Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story Of Jallianwala Bagh

Debutant Karan Singh Tyagi’s Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story Of Jallianwala Bagh, based on the book The Case That Shook The Empire by Raghu and Pushpa Palat, explores an Indian lawyer’s challenge to the British Empire’s cover-up of the horrific Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919. While the raw material had immense potential, the outcome collapses into an overwrought exchange of patriotic rhetoric and little else.

Justice Sankaran Nair (Akshay Kumar) is a lawyer whose legal brilliance has, more often than not, served the interests of the British Crown. His loyalty to the Empire earns him a knighthood. So, when the colonial government seeks an Indian member to legitimise its inquiry into the Jallianwala Bagh slaughter, Nair is the natural choice. As a part of the defence, Nair endorses a report exonerating the architect of the carnage, General Reginald Dyer (Simon Paisley Day). But a tragic turning point and a stinging moral challenge from a spirited young lawyer, Dilreet Gill (Ananya Panday), compel him to act. A courtroom showdown follows, in which Sankaran mounts a case against Dyer himself. To counter him, Tirath Singh (Amit Sial), adviser to the Governor of Punjab, brings in an Anglo-Indian lawyer, Neville McKinley (R Madhavan)…

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre has found its way into cinema before, most notably in Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham (2021), where the horror becomes a haunting indictment of colonial brutality. In contrast, Kesari Chapter 2, the very sequence that ought to serve as the film’s moral and emotional core feels curiously inert. The imagery of bodies piled in morgues, corpses discarded in drains, is presented without any narrative weight or psychological urgency. For a film that seeks to build its entire structure around the repercussions of this atrocity, this failure of affect is not merely a misstep; it is a foundational flaw.

While the screenplay by Tyagi and Amritpal Singh Bindra takes significant ‘creative liberties’, more troubling is its pervasive disengagement from history, character, and plot alike. Sankaran is endowed with an implausible Sherlockian flair, wandering freely into hostels and offices to gather evidence with little resistance. His protégé, Dilreet, appears to inherit this uncanny investigative power, producing classified documents like bank records and military logs with mechanical ease. These moments, meant as turning points, arrive much too easily and lack tension, reducing the story to a series of perfunctory checkpoints rather than a gripping pursuit of truth. By the time the film reaches its sobering truth with the end title card that says the British government has never apologised for the butchery, the moment lands with diminished force, its historical weight blunted by weak storytelling.

Kesari 2 builds its case on promising ideas of justice, of reckoning, of moral ambiguity, but never quite commits to the emotional and psychological depth required to make them resonate. In a character-driven drama such as this, the viewer’s investment hinges on the interior lives of its protagonists. Nair, whose arc from imperial loyalist to a dissenter ought to have been catalysed by searing moral conflict, undergoes his transformation with little more than superficial narrative convenience. Similarly, the character of Neville McKinley, once a friend and now  Nair’s legal adversary, is introduced with the promise of intellectual rivalry, but his courtroom presence is all posture and flourish, nothing more. What should have been a tense and illuminating clash of ideals is reduced to a theatrical shouting match that flattens the entire historical complexity of colonial justice.

The women are either dutiful supporters or used as handy narrative tools, bereft of the complexity or agency given to their male counterparts. Dilreet, who has filed a case against Dyer, suddenly announces at a pre-trial hearing that she has a co-counsel, and unsurprisingly, it turns out to be Sankaran. Instead of developing as an independent character, Dilreet immediately becomes the sidekick, while Sankaran resumes the heavy lifting of the courtroom drama. Parvathy (Regina Cassandra), Sankaran’s wife, is confined to the role of the weeping spouse, where her emotional labour is reduced to a series of reaction shots. Even the introduction of a British woman, coerced by colonial authorities to falsely implicate a revolutionary, feels like another underdeveloped twist in the film.

Akshay Kumar brings an undeniable commitment to the role of Sankaran. But his efforts are ultimately constrained by a script that fails to give him the depth or nuance the part demands. R Madhavan, too, is limited by a character more defined by oratory eloquence than internal conflict. Ananya Panday’s Dilreet, introduced with promise, is soon relegated to a peripheral presence with her arc truncated just as it begins to take shape. Simon Paisley Day’s portrayal of General Dyer lacks the chilling menace the role requires and slips into caricature territory, while Amit Sial’s character Tirath Singh comes out as a cardboard cutout of bureaucratic villainy. Regina Cassandra as Parvathy is reduced to a presence functioning more as punctuation than participation. However, in a film crowded with seasoned actors struggling to bring gravitas to their roles, young Krish Rao leaves a lasting impression as Pargat Singh, a teenager who has lost his family in the massacre. His performance carries a raw emotional clarity that the rest of the film too often lacks.

Debojeet Ray’s cinematography and Rita Ghosh’s production design lend the film a convincing period texture, with a keen eye for detail. Nitin Baid’s editing compresses too many narrative turns into a tight 135-minute runtime, often at the expense of emotional continuity and dramatic build-up. Anish John’s sound design seldom shapes atmosphere or tension in meaningful ways. The background score by Shashwat Sachdev strives for grandeur but feels overbearing, while the songs by Kavita Seth and Kanishk Seth are largely forgettable, with the item number Khumaari, featuring Masaba Gupta, feeling jarringly out of place.

It is a rare opportunity for a first-time director to be handed a canvas so rich in historical resonance and narrative potential. And yet, it is precisely this scale that overwhelms Tyagi whose directorial debut tries hard to shout, but never quite finds its voice.

Hindi, Drama, Color