‘Rehmat’ Movie Review: Naseeruddin Shah Reclaims the Plurality of Punjab 

It’s present-day Punjab but it could be Punjab 1995; it could be India 1984. The village of Gujjarwal bristles with unsaid questions and silent answers. Big Bollywood movies (like Dangal) have been shot in the region, but the place is haunted by its own fictions. Everyone’s story is interconnected, like desperate organs of a wounded body. A young man named Keshav is absent from one household; a young father named Balwinder is missing from another. The police go around camouflaging bloody encounters as separatist violence and communal unrest. They assure Keshav’s family that his Sikh killers will be brought to justice; they visit Balwinder’s family to keep an eye on their voices.

Everyone knows what’s happening — it’s whispered with sadness in living rooms that soothe the living, and in drawing rooms traced from the despair of disappearance. Amidst the rubble of no closure, an old stranger (Naseeruddin Shah) reaches the doorstep of one of these houses. He claims to be God (“Rab”) visiting the place of maximum prayers, but slowly settles into his identity as Rashid Ali, a British national who yearns to see the home and village of his birth. He fits in as if he never left. 

Based on the short stories by Ajeet Cour, Gurvinder Singh’s Rehmat shares a universe with some significant recent titles about a Punjab torn between the scars of its past and the cracks of history. Performers from two such movies shape the last of the three narrative strands. Suvinder Vicky, who played an infamous police officer in Honey Trehan’s Satluj, plays the welcoming new owner of the childhood manor of Rashid Ali. Naseeruddin Shah, who played a sick Partition survivor desperate to revisit the heart of his ancestral village in Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga, plays a sick pre-Partition survivor who revisits the soul of his ancestral village. When Rashid arrives, he is noticed from a distance. It feels like a hero shot without the ornamental treatment and score; the Bollywood-wired mind sees him as an aged saviour who is there to repair a broken place. But he’s there to repair his own rootlessness, which extends to the stillness of those who host him. As an Indian Muslim who’s spent a lifetime being the ‘other’ in a foreign country, he yearns to be ‘another’ in a land he barely remembers. 

What distinguishes Rehmat as a film is this quiet tussle at its core: the one between traditional compassion and modern conflict. The few times we see the authorities, they seem to represent all the social and political divides that define new-age cinema; they’re the only ones who allude to Rashid’s religious identity, scolding both him and his hosts for blindly trusting each other. They impose tales written by their leaders onto the wary citizens of the village. It’s almost like Rashid is a human manifestation of an old-school secularism that’s fading over time and tide; it’s why the cops find it difficult to understand him and his free spirit. Yet, the three threads — the grief of Keshav’s family, the trauma of Balwinder’s family and kids, and Rashid Ali’s sense of belonging — thrive on an inherent warmth and dignity beneath the tensions.

The opening shot foreshadows this tone: a young woman’s tears while chopping onions turn into actual emotions, conveying how pain and caregiving often speak the same language. She finds an injured man, an alleged Sikh militant on the run, hiding in her storeroom but agrees to shelter him; this man’s family then welcomes a Muslim stranger like Rashid without any doubt and suspicion; Rashid is then hosted by the Sikh family living in his childhood home without any questions. Apart from the meaning of guests in Indian mythology, it’s the kind of hospitality that brings to mind Zeus’ law in The Odyssey, which, if ruptured, alters the fate of humanity itself. The village refuses to forsake the civility of their ancestors. All of the residents have their problems, but the symbolism of Rashid Ali’s homecoming — a divine event in more ways than one — unites them by nature and not stature. They do not abandon their values in the face of establishment pressure and dubious charges.

It’s like their compassion keeps defying the mainstream impression of a place that’s too often reduced to its debris and faultlines. Most films would have revolved around Rashid and his last-gasp journey; here he boards a train that’s already in motion across spiritual borders. It’s an unusually gentle story about the people who reclaim the plurality of a culture and rise above the volatility of forces that appropriate them. The camera captures this gaze with the way it moves, floating within homes and spaces like the ghosts of the perished who are watching their loved ones keep them alive. You can sense the presence of those before and after, even as the families offset their anxieties with the generosity of everyday life. Everyone is coping, but it doesn’t turn them away from the most basic tenets; Rashid is both real and unreal in how his condition urges them to find refuge in his care. He is their mosque, temple and gurudwara at once, bringing out the best from those in need of faith.

Of the cast, Diya Kamboj is striking as a bereaved sibling whose first instinct is to protect a stranger, regardless of their circumstances. Her conflict isn’t that she’s doing this in secret, but that she’s realising the truth and fantasies surrounding the death of her brother; charity is the only grammar of dissent she knows. There’s something about Naseeruddin Shah and the way he uses his mortality — physical ailments, psychological tolls, lived-in wisdom — in such roles. A wonky British accent aside, his Rashid Ali morphs into a portrait of South Asian civilisation, creaking under the cancers of contemporary rhetoric. It’s a typically alert performance, so tuned into the context of the film that he works as both character and idea.  

Suvinder Vicky undoes the toxicity of the characters that are generally assigned to him. The way this man looks at Rashid — with respect, affection, hope, humility — brings to mind the journeyman grace of his breakout performance in Ivan Ayr’s Meel Patthar (2020). Some of the little exchanges between these two make for the moments of the film. The polite resistance from Rashid gives way to a kinship that transcends labels and erases the partitioning of empathy. Watching them is watching everything that matters. It’s the very essence of Rehmat: Governments come and go, but the people continue to build places with incomplete sentences, chopped onions and apolitical memories.

Rehmat premiered at the 79th Locarno Film Festival.