Movie Review | The Death of a Soul: Sardar Udham by Shoojit Sircar

What happens when you allow one of the country’s best directors to finally make what has been a dream project? You get a visual portrait so riddled with intricacy and intimacy that you can, from the very first look, tell that the artist’s passion for their art was at its creative peak. Such is the story with Sardar Udham, a film that is Sircar at his best. Unforgettable are those thirty harrowing minutes, which unfold like a haunting nightmare you cannot get up from but have to endure. Perhaps because this nightmare was very much real for so many people. A shock that sent tremors down the angered veins of every Indian in 1919. The aftermath of the massacre left an impact so deep in the memory of Sardar Udham Singh that he vowed to take down the man behind the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, Michael O’Dwyer.

Every frame is melancholic in this blue galore of a visual masterpiece, where the frames by Avik Mukhopadhyay are as telling to the narrative as Shantanu Moitra’s music serves to be. The film’s themes manage to serve relevance even in the current political climate, and that is what makes any great film stand the test of time. The non-linear form of storytelling by Sircar is a bolstering choice that elevates this film. The structure takes you across various years and never yields to confusion but rather allows for the exploration of a man’s journey behind why he remains an immortal figure in the fight for India’s freedom.

“Tell people I was a revolutionary,” he says. And when he says it, you feel the hair on your body standing up. The impact that Vicky Kaushal has in the titular role in this film is nothing short of the true embodiment and determination towards serving a character. He is Udham Singh, and every movement tells that. One thing you may notice while watching this film is the authenticity to everything. It truly feels like the epic that Sircar dreamt for the film to be in all of its rights and is a reminder of the journey that makes you a revolutionary. The typewriters click-clack as the telegrams send across messages, and amidst the many aliases, we see the travels of Udham Singh over the years. Unbearable is the pain of every loss that you experience, and even in his final act of killing, there is such emotional depth towards the feeling of it all. Sircar never mish-mashes the dramatism that you find in several films that are based on the lives of freedom fighters, which makes the notion of Patriotism an overtly expressive act. Rather, he allows for the painful need for the love of one’s nation to seep in through the mist of horror. A horror we witness towards the end, and are not allowed to take our eyes off of.

You see, Sardar Udham is not just a patriotic film that celebrates the life of a freedom fighter but rather, a challenge that Sircar invites. It is the journey of a man whose soul died along with thousands of helpless people, a man whose contribution to our history remains forgotten in the history books at school. It took him twenty-one years to seek the man who took it all away, and it was only seven years after this that India saw freedom. Sircar’s film asks you to witness a journey, as Sardar Udham tries to understand himself the desires of his inner freedom. He makes you ask yourself, if Udham Singh could wait for twenty-one years before using the bullet on Lieutenant Governor O’Dwyer, you can definitely wait for the hundred and sixty-two minutes of the film’s runtime to remember the legacy of a man who will forever be remembered as a revolutionary.