Honour role

What does it take to tell a war story with a sense of truth? From the start, Raghavan says, he was determined that his film would follow the facts. What did soldiers really feel? What thoughts went through their minds? What did it take to override the basic human imperative to survive, in order to keep fighting? The result is Ikkis, which tells the true story of a 21-year-old who secured the victory he wanted, and paid for it with his life. It is a war film that isn't centred on a villain, doesn't seek to promote hate. That puts India, and its heroes, first

- Karishma Upadhyay

ver and over, during the making of the war film Ikkis, Sriram Raghavan found himself wondering: “What have I got myself into?”

He had never shot a battle scene before; the ones in his film had to be set during a real war that occurred over half a century ago. The tanks he needed, the ones used by India and Pakistan in the war of 1971, had long been decommissioned and lay unmoving in museums or war memorials. He and his team had to create scale models from scratch.

What played on his mind, more than any of this, was the fact that he was telling the true story of a man who gave his life for his country at the age of 21. This was a film the young man’s father, a retired brigadier, would most certainly watch; and one that Raghavan planned to screen first for members of the Indian Army.

In his two decades as a filmmaker, says the 62-year-old, he had never felt such pressure.

Raghavan is best-known for writing and directing stylish thrillers and whodunits that delve into the darkness of the human psyche. A prime example is Andhadhun (2018), about a murder, a conniving cast of possible suspects and a man who has quietly convinced everyone he cannot see.

Here, he wanted to tell a story about war, but offer hope; build a mainstream Bollywood narrative around a tragic true tale; champion an Indian hero, but humanise everyone dragged into the horrors of battle. More than anything, he wanted to follow the facts, to tell a story that represented what people from battlefields past and present were telling him they experienced and felt.

This sense of authenticity over machismo and fact over propaganda sets Ikkis apart. As Wknd columnist Deepanjana Pal put it last week, it chooses silence over noise and beauty over violence; it dares to be a war movie that dreams of peace.