Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham is a biopic of a man of history and mystery, a pre-Independence revolutionary who is remembered for a single...
Shoojit Sircar’s Sardar Udham is a biopic of a man of history and mystery, a pre-Independence revolutionary who is remembered for a single act but whose life had many moving parts.
On March 13, 1940, Udham Singh avenged the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar by assassinating Punjab’s former Lieutenant Governor Michael O’Dwyer in London. While Reginald Dyer was the one who gave the orders to mow down unarmed protestors in the walled garden on April 13, 1919, O’Dwyer “gave his tacit encouragement, and explicit approval, for the violent suppression of the unrest in Punjab”, writes historian Kim A Wagner in Jallianwala Bagh.
Wagner quotes O’Dwyer’s views on the tragedy, which claimed hundreds of lives: “The Amritsar business cleared the air, and if there was to be a holocaust anywhere, and one regrets that there should be, it was best at Amritsar.”
Udham Singh waited for over two decades for revenge. The movie about Udham’s slow-burning exploit plays out mostly as a one-hander. Sircar’s Udham, played by Vicky Kaushal, emerges as a magnificently obsessed individual, driven by the desire for freedom from colonisation and closure on Jallianwala Bagh.
Sardar Udham follows a handful of biopics about a historical figure whose colourful life readily lends itself to fictionalisation. Writer Anu Kumar points out in a profile...Read more
