Ikkis

Madan Lal Khetarpal is in Lahore. He’s attending a college reunion and seeing the house where he grew up, but really, he’s building up courage to visit the place where his son Arun, second lieutenant in the Indian army, breathed his last in the 1971 War. This turned out to be Dharmendra’s final role, and he’s a little too old to offer an incisive performance. Yet, what we get is even better, something pure and unfiltered, an old man using his last fruitful moments to speak of love and understanding. I was incredibly moved, perhaps because my grandfather is also a Madan Lal who studied in Lahore and, like Dharmendra, has been a witness to both undivided Punjab and the entire sweep of independent India.

Sriram Raghavan, best known as a master of neo-noir crime thrillers, ventures onto unfamiliar terrain with Ikkis, a humane war drama that shuttles between past and present. It is a challenging film to navigate, as Raghavan must balance the portrayal of the gallantry of one of India’s youngest Param Vir Chakra awardees (posthumous) with a more understated theme—the quiet, mutual respect shared by soldiers on opposing sides, bound by a common understanding of the true cost of war and the pain of losing loved ones. Raghavan’s trademark, unpredictable humour crops up in the most unexpected places, adding a delightful edge that works wonders. In Ikkis, patriotism roars, while courage forgives. The emotional core of the film lies in a heart-wrenching face-off staged away from the battlefield. Dharmendra and Jaideep Ahlawat breathe life into the narrative through a sublime, soulful interplay of grief and guilt. Largely functioning as a two-hander, the film is held together by these two formidable performances, which anchor it even when the pace feels inconsistent and storytelling gets stagnant in portions.

There’s a wistfulness about Ikkis, a period action drama based on the life of India’s youngest Param Vir Chakra awardee, Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal. The 21-year-old Indian army officer was immortalised during the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war; the film outlines his undying sense of duty. But the wistfulness is something we’ve come to associate with brave love stories. I last felt it after Merry Christmas, Sriram Raghavan’s soft-hearted romantic thriller rooted in war-coded emotions like sacrifice, guilt, rage, deceit, redemption, heroism and loyalty. Raghavan’s Ikkis (“21”) is a war movie rooted in love-coded emotions: longing, regret, naivety, mutual respect, trust, compassion and hope. Beneath all the bullets and armour, it’s a tender and kind film — one that reclaims patriotism as the quest for humanity, not identity or faith. I went in expecting a reverential biopic, but came out thinking of Yash Chopra and other vintage legacies of cross-border nostalgia. It’s a story in which soldiers aren’t killed; humans die. It’s a post-partition tragedy in which two nations are united by memory and divided by borders. In other words, Ikkis is a minor miracle in a genre landscape that often sells valour in the currency of hate and victimhood. It’s hard not to feel protective of it.

These are interesting times in popular Hindi cinema, as a battle of perspectives rages at the turnstiles. Filmmakers known for overtly jingoistic tentpoles are turning to dark espionage dramas to convey their political intent, while those celebrated for their noirish, intricate thrillers are turning to patriotic dramas with predictable plotlines, in what seems like a well-argued counterpoint.

Not the sort of Bollywood war movie that goes all guns blazing and tom-tomming the virtues of battlefield bellicosity, Ikkis conserves its firepower and spreads it out judiciously over its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. The strategy, sustained all the way through, serves Sriram Raghavan’s film, which is a marked departure from his neo-noir thrillers, well. It hits its intended targets more often than it misses.

Ikkis movie review: “Ikkis,” responds a young soldier when asked his age by a senior officer, his face thickly smeared by birthday cake. Twenty-one, when you come properly of age. Second Lt Arun Khetarpal did not live to be 22: he fought with his last breath on that climactic December day of the 1971 Indo-Pak war, becoming the youngest Army officer to be awarded a Param Vir Chakra. Rather than just a straight-up war film about a young man’s exemplary courage, Ikkis is also an exploration of the harrowing fallout of conflict. And that makes Sriram Raghavan’s latest, co-written by him, Arijit Biswas and Pooja Ladha Surti, stand out from the overwhelmingly jingoistic, disturbingly violent features of the past few years.

1971 में जब भारत पूर्वी मोर्चे पर पाकिस्तान से जूझ रहा था तब पाकिस्तान ने भारत को उलझाने के लिए पश्चिमी सरहद पर भी मोर्चा खोल दिया था। उस दौरान लड़ी गई कई लड़ाइयों में से एक थी ‘बसंतर की लड़ाई’ जिसमें हमारे टैंक सवार वीरों ने पाकिस्तानी टैंकों को नेस्तनाबूद करते हुए असीम शौर्य का प्रदर्शन किया था। उन वीरों में से एक थे सैकिंड लेफ्टिनेंट अरुण खेत्रपाल जिन्होंने महज़ 21 साल की उम्र में अद्भुत वीरता दिखाते हुए अपने टैंक में आग लगने के बावजूद पीछे हटने से इंकार करते हुए पाकिस्तानी फौज को भारी नुकसान पहुंचाया था और देश के लिए सर्वोच्च बलिदान दिया था। इस वीरता के लिए उन्हें मरणोपरांत परमवीर चक्र से सम्मानित किया गया था। इस सर्वोच्च सम्मान को पाने वाले वह सबसे युवा सैनिक थे। श्रीराम राघवन की यह फिल्म ‘इक्कीस’ (Ikkis) उसी 21 वर्षीय वीर अरुण खेत्रपाल की कहानी दिखाती है, थोड़े अलग ढंग से।