There are not many books or movies or references about barrister C. Sankaran Nair, and hence, when an Akshay Kumar movie was announced where he was playing a Malayali, which later went on to become a part of the Kesari franchise, many were ignorant about this individual. Even though we have all learned about the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and the names of people like General Dyer and Governor Michael O’Dwyer, Sankaran Nair’s legal battle was a less discussed chapter. The movie Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh, directed and co-written by Karan Singh Tyagi, has the advantage of talking about a least-explored character. But other than documenting the existence of a forgotten hero, Kesari Chapter 2 rarely becomes a movie that will stand the test of time. Because all it tries to be is being a generic patriotic fan service.
So, the film is about the aftermath of the genocide that happened in Jallianwala Bagh. C Sankaran Nair, a judge of Madras High Court, who was a part of the Viceroy’s council at that point, was deeply shocked to know what really happened, and he felt guilty for not being able to support his own people. What we see in Kesari Chapter 2 is Sankaran Nair’s fight to deliver justice to the people who lost their loved ones in Jallianwala Bagh.
Like I said in the beginning, the C Sankaran Nair story is something the general public hasn’t really heard. So when the movie was announced, I did some basic research about the individual, and these are what came to my knowledge. Sankaran Nair was a part of the Viceroy’s Council at the time of the Jallianwala Bagh incident, and his decision to resign from that privileged position made the British Empire take the situation seriously. Press censorship was removed, Martial law was lifted, and a commission, the Hunter Commission, was formed to investigate the whole incident. Nair received high praise from Indians for his stand. Later, in 1922, when Nair wrote a book named Gandhi and Anarchy, he had to face a defamation case lodged in a London courtroom by Michael O’Dwyer. Even though he failed to win the case and had to pay the price, he was able to expose the details of the massacre during that trial.
When it comes to Kesari Chapter 2, there are significant changes to these publicly available details. Nair is shown as part of a commission (Hunter Commission possibly) that conducts an inquiry about General Dyer’s actions, and that’s not factually correct. We see that General Dyer is put on trial in a court in India, and the makers are actually using the real-life defamation trial that happened against Nair in London as the trial of General Dyer in this movie. Other than Sankaran Nair, we don’t have many details available in the public domain about these characters played by R Madhavan and Ananya Pandey, and looking at how those characters are written, I believe they are fictional characters created for the sake of making the film a spicy courtroom drama.
I know that some of you may have the argument that every biopic we see out there is factually inaccurate, and a lot of creative liberty is taken for the sake of creating drama. But when you do that for a good reason, it makes sense. For instance, in Bhaagh Milkha Bhaagh, we see the traumatic impact of the film’s title on the hero’s life, and it is used in the movie as a reason for a significant event in Milkha Singh’s story. In this movie, they show that Sankaran Nair’s Knighthood and the Jallianwala Bagh incident happened parallelly, whereas there was a 7-year gap between the two incidents. I mean that much of creative liberty is understandable. But when you are making a movie about a less discussed hero with a movie caption, The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh, creating a fictional trial that never really happened feels like too much creative freedom.
The movie ends with the makers openly stating that The British Empire is yet to say sorry for what they did to those innocent people who died on April 13, 1919. But when you make these extreme factual manipulations for the sake of drama in the story, and you also make the British characters too much of caricatures, it somewhere becomes a disservice to the clever strategy of Sankaran Nair, who exposed the atrocities of the British Empire at the cost of losing a case in hostile territory. From fake rape case investigations to the gallery-pleasing repeated use of the F word, the mediocrity and the excessive simplicity of the writing make it not that difficult to understand who are fictional characters and what are fictional subplots. The color palette of the visuals shuttles between the “Kesari” tone and a bluish tone, and that, along with the costumes and hairstyle, occasionally would remind you of the Harry Potter-like visual aesthetic.
When Akshay Kumar is introduced as Sankaran Nair, we hear the voiceover say that born and brought up in Kerala, Sankaran was good in both Kathakali and Kalaripayattu. I don’t know why Bollywood is so obsessed with showing houseboats and Kathakali as the only way to show someone is Malayali. Akshay Kumar, with his prowess in Hindi, transforms into a sharp lawyer, similar to something he did in Jolly LLB 2. He really gets the dramatic pitch the movie was aiming for and gives the movie and its target audience that theatrical hero energy while performing the rhetorics of Sankaran Nair. It was kind of funny that, as a Malayali, I had to depend on the subtitle when he spoke in Malayalam, “Mathi Namukk Veettil Pokam.”
R Madhavan, in that slightly eccentric tone with that salt and pepper look, looked really dashing on screen. Unfortunately, the writing of the character was not that great. There is a bit in the movie where we see him in that clean-shaven look, and somewhere, I felt if Maddy was ready to shed some weight, he would have been a more believable Sankaran Nair. Ananya Pandey plays the role of a Punjabi lawyer named Dilreet Gill. Her performance felt like she was restricting herself from delivering that typical South Bombay accent. Jaat, Rocket Boys, and now with this, Regina Cassandra is slowly becoming Bollywood’s go-to choice for a South Indian wife. The British actors and their British acting are deliberately hammy. With close-ups of his mouth, shown before his evil laugh, Simon Paisley Day’s General Reginald Dyer felt more like a funny Shikhari Shambhu rather than an intimidating military figure.
The major purpose of this movie is to acknowledge the underappreciated sacrifice and tactics of Sankaran Nair in exposing the brutality of the British Empire. Even though the script is a diluted, overtly patriotic courtroom drama with unsurprising beats, it does manage to shed light on the lives of people like Sankaran Nair. Kesari Chapter 2 has nothing charming about its filmmaking, but it knows how to add flavors to make it appealing to an impatient audience pool.
Even though the script is a diluted, overtly patriotic courtroom drama with unsurprising beats, it does manage to shed light on the lives of people like Sankaran Nair.
Green: Recommended Content
Orange: The In-Between Ones
Red: Not Recommended
