The Past Superimposed upon the Present: Shoojit Sircar’s SARDAR UDHAM
It’s impossible to watch the biopic Sardar Udham without identifying how the past still haunts India’s present, how old imperialism continues in the form of the new state.
One of the rare qualities of Sardar Udham—Shoojit Sircar’s 2021 biopic about the Indian freedom fighter Udham Singh—is that the fictionalisation of the subject hardly needed any outlandish fiction. The real Udham Singh really lived a life filled with the highest stakes of heartbreak, drama, tragedy, and destiny. He really was witness to the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar, really flew the revolutionary flags alongside Bhagat Singh, really served jail time, and really assassinated Michael O’Dwyer—the former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab—in London’s Caxton Hall.
The real Udham Singh, like the one portrayed in the film, was a man of many aliases—a slippery solution to avoid detection—going by Sher Singh, Ude Singh, Frank Brazil, and more. Most striking of all was the name ‘Ram Mohamed Singh Azad’, which he claimed for himself during interrogation by the British authorities after O’Dwyer’s assassination. This pseudonym was but a simple vision of India’s religious unity between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, with ‘Azad’—an Urdu/Hindustani word—added in the end as a call for freedom.
The revelation of this adopted alias is one of the most striking moments in Sircar’s film. Played with sublime understatement by Vicky Kaushal, Singh rolls up his sleeve to reveal the tattoo bearing the four words. In 1940, the English are first perplexed, and later, concerned: Ram Mohamed Singh Azad evoked a strength in India’s diversity, and symbolised the secular idea of India that would become one of our foundational identities of our freedom.
A criminal convicted of murder and sentenced to death, and a revolutionary who is celebrated as a shaheed (martyr), Udham Singh’s story serves as the perfect example of how perspective shapes narrative. While Sircar’s film remains firmly rooted in the politics and struggles of its time, any discerning viewer will make the connection to its themes with contemporary India.
At the heart of Singh’s story is the one, tragic Baisakhi day in Amritsar. In April 1919, local Indian National Congress leaders were arrested by the British government under the Rowlatt Act, and protestors against these arrests were fired at by British troops. Three days later—April 13—over twenty thousand people assembled at the city’s Jallianwala Bagh for a peaceful protest of these arrests. Under the command of Colonel Reginald Dyer, British troops shot and killed hundreds (estimates vary between 379 to 1500) and injured hundreds more. To prevent further protests and riots in retaliation, the government declared Section 144 of the Penal Code, disallowing any ‘unlawful’ assembly of individuals in the city. The massacre and the citywide shutdowns were approved and defended by O’Dwyer, Punjab’s Lieutenant Governor at the time.
102 years later, India has new colonels, new governors, new democratically-elected figures of authority, would continue to be equally fearful of its own citizenry. For over a century, this ‘Bagh’—park—stood as a sombre memorial to the dead. In late August 2021, prime minister Narendra Modi—riding a wave of venomous majoritarianism in the nation to win his re-election—unveiled a number of controversial ‘renovations’ to the park. “The redesign,” wrote Shreya Pillai for Deccan Herald, “has been called a ‘Disney-fied’ version of reality; that is, a happy place, complete with a sound-and-light show, desensitised to the terrible event that it memorialises.” A number of opposition groups, including leftist organisations and farmer’s groups protested the renovations. In return, history repeated itself: the Deputy Commissioner Police of Amritsar announced Section 144 in the city, ordering a ban on the assembly of five or more persons at one place for protest, rallies, meetings or raising slogans.
Over a century after the bloodbath, this was the first time that Section 144 was imposed in and around the Bagh. It was only one of the many recent instances of the colonial-era legislation being applied to suppress dissent in India against the current government—much like how Section 144 was used by the British to keep the Indian citizenry in check a century ago. Since Modi’s 2019 re-election, curbs and curfews of this type have been employed following the nationwide CAA/NRC protests, the Ayodhya verdict, the Aarey forests controversy, the riots in Tripura, and the constant state of shutdown faced by the citizens in Kashmir—a supposedly-free region where freedom is rarer than curfew.
