Language: Hindi

Director: Rajkumar Santoshi

Cast: Sunny Deol, Preity G Zinta, Shabana Azmi, Ali Fazal, Karan Deol, Abhimanyu Singh, Khushi Hazare

We have all seen Sunny Deol do it. He can beat up several bad guys at once, roar dialogues that can rouse the patriotism out of an entire theatre, and, of course, pull up a hand-pump with nothing but brute strength.

So when Batwara 1947 begins with Sunny Deol preparing for India’s Independence Day celebrations, you almost know what to expect. Except, this time, he isn’t going to fight Pakistan.

In Rajkumar Santoshi’s Batwara 1947, Deol plays Sikandar Mirza, a man who initially believes that the violence accompanying Partition is merely the handiwork of a few extremists. The riots will stop, he thinks. People will come to their senses. Independence is supposed to be a celebration, after all. Then the fire reaches his doorstep.

Forced to flee Meerut overnight with his wife Nargis (Preity Zinta), son Javed (Karan Deol) and daughter (Khushi Hazare), Mirza finds himself among thousands of people whose lives have been torn apart by a line drawn across a map. After spending months in a refugee camp, he finally gets a house in Lahore with the help of poet Habib (Ali Fazal).

There is just one problem; the house isn’t empty. Its elderly matriarch, Durga Mai (Shabana Azmi), is still living there. And she is Hindu.

More from Lifestyle

Based on Asghar Wajahat’s acclaimed play Jis Lahore Nai Dekhya, O Jamyai Nai, Batwara 1947 takes a deceptively simple premise and uses it to ask a question that feels uncomfortably relevant even today- was religion created to unite people, or have we simply learnt to use it to divide them?

That question becomes particularly important through Javed. Separated from his family at the Meerut railway station and later reunited with them, he is no longer the boy his father remembers. He has seen people killed. He has watched neighbours turn against neighbours and friendships dissolve because someone happened to pray differently. His anger has nowhere to go, so he finds a target in the most obvious person available: the old Hindu woman occupying the house he believes rightfully belongs to his family.

For Javed, Durga Mai isn’t a human being anymore. She is the embodiment of everything he believes was taken from him. And that is where Batwara 1947 becomes considerably more interesting than a conventional Partition drama. The film isn’t interested in telling us which side suffered more. It is interested in what happens when suffering is converted into hatred.

One of the film’s most powerful ideas comes through Ali Fazal’s character, Habib, who asks, “Agar woh haiwan hai toh kya hum acche hain?” It is a deceptively simple question, but perhaps the entire film is contained within it. If violence has stripped someone else of their humanity, what happens when we allow hatred to do the same to us?

Partition was, of course, a political event. But Batwara 1947 is interested in the human catastrophe underneath it. What was lost wasn’t merely land. It was trust, neighbourhoods, friendships, shared histories and the ordinary familiarity of people who had lived alongside each other for generations.

And perhaps most importantly, it asks us to consider how easily a handful of people can turn religious identity into a weapon for power. That makes the film’s timing rather striking.

We live in an age where the “us versus them” narrative has become almost impossible to escape. Politics, social media and public discourse routinely reduce complicated human beings into religious or ideological identities. It doesn’t matter which side of the border you are on; the temptation to define people by the group they belong to remains frighteningly universal.

Batwara 1947 doesn’t pretend that hatred can disappear with one speech. Instead, it asks whether we can recognise the humanity of the person standing on the other side before it is too late. There is something particularly moving about this idea towards the climax.

When the film began, I found myself wondering why Partition stories so often remain centred around Punjab. What about Bengal, where the division of the country also ripped through families, homes and communities? For a fleeting moment, I even thought about The Bengal Files and the way the conversation around Partition can itself become another exercise in choosing sides.

But by the time Batwara 1947 reached its emotional climax, the thought had disappeared. I could hear muffled cries around me in the theatre. Nobody was discussing which religion had suffered more. Nobody was arguing about which community was responsible. For those few moments, everyone was simply responding to the grief on screen.

