LONG WALK TO FREEDOM

ACTOR PORTRAYS BEGINNING OF END OF COLONIAL RULE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Sardar Udham had a long walk to freedom after helping survivors of the Jallianwala massacre on April 13, 1919.

Director Shoojit Sircar narrative begins a quarter of the way through the film when the person responsible for empowering the military to shoot peaceful protesters is assassinated by Udham in Sardar Udham (2021). Sircar then begins to fill in the backstory as the London detectives struggle to discover the personal story of the assassin they have in their prison.

Sircar uses up much of the rest of the 2hrs 44 minute runtime in this way, intertwining the prison narrative with the backstory until the near end of the narrative when Udham is seen in the light of a freedom fighter.

India was a colony of the British Empire at the time, after the East India Company took control of the economy and made India subservient to British Rule. People were subservient to their British masters in almost every aspect of daily life.

The assassination of the British Colonial Administrator for Punjab, Michael O Dwyer, in London occurred directly as a consequence of the Jallianwala massacre in which British Soldiers fired on unarmed protesters, killing at least 400 people and injuring 1500 in a public square in Amristar, Punjab.

O’ Dwyer represented the unfairness and humiliation caused by the British.

Sircar builds a case for the assassination by showing the audience, through a series of vignettes, that O’Dwyer had no remorse for the massacre, and that O’Dwyer continued to justify the military action up until the day of his assassination.

Vicky Kaushai is cast as Udham working through the dark narratives often filmed at night or within the dark settings of restaurants, hotels and other meeting places that would have been typically under-lit during a time without central utilities in the buildings for heat, light and running water.

Kaushai performs the freedom fighter as often outwardly brooding while operating pursuant to a silent internal monologue about his singular purpose that the audience never hears.

Sircar creates a creeping admiration for the assassin before he is considered a freedom fighter. Kaushai then shows how Udham rescued dozens of wounded among the hundreds lying dead in the Jallianwala square.

Udham clearly felt the pain of the dead and wounded which compelled him on his long march to freedom. In this way, Sircar rationalizes the lifepath of Udham so that Udham is viewed as a righteous revolutionary.

Sircar shows creative camera work with a variety of scenes that are often final portraits of a particular stage in the long walk to freedom. This film art makes the long runtime more compelling.

The film is very singular in purpose though, with almost no character development among the other cast, even though relationships exist with the protagonist, and superficial treatment of any possible subplots, when obviously they existed as the London detectives insist during Udham’s interrogations.

The film is aesthetically pleasing though with well designed pictures of the natural landscapes as well as the city streets and architecture.

The narrative device is essentially a silent internal monologue by the protagonist. However, the film would have had much better pace with a bit more development of the other characters and even brief excursions into sidebars and subplots, none of which really happens on film. This overall vision for the film is good, but the narrative device takes too much away from the other elements of good filmmaking that keep audiences engaged with the material.

A lot of the background remains a mystery to the British police as well as to the audience because Udham refuses to cooperate with interrogators, as Udham wanted only to be known as a revolutionary who had assassinated the personification of empire. Sircar encapsulates this purpose without dramatizing the parts unknown.

Sardar Udham is currently streaming on Amazon Prime.