Now, even 81 years after Udham Singh’s execution, it is impossible to watch a biopic about him without superimposing the past over the present, without imagining how the departure of old imperialists only substituted new, locally-brewed ones, without identifying a direct thread connecting the atrocities levied upon the powerless in the early 20th century to those suffered in the early 21st, without sharing Bhagat Singh’s thoughtful deliberations on the contrast between terrorists and freedom fighters—and who gets to stamp these labels upon whom.
Sircar’s Sardar Udham was released on Amazon Prime Video in mid-October to critical acclaim—and much of this acclaim is thoroughly deserved. With high production value, exceptional acting, and mesmerising sets decorating this period drama, the film felt ambitious and distinct, even in the over-populated chain of patriotic recent releases being made to quench our audience’s thirst for national pride. Most ambitious of all was the film’s nonlinear narrative, jumping back and forth through time in Udham Singh’s life, and of the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh itself. Sardar Udham was shortlisted among with 14 other films for the Indian submissions for Best Foreign Film category at the 94th Academy Awards, but was (somewhat controversially) not selected.
In his vision of Udham Singh, Sircar crafts a patriotic character without the modern cliches of toxic nationalism—an ironic supposition, of course, as the character in question literally conducts a political assassination in the name of national pride and revenge. The film could’ve easily fed into the modern appetite of nationalist fantasies—including Kaushal’s very last project Uri: The Surgical Strike which won a number of accolades and awards and also offered rallying cries of rah-rah jingoism in support of the state. In Sircar’s Udham Singh, however, Kaushal’s character is filled not with a xenophobic venom towards other races, but rather, with a more specific hatred towards the imperialists that led to this extremity. Kaushal quotes real statements by Udham Singh, made during his trial in 1940, where he clarified: “Your conduct, your conduct – I am talking about the British government. I have nothing against the English people at all. I have more English friends living in England than I have in India. I have great sympathy with the workers of England. I am against the Imperialist Government.”
During the seven years or so he spends in Europe, Singh makes inroads and connections with all parties that stand against British Imperialism, including the British communists, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and the Russians. The film doesn’t caricaturise the English as uniform faces of pure evil, and instead, displays varying shades of grey even in story’s ‘other’. This even includes the chief villain—O’Dwyer—who, in his ghastly lack of humanity, is portrayed in his full three dimensions by actor Shaun Scott, as someone who wrestles with the weight of his decisions in India, and ultimately, convinces himself of his own righteousness.
Much like the British authorities that interrogate Udham Singh in the film, the mighty rulers of new India are disturbed by an India of religious unity, of an individual being a Ram, a Mohamed, a Singh, and being azad—free to choose.
As for Singh, even as his roots stemmed from the pain of a Jallianwala Bagh and Hindustani Socialist Republic Association’s (HSRA) fight for the farmers and labour class in India, he carries with him the mission of a larger, united India, its tenets symbolically tattooed on his arm. Another standout moment from the film is of a younger Singh serving alongside Bhagat Singh at the HSRA. Bhagat (played by Amol Parashar) gives a rousing speech to a close circle of his fellow party-members, insisting on why their symbolic, political actions made them not terrorists but revolutionaries: A ‘revolutionary’, Bhagat says, conducts a symbolic act to register their protest.
“Woh terror se kise to darana aur dhamkana nahi chahate. Ulta, apne symbolic act se, woh logon koh inspire karte hain, apna haq maange ke liye. Haq. Revolutionary ki sirf ek hi larayi hai, or woh hai freedom ki larayi. Aur sabke freedom ki larayi.”
They don’t use terror to scare or intimidate anyone. Instead, with their symbolic act, they inspire people to ask for their haq (rights). A revolutionary only has one fight, and that is the fight for freedom. Freedom for all.
With time and global circumstances, words like terrorism and revolutionary have only gained in currency over the past few decades. Bhagat Singh himself was labelled as the former by the rulers—and the latter by the people he has inspired, so much so that, contemporary Indian politicians continue to hail him as one of the nation’s greatest heroes.
