'Haq' Movie Review: Simple-Minded Solidarity

Hindi cinema operates in extremes. On the one hand, you have the blatant Islamophobia and sectarianism of recent propaganda films. These films dig around in history to single out a particular community. The other approach is rarer: calm, sober-sided films made with a measure of dignity and intent. Yet these films also have a tendency to hedge, to oversimplify. Too often, they reduce complex realities to pat displays of solidarity. I felt that way about Ground Zero, a Kashmir-set military film with a passing yet palpable concern for local lives. And I feel much the same about Haq, which dramatises the landmark Shah Bano case from the 1980s. Incidentally, both films star Emraan Hashmi.

Suparn S Varma’s film begins in earnest in 1967, with the nikah of Abbas Khan (Hashmi), a well-to-do lawyer, to Shazia Bano (Yami Gautam Dhar), a cleric’s daughter. The scene that immediately follows squarely establishes the film’s relationship with subtlety. Entering the kitchen of her new household, Shazia is perplexed by an abundance of pressure cookers. “Why three?” she enquires. “Whenever something breaks down, he gets a new one,” she’s told. Ah, could this mean…

Fast-forward some years and Abbas has taken a new wife. Her marriage disintegrating and her dignity affronted, Shazia decides to walk out, taking their three children with her. Abbas denies her maintenance and stops sending child support after the iddat period. When Shazia approaches the courts, he gives her triple talaq, on the shrewd logic that secular law—specifically, Section 125 of the CrPC—grants maintenance rights only to a ‘wife’.

Written by Reshu Nath, Haq is adapted from journalist Jigna Vora’s book, Bano: Bharat Ki Beti. The 1985 lawsuit was significant for bringing to national attention the tangled nature of personal law and secular jurisprudence in India. Is the Shariyat (Muslim personal law) at odds with women’s rights? Can constitutional principles stand in the way of religious freedom? Releasing in an India moving towards a Uniform Civil Code, Haq is treading on delicate ground. Varma’s response is to assuage all sides—sticking up for fairness and reform while painting faith and religion in an equitable light. “We will give the nation a spectacle,” Abbas says, yet the film skirts the finer conundrums.

This reluctance to confront any messiness serves the film poorly. For when this does happen, the story and emotions shine. Verma intersperses the courtroom drama with scenes from the characters’ domestic lives. We see two families fray, the bonds of mutual care and concern tested by time and circumstance. Dhar’s self-belief and determination in the face of social boycott is the film’s main event, but it’s Hashmi who anchors proceedings, with another masterful distillation of the egoistic Indian male. Natty in pathanis and French cut, Hashmi refuses to play Abbas as a type, isolating his hauteur and opportunism to an individual context.

There’s a poised, antique-shop quality to Prathan Mehta’s cinematography and Abhijit Gaonkar and Sonam Singh’s production design—the film is as obsessed with fine fabrics as it is with legal intricacies. The dialogue blends old-world Hindustani with sudden English flourishes: “chalaki wala move”, “tum meri wahid woh—Number 1”. There is a scene where Shazia, from across a screen, must present her case before the Muslim law board. Actor SM Zaheer turns up, playing a grumpy old codger, and I laughed at the arrangement of tall sherbet glasses (rooh-afza, is it?) on the table.

The film wraps up with the Supreme Court verdict in Bano’s favour. This is followed by two title cards: one acknowledging the then-government’s reversal (no direct mention of Rajiv Gandhi), the other hailing the current government’s enactment of The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019, which criminalised instant divorce. What gets lost here is the role of the BMMA (Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan), a women-led rights group that petitioned the Supreme Court in 2016 against triple talaq. It will be unfair to call Haq a partisan film, though its bland linearity conveys a politics of its own.

Haq releases in theatres on November 7.