Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh :
unfurled before me not merely as a film, but as a haunting echo of a past that refuses to be silenced; Akshay Kumar’s portrayal of C. Sankaran Nair is a masterstroke of restrained fury and unyielding resolve, his every gesture and gaze a testament to a man who dares to challenge an empire’s arrogance with the quiet, devastating power of truth, while R. Madhavan’s Neville McKinley slithers through the courtroom like a serpent cloaked in civility, his smug grin a mask for the venom of colonial entitlement; the film’s pacing, initially a slow burn that mirrors the painstaking gathering of evidence, crescendos into a courtroom showdown where each exchange crackles with the intensity of a duel, though it occasionally stumbles under the weight of its own ambition, as when it veers into fictionalized flourishes—like a genocide trial in Punjab rather than the historical defamation case in London—that, while dramatically potent, leave a faint aftertaste of narrative overreach; yet, these missteps are eclipsed by the film’s visual poetry, where sepia-toned flashbacks to the massacre sear the soul with their brutal clarity, and the haunting strains of “Teri Mitti” weave a thread of melancholy that binds the viewer to the martyrs’ sacrifice; the cinematography, with its stark contrasts of shadow and light, mirrors the moral chiaroscuro of justice and injustice, while young Pargat Singh’s (Krish Rao) quest for closure becomes a poignant counterpoint to the legal battle, his innocent eyes reflecting the wounds of a nation; director Karan Singh Tyagi’s vision is unflinching, daring to confront the unapologized horrors of colonialism with a rawness that leaves you not just watching, but feeling—feeling the rage, the helplessness, and ultimately, the flicker of hope that justice, though delayed, might one day prevail; as the credits rolled, I sat motionless, the silence around me thick with the unspoken question that the film plants like a seed in your conscience: if history is a courtroom, are we, the inheritors of its verdicts, brave enough to demand a retrial? Kesari Chapter 2 is not a perfect film—it is a necessary one, a cinematic gut-punch that reverberates long after the lights come up, urging us to remember, to question, and to never let the embers of truth die out.
