Main Vaapas Aaunga

79 years have passed, and it is evident that India and Pakistan still bear the scars of the Partition. While the rare surviving victims and their descendants have somehow learned the quiet dignity of forgiving, a parallel political machinery remains ever-ready to weaponize the tragedy with convenient, revisionist theories. Against this polarized backdrop, Imtiaz Ali arrives with Main Vaapas Aaunga – a remarkably neutral, almost defiantly apolitical look at one of the subcontinent’s defining horrors. It is a film that approaches Partition not as a political failure but as a deeply personal one, choosing to focus on the people who were uprooted, separated, and left waiting for promises that would never be fulfilled.

Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga is the story of the aftermath of the Partition of 1947 that led to the formation of two countries – India and Pakistan. Ishar Singh Grewal (Naseeruddin Shah) is a 95-year-old man living in Chandigarh with his son (Rajat Kapoor), daughter-in-law (Anjana Sukhani) and others. He had to migrate there from Sargodha (which now lies in Pakistan) during the Partition. He once forces his driver to take him to the other side of the border to Sargodha through Attari. Ishar is, obviously, stopped by the soldiers guarding the border. At that time, he suffers a stroke and starts suffering from dementia.

Main Vaapas Aaunga has its heart in the right place. A love story set against the backdrop of Partition and the horrors endured by millions has the ingredients for compelling cinema. But at over 160 minutes, Imtiaz Ali’s Main Vaapas Aaunga takes an awfully long time to get where it wants to go.

Nafraton mein mohabatton ko na bhoolna… Trust the eternal romantic Imtiaz Ali to give us yet another tale of love and trust him to transform a love story set around Partition into a requiem for peace. Of course, we have seen a number of cross-border love stories laced with the message of harmony. So when the narrative begins with a Sikh patriarch, Ishar Grewal (the brilliant and exceptional Naseeruddin Shah), rushing to the Wagah border in Amritsar, you think you know where the story is headed.

A 95-year-old Sikh patriarch (Naseeruddin Shah) quivers on his deathbed. He mutters what sounds like gibberish: random words and incoherent ramblings, delusions dancing with reality. The only thing clear is his desperate desire to visit the pre-Partition Punjab he grew up in. His adult sons put it down to his dementia; they wait for the inevitable. But the old man refuses to go, almost as if he were tricking his life into flashing before his eyes. These flashes, though, feature nothing from his 78 long years in India; they feature everything from his first 17 in ‘Pakistan’. His grandson (Diljit Dosanjh), a London-based NRI who rushes to him, is the only one he responds to. He’s the only one willing to look for a breathing tale within the debris of fractured memory. A portrait of love in the time of severance emerges: his college days as Keenu (a soulful Vedang Raina), a girl named Afsana (Sharvari), furtive glances, covert meet-cutes, his mediocre Urdu poetry, dreams interrupted, a romance rushed by history, and a love story suddenly reduced to faith and fate.

No one depicts love and longing as beautifully as Imtiaz Ali does. His coming-of-age dramas like Rockstar, Cocktail, Jab We Met, and even Jab Harry Met Sejal have had these two as central themes in the plot. In Amar Singh Chamkeela, Ali’s most political film to date, love made the two lead characters brave even as they longed to belong. His latest, Main Vapas Aaunga, is based on a similar theme, but Ali goes a step forward and talks of man-made borders, refugee crisis world over and how no particular community should be held responsible for the trauma that came with the partition of India in 1947. Featuring a stellar cast comprising Naseeruddin Shah, Diljit Dosanjh, Vedang Raina, Rajat Kapoor, and Sharvari, Main Vaapas Aaunga speaks the language of love in a polarised world.

In Chandigarh, 95-year-old Ishar Singh Grewal alias Kinnu (Naseeruddin Shah) is battling a stroke and dementia; Dadaji is on his deathbed. Amidst his rambling delirium over Martians and Sargodha while making cussed comments at family members taking care of him, the searing pain of 1947 finally stands out. UK-based grandson Nirvair (Diljit Dosanjh), between IT jobs and a failure at standup comedy, leaves behind a relationship (with girlfriend Banita Sandhu) that’s defying definition, and heads to Chandigarh. Between Nirvair’s dogged attempt to decipher grandpa’s delirious but determined hold on a trauma that needs closure, the pangs of separation, the pain of Partition, the horrifying truths families seek to keep buried, emerge with ferocity.

As it turns out, Partition is now the safest address in Hindi cinema if you’re a filmmaker making a film about politics, about bigotry, and about the Hindu-Muslim wound the present government keeps raking up. To set this in the present day would mean inviting forms of censorship that could range from a notice to a ban. But that isn’t the case if you reach back to 1947, where the bloodshed is settled history and nobody can accuse you of inventing it. Sriram Raghavan did it last year with Ikkis, sending Dharmendra back to Sargodha after a lifetime, crafting a film that is essentially an indictment against the cruelty of war and the real price of bigotry. Now Imtiaz Ali sends an old man to the same town and uses the journey to say almost everything a Hindi film in 2026 is otherwise forbidden to say.