Where a Monumental Silence Became a Story
An audible intake of breath across the country’s film industry was noted when the idea of Kesari Chapter 2: The Untold Story of Jallianwala Bagh was born. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre is not just a history that is printed on a page: It is a deeply rooted sorrow inherited in the heart and one that needs to be revisited in the national memory. It is a memory that needs to be told on film and woven into the cinematic fabric that told tales of battles of valor and patriotism. It is a responsibility that hums under every camera light and costume seam, and needs to be addressed.
What the film is trying to do and, for the most part, accomplishing, is not to glorify the catastrophe. It is to transform the human echoes of the small rituals that were altered, interrupted, the mothers that were hushed, the marketplaces that were silenced. The cast and crew did not approach this as a period set to dress up for, as one might do for a celebration. They did so as a private pilgrimage.
The performers who embodied the past
The principal actors have experience from undertaking similar historical projects. The lead role of the protagonist, a village schoolteacher and reluctant martyr, was taken by an actor who is esteemed for his on-screen understated yet thoughtful portrayals. Off-screen, he has a lifetime of small compromises and careful choices: years of theatre, a career that moved slowly from television to film, and a public image that is more reserved and less glamorous. Those years of playing ordinary men taught him to capture the teacher’s long silences not as empty, awkward pauses, but as deep, crater-like wells of thoughtful contemplation.
The performer opposite him is the actress who plays the grieving widow and has different kinds of lived gravity. Her formative years were spent in an environment that taught her to listen more than speak; she has remarked in interviews that some roles come to her rather than the other way around. That sensibility is seen in her performance which is built not on words, but on the tightening of the mouth, the hand that futilely searches for a lost child’s toy, and the slow acceptance of a fate that is personal and political.
Artisans, shopkeepers, and young revolutionaries formed part of the supporting case and were drawn from local talent as well as established character actors from and around Punjab. It mattered who and what characters were cast. The extras are not anonymous. They are the faces of the people whose land the film is telling a story about. The actors in the film were not readers of the script. They were as much a part of the memory of the place as the people. The performances communicated the memory of the place in a manner that the speech of the people in the marketplace did not.
The director’s faith in restraint
A deliberate modesty characterized the director’s approach to the topic. It was the close, stifling frames that captured suffocating sequences of violence. Instead of a panoramic view of a violent landscape, a room that is a made a prison to a child that is a left to stand in a violent landscape, of a door closed to a crowd. It is a prison made to hold a door that divides a child from a forgotten soul of the young revolution. He carried a torn shawl and held in his hand the pregnant shame of a parted body. Each piece of costumed clothing and historically accurate material carried certain value and weighted a truth above the lip of the actors. The precise and fine details of the objects cast their shadow upon the actors’ bodies. The director was more concerned with the idea and spirit of the objects.
At a technical level, the writing moved away from the ‘typical’ glossy nationalism and cinematically evoked a family album — the washed sepia tones, the overexposed sunny-day portraits, the sudden, brutal contrasts when the guns open fire. And the sound design matches this intent: the clip-clop of hooves, a distant hymn, and the particular shattering of glass. Music is also scarce, remaining as the solitary tabla, or the throat-son of a lone mournful voice. All choices that reserve space for the audience’s memory to complete the frame.
It was this that the set also taught its cast — and vice-versa
The younger actors were taken to the archives and oral history centres, spending the afternoons with survivors’ descendants, listening instead of rehearsing. One anecdote that circulated quietly among the crew was about a morning when the entourage visited an old family house where, decades earlier, someone had actually hidden family documents from sight. The rawness of that moment — the slow retrieval and folding open of brittle pages — was taken back to the set and refracted into a sequence where the teacher discovers a note that changes everything. The props were not just props; they were fragments of living history.
The production also sought to address community sensitivities. For a scene depicting civic response and British military presence, production staff met with local elders for a long time. It was not merely a matter of permission, but a matter of stewardship. The filmmakers listened to the community’s sense of ownership and propriety about which songs to use, which words to omit, and ways to represent rituals without performing them in an exploitative manner.
The conversations the trailers started
The trailer was released on a humid summer afternoon and immediately sparked conversations between two types of viewers. One type of viewer wanted the film to be a straightforward retelling, a way of passing on hard facts to a generation raised on streaming and listicles, while the other wanted the film to focus on the human detail and moral ambiguity. The film must show how ordinary people became complicit, how silence can be a form of survival, and how it can be a betrayal.
The marketing strategy’s strength was its focus on individuals instead of large-scale events. Rather than using telescopic shots of troops or long narrations about dates, the teaser focused on a single hand releasing a kite, children playing under a fig tree, and a woman folding a shawl. The teaser was intended to remind people of the film privately, and, in a way, social media excitement was about that, not the previewed action. It also, in part, explained the absence of a spectacle. It was about conversation instead: schools requesting screenings, historians commenting on accuracy, and artists grappling with the ethics of grief dramatization. The conversions of the buzz seemed unexpected, but the marketing team seemed to have anticipated them.
The marketing strategy’s strength was its focus on individuals instead of large-scale events. Rather than using telescopic shots of troops or long narrations about dates, the teaser focused on a single hand releasing a kite, children playing under a fig tree, and a woman folding a shawl. The teaser was intended to remind people of the film privately. In a way, social media excitement was about that, not the previewed action. It also, in part, explained the absence of a spectacle. It was about conversation instead: schools requesting screenings, historians commenting on accuracy, and artists grappling with the ethics of grief dramatization. The conversions of the buzz seemed unexpected, but the marketing team seemed to have anticipated them.
Editorial disagreements also involved creativity. Should we show the aftermath in a documentary style or allow a poetic ellipsis? The final cut reflected restrained judgment: just enough visibility to present the truth and sufficient omission to avoid voyeurism. This choice frustrated some early viewers who expected a more polemical film and satisfied others who found the approach dignified.
The critics faltered on what the audience took away. During the premieres and early screenings, the audience discussed the film’s political registers and, more importantly, the small, everyday acts in the film: the way a community folds cloth to cover the deceased, the silence of a tide-like prayer, and the bread- breaking ritual of communion at dawn. The film served as a human mirror more than a historical lecture.
Families who watched the film together reported conversations that continued long after the closing credits. Elders corrected young relatives, grandchildren asked questions about the festivals, and small reparations in memory were passed in a living room like an heirloom. Perhaps that is the film’s most important achievement: to transform public history into private conversation.
Some movies try to give lessons, while Kesari Chapter 2 chooses to give an invitation to remember. It does not rely on spectacle, but thoughtfully attends to the history, keeping it from becoming merely an archive, and turning it into something vibrant, tangible, debatable, and something to mourn. Most importantly, the film does not indulge the soft comforts of heroism, instead, it poses a difficult question: what does one make of the burden of silence that our parents carried? There is no one answer, but the film suggests, it comes one recollected detail at a time.