Kesari: Chapter 2

Little details tend to annoy when the broader experience is choppy. During the first half hour of Kesari Chapter 2, every musical choice had me scribbling notes. The generic sad song that plays over the end of the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. The nu-metal that accompanies one of Akshay Kumar’s dramatic entries. The angelic chorus that practically announces the fate of an earnest young revolutionary. Jallianwala Bagh has been solemnly depicted in several Hindi films, most starkly in Sardar Udham (2021). More than 1500 people were killed in the 1919 massacre after General Dyer ordered army troops to fire on a crowd of civilians trapped in a garden. Though the British tried to suppress the details, enough pressure was built that they constituted the Hunter Commission to look into the matter. The committee condemned Dyer’s actions, but the Viceroy’s Executive Council opted not to prosecute.

कभी जलियांवाला बाग गए हैं आप? अमृतसर में हरमंदिर साहिब के पास यह वही जगह है जहां 13 अप्रैल, 1919 को उस खूनी बैसाखी के दिन अंग्रेज़ी हुकूमत के सनकी जनरल डायर की चलवाई गोलियों से सैंकड़ों बेकसूर, निहत्थे हिन्दुस्तानी मारे गए थे। इस बाग की दीवारों पर आज भी उन गोलियों के निशान दिख जाएंगे। गौर से देखेंगे तो सूख चुके खून के छींटे भी। और गौर करेंगे तो लगेगा कि ये दीवारें फुसफुसा रही हैं। जैसे कह रही हों कि इन्होंने उस शाम यहां नाइंसाफी का जो मंजर देखा था उसकी माफी इन्हें कब सुनने को मिलेगी? यह फिल्म ‘केसरी चैप्टर 2-द अनटोल्ड स्टोरी ऑफ जलियांवाला बाग’ हमें वही फुसफुसाहटें सुनाने आई है। ‘केसरी 2’ का ट्रेलर रिलीज़ होने से पहले चंद ही लोगों को यह बात मालूम थी कि जलियांवाला बाग के उस नरसंहार के बाद एक भारतीय वकील ने ब्रिटिश अदालत में यह साबित किया था उस दिन जनरल डायर वहां ‘दंगे पर उतारू भीड़’ को नियंत्रित करने नहीं बल्कि निहत्थे लोगों पर एक सोची-समझी साज़िश के तहत गोलियां चलाने गया था वरना अंग्रेज़ी हुकूमत ने तो अपनी रिपोर्ट में उस भीड़ को दंगाई और आतंकी करार देते हुए जनरल डायर को क्लीन चिट दे दी थी। वह वकील यानी सी. शंकरन नायर 1897 में कांग्रेस का अध्यक्ष रह चुका था, अंग्रेज़ी हुकूमत का इतना ज़्यादा वफादार था कि उसे ‘सर’ की उपाधि दी गई थी। लेकिन जलियांवाला बाग नरसंहार के बाद उसने अपना रास्ता बदल लिया था। यह फिल्म हमें उसे इसी बदले हुए रास्ते पर चलते हुए दिखाने आई है।

The strong points of Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh - it does have a few - are most surface level. The intense and occasionally blustery dramatization of the legal battle waged by one brave man to bring mass murderer General Reginald Dyer to justice is mounted and filmed with impressive flair. But in its deeper, defining folds, there is much that would have benefitted had more thought and rigour gone into the project. Akshay Kumar - he is obviously in here to lend star power to a historical that largely steers clear of commercial tics - is clearly miscast as the Malayali lawyer-statesman Sir Chettur Sankaran Nair, who sued the Crown for genocide after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of March 13, 1919 and almost single-handedly took the case to its logical conclusion.

More than a hundred years after it occurred, the April 1919 massacre of Jallianwala Bagh is a wound that continues to fester. There has been no contestation about what happened that terrible day when General Reginald Dyer ordered his troops to fire upon scores of unarmed innocents, many of them women and children, without a single warning. The people of Amritsar who had gathered there to protest against the Rowlatt Act had no inkling that a spotter plane had been deployed to ascertain their numbers: shortly afterwards it flew overhead, shoot-to-kill orders were barked, and ground was filled with the bodies of the dead and dying.

As is usually the case, the untold story in Kesari Chapter 2 is actually an inaccurate one wherein history is juggled and chronology is shuffled for the sake of drama. True identities and occurrences are evoked but tweaked beyond recognition to design a chapter in India’s pre-Independence era that sounds far more sensational when told through the prism of film-making. So a case of libel becomes a fight against genocide and a devil’s advocate transforms into an F-word blasting freedom fighter as fictionalised twists and turns are tossed until an over five-week long courtroom battle acquires the air of a spectacle that’s nationalist and cinematic in equal measure.

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.