And perhaps that is the film’s biggest achievement. It reminds us that some emotions don’t belong to a religion. Grief doesn’t. Fear doesn’t. Loneliness doesn’t. The desire to return home doesn’t. And neither does the need to be treated like a human being.

The casting reinforces that idea in an interesting way. Shabana Azmi, a Muslim actor, plays Durga Mai, a Hindu woman, while Sunny Deol and Preity Zinta portray Muslim characters. In a film so explicitly concerned with the dangers of religious identity becoming an all-consuming label, the casting feels like a deliberate and welcome choice. The characters are allowed to exist beyond the religions they practise.

Azmi, unsurprisingly, is the heart of the film. As Durga Mai, she doesn’t need elaborate speeches to command the screen. There is an extraordinary dignity to her performance, even when the character is frightened, vulnerable or defiant. Azmi understands how to make silence emotional, and she becomes the person through whom the film’s larger argument acquires a human face.

Sunny Deol shoulders much of the film with the familiar screen presence that has made him so recognisable over the years. But this isn’t the Sunny Deol of Gadar or Border, and audiences expecting an endless stream of roaring dialogues and larger-than-life action sequences may be surprised. There is still action, there are still moments designed for whistles and applause, but they are balanced by a quieter emotional journey.

As Mirza, Deol is essentially playing a man forced to confront the consequences of hatred around him while trying to keep his own family together. The performance works best when he is restrained, particularly as Mirza’s understanding of what has happened around him begins to change.

It is also genuinely lovely to see Preity Zinta back on screen after such a long gap. She brings warmth and familiarity to Nargis, although the character isn’t given quite enough to do in comparison with the more central figures.

Karan Deol, unfortunately, struggles with the weight placed on Javed. The character undergoes an enormous emotional transformation, and much of the film’s internal conflict rests on his shoulders. There are moments where Deol gets close to conveying that rage and trauma, but the performance doesn’t always possess the emotional range the role demands. There is still plenty of room for growth.

Ali Fazal, despite having comparatively limited screen time, is wonderful as Habib. There is an innate gentleness to his performance, and he becomes an important counterpoint to the anger surrounding him. His character has also lost much because of the “us versus them” mentality, but instead of allowing that loss to consume him, he tries to hold on to his humanity.

Abhimanyu Singh plays Pahalwan, the film’s antagonist, and makes a committed attempt at the Punjabi-Urdu accent. It occasionally becomes distracting, but there are moments when he gets the texture of the character right.

If Batwara 1947 has a weakness, it is that the film sometimes struggles to match the strength of its central idea. The first half could have been considerably crisper. The editing occasionally makes the narrative feel more stretched than it needs to be, and some of the character transitions, particularly Mirza’s changing perspective, could have been developed more organically. There are moments when the screenplay tells us that a character has changed before it has quite earned that change emotionally.

The second half, however, picks up considerably. There is more drama, more action and, yes, more of the Sunny Deol-style dialogue that had people in the theatre clapping and whistling. But by then, the film has already established what it really wants to say, so these moments feel less like distractions and more like familiar cinematic punctuation.

I also suspect Batwara 1947 may invite controversy. There will probably be people who question why a Muslim character is shown lighting a diya for Ram, or find fault with the film for crossing certain religious boundaries. But that would also mean missing the central point of the story. The film isn’t asking its characters to abandon their faith. It is asking them to stop treating faith as a reason to deny someone else their humanity.

Batwara 1947 is far from perfect. The writing can be uneven, the first half could have been tighter, and some of its emotional turns feel too convenient. But its heart is unmistakably in the right place. And perhaps that is why, despite all its flaws, I found myself thinking about the film after leaving the theatre.

Sunny Deol has spent decades fighting villains who could be defeated with a punch. Here, the enemy is much harder to defeat. It is hatred. It is the instinct to turn people into “us” and “them”. It is the dangerous idea that someone else’s religion makes them less deserving of a home, a friendship, dignity or even life.

Batwara 1947 doesn’t have all the answers. But at a time when division can feel easier than empathy, perhaps asking the right question is a good place to start.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars.