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'Kesari Chapter 2' Movie Review: Fighting a Losing Battle
The Akshay Kumar starrer is torn between opposing brands of patriotism.
Director: Karan Singh Tyagi
Writers: Karan Singh Tyagi, Amritpal Singh Bindra, Sumit Saxena
Cast: Akshay Kumar, R. Madhavan, Ananya Panday, Simon Paisley Day, Regina Cassandra, Amit Sial, Mark Bennington, Alexx O’Nell
Language: Hindi
Kesari Chapter 2 is a strange film. Based on the 2019 book The Case That Shook The Nation, it dramatises the events following the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre. The story revolves around C. Sankaran Nair, the Indian lawyer who took on the British Raj in court to prove that the massacre was a carefully planned conspiracy. So, on paper, the patriotism it exudes is more of an old-school one — the kind detected in period dramas like Ae Watan Mere Watan (2024) and The Waking of a Nation (the recent SonyLIV show featuring a fictional version of Nair). I’d like to believe that these stories use the atrocities of colonialism as a medium to express the importance of dissent, free speech, secularism and anti-establishment courage in present-day India. After all, Nair’s fight is inherently one that challenges an oppressive rule and the systemic abuse of power.
While both Ae Watan… and The Waking… were undone by narrative and technical flaws, Kesari Chapter 2 chooses a new problem to have. Its implications are (relatively) progressive, but its storytelling is not. It tries to deliver the message of defiance in the loud language of compliance: arthouse politics in massy packaging. This may sound like a clever hybrid, especially given how difficult it is to make and exhibit movies that dispute majoritarian ideals these days. It’s a Trojan-horse plan of sorts: reel the audience in with the promise of Bharat (starring Akshay Kumar and R. Madhavan) only to slyly hit them with a whiff of vintage Hindustan. But the film commits so hard to the mainstream formula that its intent starts to look just as hollow as its counterparts. Journalism is suppressed, newspapers are burnt, civilians are silenced, religious tensions are stoked and propaganda is spread; the tone of film-making, though, makes it hard to tell the subtext from the text. The strangeness stems from the fact that, by the end, not even Kesari 2 seems to know what kind of patriot it wants to be.
Akshay Kumar plays the fearless Sankaran Nair, but it emerges quickly that Nair is playing Kumar. He cannot afford to be a very complicated nationalist. He’s so cool that he does a crossword while winning big cases and corrects his opponents’ phrases (“Shakespeare, not Twain”). As in Ram Setu (2022), Kumar’s character starts as a doubter — a proud pawn of the Crown who’s knighted on the same day as the massacre. His subservience feels oddly genuine; “forget this andolan-wandolan, go and study,” he tells a Sikh kid whose mother and sister were killed. Once he’s selected to be the only Indian on the Viceroy Commission, the crisis of conscience takes over. He sees injustice and suffering all around. On cue, he is humiliated by everyone — including a passionate young lawyer (Ananya Panday) who calls out his complicity; and Dyer, who shows him a “no dogs and Indians allowed” sign — and gets transformed. He decides to sue the empire for genocide, but the film is so clearly written from and for the 2020s that the grammar of dissent belongs to a moviegoer suing a multiplex chain for running too many ads.
Every time he enters the courtroom, it’s an intro shot. Even his exits are intro shots. The background score is endless intro and outro music. Every time he argues the case, it’s a symbol of comeuppance and saviour complex. He doesn’t make points, he proves them. The entire legal system is rigged against him — in football terms, he’s like an away striker taking a penalty at Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu stadium — but he soldiers on. The issue is that Kumar hijacks the persona (or the character is written around him) to an extent where it’s hard to ignore the irony of a Bollywood film batting for voices against fascism. At times, it goes too far to service the persona. For instance, even womanhood is sacrificed at the altar of anti-Indian sentiment: when a white lady is put on stand, his female colleague (Panday) cross-examines and exposes her as someone whose rape accusations against a local are fake; he then offers the crying woman some water and a handkerchief. At one point, in a scene straight out of The Waking of a Nation, he psycho-analyses and provokes Dyer (complete with sad childhood flashbacks) into yelling racist abuse to show that he’s mentally unstable.
It’s not about the authenticity of these scenes so much as the big-picture fodder. Once Madhavan enters as the bitter defense lawyer, the actors embark on a quest of out-acting each other. It morphs into a battle of main-character energies. It becomes about them, and about us. As is often the case, the actual tragedy turns into a footnote. If every theme is a surrogate and a surrogate of a surrogate, what is real? The specificity of the premise is reduced to a universal vessel of noise. The film opens with a recreation of the massacre and, with Vicky Kaushal’s voice-over and the survival of a Sikh youngster, momentarily raises the possibility of a shared universe with Sardar Udham (2021). That doesn’t happen of course, but one’s admiration for the Shoojit Sircar film — a non-linear and daring portrait of patriotism as a personal emotion — only grows every week.
The rousing monologues (“get the f*ck out my country”) and closing slates (on the lines of “the British have still not said sorry”) inevitably follow. The rest of the film is designed to poke us and poke us until we feel rage. You wonder if you can be Indian if you’re not angry anymore. That’s where Kesari Chapter 2 becomes most other titles in this genre. The new-age core is so persistent that the essence of its nationalism is forgotten. It succeeds in provoking those looking for an everyday outlet, but it aims to summon reactions similar to General Dyer’s on stand. All is fair in love and lore. In other words, you don’t see such films — you see through them.