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A few years back, Karan Johar launched his Dharmatic Entertainment label with a Netflix movie titled Guilty. This film is memorable for two main reasons: first, Kiara Advani delivers an outstanding performance, and second, it’s possibly the only instance where Bollywood has tackled the #MeToo movement directly. Guilty effectively utilized the Rashomon effect and concluded with a rather blunt title card highlighting how Bollywood has ignored the allegations against some of its most notable figures. Fast forward to today, and many of those alleged offenses have been largely forgotten. Numerous accused individuals continue to work without repercussions, while many who spoke out have been quietly ostracized. Interestingly, Johar’s latest co-production, Kesari Chapter 2, inadvertently serves as a poignant critique of how the industry has failed its most vulnerable members.
Post-Credits Scene: Akshay Kumar’s Kesari Chapter 2 seems unaware of the contradiction in advocating for free speech while simultaneously disseminating misinformation.
Directed by newcomer Karan Singh Tyagi, Kesari 2 serves as a particularly troubling instance of post-truth cinema. It doesn’t just embellish; it outright fabricates. It doesn’t merely deviate; it distorts the truth. Promoted as a fact-based drama following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre — with the subtitle ‘The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh’ — Kesari 2 concocts a fictional court case involving the historical figure Sankaran Nair and the British Crown. In this film, the British sympathizer Nair takes legal action against the Crown for genocide after undergoing a personal awakening. However, this event never occurred. In reality, he was the one who faced a lawsuit. Just picture if Aamir Khan attempted to persuade us that a group of Indian villagers actually defeated British soldiers in a cricket match; or if SS Rajamouli pretended that two significant historical figures truly engaged in a dance-off. This is precisely what Kesari 2 does.
In a time when school history books are literally being rewritten, a film like Kesari 2 feels really irresponsible. Everyone involved should take a moment to think: is this really something they’d want to show their kids? What’s puzzling about this whole thing is that they could’ve just stuck to the facts and gotten the same results. Kesari 2 doesn’t portray the British as heroes — even though it spends time trying to humanize the awful General Reginal Dyer — but instead, it opts to slander them with falsehoods when it already had the truth on its side. How odd. It’s like the movie Major making up scenes that show the late Sandeep Unnikrishnan as an even bigger hero than he was. As if his real-life sacrifice wasn’t dramatic enough for a film.