Bhagat Singh’s friend/protégé Udham Singh gained similar adoration at home, too: a museum dedicated to him is located in Amritsar, the name of his ancestral hometown has been changed from Sunam to Sunam Udham Singh Wala, a district in Uttarakhand has been named after him, and a statue of his was unveiled at the main entrance of Jallianwala Bagh in March 2018 by then-Home Minister Rajnath Singh. Sircar’s film is the latest in line of a handful of on-screen adaptations of Udham Singh’s life, including 2000s Shaheed Uddham Singh, which starred Raj Babbar in the titular role.
A criminal convicted of murder and sentenced to death, and a revolutionary who is celebrated as a shaheed (martyr), Udham Singh’s story serves as the perfect example of how perspective shapes narrative. While Sircar’s film remains firmly rooted in the politics and struggles of its time, any discerning viewer will make the connection to its themes with contemporary India, with the individuals that the state now brands as terrorists, and the individuals who fight for the the type of symbolic revolution—for haq and freedom—like Bhagat Singh and Udham Singh once did. Heroes and villains are branded by the victors of history; today’s Indian state villainises all those who oppose it—protesting farmers, communists, separatists—and yet, from a different perspective, these opposing voices are to our republic what Udham Singh was to the British Raj.
Indian nostalgia for past the past goes even further back to heroes and antiheroes whose stories are exaggerated, extrapolated, or in some cases, imagined; characters from reality and mythology hover in caricatured form over the everyday discourse in the 21st century, from Ram and Raavan to Shivaji and Akbar and Aurangzeb. In the more-recent past, figures crucial to the narrative of the country’s ideals as an independent nation—Nehru, Ambedkar, Gandhi, Savarkar, Godse—continue to cast an oversized shadow over India’s socio-political challenges. It’s as if the past is still handling the puppet strings above us, dictating how we act in the present.
The interpretations of what these figures stood for continue to define what many Indians fight for—and against—today. Often, the same individual can teach two different things to different sets of people with already preconceived notions. Godse—Gandhi’s assassin—was Independent India’s first terrorist, but is now branded as a hero by some in the far-right, who envision an Indian nation free of Gandhi’s ideas of peaceful secularism.
Despite its overall ambition and polish, Sardar Udham has its obvious flaws. Chief among them is the unchanging, sombre tone of the film, with hardly any peaks or troughs or moments of levity. Kaushal, in the titular role, has been handed a script without personality. Singh’s biopic is painted with little colour beyond his thirst for revenge, with a lack of imagination in rounding off the character (except for his love for laddoos; a fleeting moment that makes the audience chuckle). Singh is shown as purely driven by his ideology, lacking in further humanity, the humanity of imperfections and mistakes; it was as if the writers themselves were wary of risking offense in this fictionalised account.
And then, there’s the film’s length. About a third of the Sardar Udham is spent in the full flashback to Jallianwala Bagh. The scenes of those fateful few days in April 1919 are perhaps the best-ever representation of the tragic event on screen. It is an impressive and visceral passage that closely reimagines how Dyer commanded his officers to open-fire upon a helpless crowd of civilians, the violent ways in which many lost their lives, and the gore of the aftermath where young Singh attempts to carry the remaining survivors to medical care. These scenes are undeniably important and heart-breaking, and help to explain the horror which shaped Singh’s lifetime quest. And yet, this flashback takes the film into a different, lengthy tangent, drastically changing the pacing of the narrative.
Where this tangent does lead us, however, is back to drawing that thread from the past to the contemporary present, tying the knot between the brutality of India’s former rulers to that of its present ones. The U.K. is still to offer a formal apology for the atrocities at Jallianwala Bagh—a lack of empathy that echoes the numerous unrepented crimes that the Indian state has since committed on its own people. Much like the British authorities that interrogate Udham Singh in the film, the mighty rulers of new India are disturbed by an India of religious unity, of an individual being a Ram, a Mohamed, a Singh, and being azad—free to choose.
In Sardar Udham, the tragedy at Jallianwala Bagh isn’t just a memorial of the past; it’s also a warning for our future. And Sircar’s understated interpretation of Udham Singh further convolutes the knots between terrorist and martyr, assassin and national hero. It questions history’s ever-changing narratives, of the differing perspectives that define a man’s legacy—and how that legacy can be politicised even a century later.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. His debut novel is forthcoming on the Aleph Book Company. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
