‘Kesari Chapter 2’ review: This Akshay Kumar film can't handle the truth

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 choir 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 1000 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. 

That’s history, and then there’s Kesari 2. At the film’s centre is Sankaran Nair (Kumar), a respected Malayali lawyer who was part of the Executive Council. Troubled by the events in Punjab, Nair resigned from the council and, in 1922, wrote a book called Gandhi and Anarchy, in which, among other things, he blamed Michael O’Dwyer, then governor of Punjab, for the violence at Jallianwala Bagh. O’Dwyer filed a defamation suit, which was contested in England (Nair didn't defend himself, engaging a lawyer instead). This is detailed in a 2019 nonfiction book, The Case That Shook the Empire, by Raghu Palat and Pushpa Palat, which Karan Singh Tyagi’s film takes as its source. Yet, it tells a very different story.

In Kesari 2, the British government and Dyer (not O’Dwyer) are taken to court—in India—by Nair and fledgling lawyer Dilreet (Ananya Panday). The trial takes place in the immediate aftermath of the massacre. The presiding judge is one McCardie (Steven Hartley). Appearing for the Crown is Neville McKinley (R. Madhavan), a wily lawyer who resents Nair. Witnesses are called, including a belligerent Dyer. 

The thing is, this trial never took place. What Tyagi and co-writer Amritpal Singh Bindra seem to have done instead is combine the Hunter Commission hearings and the O’Dwyer-Nair defamation suit from three years later (Dyer appeared before the former; McCardie was the judge in the latter). For a film that's presented as a counter to falsified and suppressed history, this is disingenuous at best. I’m all for embellishing the past in fictional works. But this is sheer fiction, no more based in fact than the teaming up of Komaran Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju in RRR (2022).

Nair dropping F-bombs in court is a madly incongruous scenario, but it sets up the final act—a disbarment trial, not a defamation one, again in India instead of England. As with Dharma’s other recent historical, Ae Watan Mere Watan (2024), this is a case of Hindi filmmakers being unable to recognise surefire material when they see it, and burying it under piles of nonsense. Nair’s actual journey is fascinating, criticising Gandhi, returning his decorations by the British, fighting a very public case on their soil. But Kesari 2 is interested in Nair only to the extent that he provides a broad outline for Kumar to shout and weep and proclaim his love for India. 

After several impossibly stagey courtroom scenes, Dyer is cross-examined by Nair. He goads the general, suggesting his racism is in part inherited from his father, and partly because he was teased by Indian schoolmates. It’s so clear where the scene is headed that I half-expected Dyer to yell “You can’t handle the truth.” All this rewriting of history, simply so you can do your own A Few Good Men.

Dialogue writer Sumit Saxena gets in a nice line or two; Nair saying “Now even my questions seem like complaints to you”, and McKinley’s suggestion that everyone’s breaking some law or the other, you just have to figure which one, have the ring of today's India. There’s one witty performance, by Amit Sial, who plays conniving government official Tirat Singh with dry matter-of-factness. Panday is quiet for the most part, leaving the yelling and grimacing to Kumar, Madhavan and the Brits, whose Hindi will make you long for the dulcet tones of Captain Russell. 

The film makes the same allegation as the recent series The Waking of a Nation—that Jallianwala Bagh was a premeditated massacre. An investigation of this, and the real facts of Nair’s life, would’ve been enough for a fine, sobering film. Instead, we get a misleading wishful fantasy. “The event speaks to the present times that we live in,” Tyagi told Mid-Day. “It’s a post-truth world where fake news is rampant.” But Kesari 2 is also post-truth. 

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