Kesari: Chapter 2

Once in a rare while, a film comes along that opens old wounds and corrects history so effectively that the revisit is worth much more than the price of your ticket. Director Karan Singh Tyagi’s retelling of The Case That Shook The Empire (authored by multi-faceted banker Raghu Palat and Pushpa Palat) which focuses on the courtroom brilliance of Indian lawyer C Sankaran Nair (Akshay Kumar) is one such piece of cinema which shrinks the once mighty Crown into a small-minded, genocidal brute, exemplified by General Reginald Dyer (Simon Paisley Day), aka the Butcher of Amritsar. Tyagi and co-writer Amritpal Singh Bindra take cinematic liberties with a true story but the outcome is an impactful court case that lays bare the bloodiness of the Baisakhi massacre.

As is the case with most Akshay Kumar films in which he plays a real-life character — frankly, at this point, is there any other kind of Akshay Kumar film, apart from the odd comedy here and there? — Kesari: Chapter 2 cannot escape the trademark saviour complex that its leading man comes with. But unlike some of Kumar’s recent outings in this sub-genre of sorts, what acts as a ‘saviour’ here, however, is that despite a lot of theatrics on display, Kesari 2 is a largely well-made film. The second film in the Kesari franchise — which has no bearing on the first, a 2019 outing in which Akshay played Havildar Ishar Singh, the man at the forefront of the Battle of Saragarhi who almost single-handedly took on a regiment of the British — the focus lies on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and its aftermath. Kesari: Chapter 2 bills itself as ’the untold story’ of the genocide that perhaps remains the darkest chapter in India’s colonial history. The first few minutes of Kesari 2, directed by Karan Singh Tyagi and jointly produced by Karan Johar and Akshay Kumar, hit the viewer hard. Despite having watched the massacre that killed thousands of innocents in Amritsar on the Baisakhi day of 1919, dramatised several times on screens big and small, there is no escaping the horror that engulfs you as a viewer as the British troops, under the orders of General Reginald Dyer, fired indiscriminately at men, women and children until “the bullets ran out”. The official figure was put at 1,650, but the body count was several thousand more.

A day before Kesari Chapter 2 was released in theatres, the film’s leading hero, Akshay Kumar, who plays Sir C Sankaran Nair in the film, urged the media at the film’s premiere to not miss the film’s beginning. While Kumar has a point since the first scene depicts the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in great detail- which serves as the backdrop of this courtroom drama, it still is a difficult scene to watch. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre has been represented in books, films, and poems for years now. The tragedy shook the Indian conscience back then and till date continues to be one of the biggest blunders that the British committed while they ruled over our country. Director Karan Singh Tyagi’s film Kesari Part 2 highlights the incidents that followed the massacre and how a certain anglicized advocate who had received Knighthood for his pro-British work changed sides and spoke up against the brutality.