. Which is why watching him, for much of the first half, play a man who slowly begins to question his silences, his allegiance feels charged with some meaning. It's a clever piece of casting not because it flatters him, but because it implicates him.
Given the state of mainstream Hindi cinema today, it means something when a film's leading man goes on a spree — invoking free speech, the right to protest, the right to hold power accountable. It means something when that very man stands up for a Muslim civilian crushed by a draconian ruler. It means something when that very film dares to question the violence unleashed on dissent, when it wonders aloud how easily revolutionaries are branded as terrorists. Historically, it may not be an authentic rendering of colonial India's complexities, but its subtext speaks of naya Bharat.