Ae Watan Mere Watan: How a 22-year-old woman fought the tyranny of British Raj

If Sardar Udham was spare and lyrical, then Ae Watan Mere Watan is the kind of crowded period film that is all too keen to provide context and significance in every scene, underlining every small step as a giant leap towards India’s freedom. If Sircar’s gaze allowed Hindi cinema to reimagine young revolutionaries as solitary, lonely figures weighed down by the losing battle for a country’s independence, then Iyer’s straightforward Ae Watan Mere Watan erases all such blemishes. It’s why Sardar Udham, arguably the best Hindi historical film of the decade, remains an individual story but Ae Watan Mere Watan is reduced to a story of collective strength.

The weakest link

Despite the best intentions of its makers then, Ae Watan Mere Watan ends up as a film that fails the voice at the centre of its narrative — Usha Mehta, the 22-year-old woman who ran Congress Radio, an underground radio station three months during the decisive Quit India Movement when the British banned the Congress Party and threw its top leadership, including Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru behind bars.

Much of it is down to the miscasting of Sara Ali Khan as Usha Mehta. There are simply no two ways about it. Sardar Udham’s genius is interlinked with the sheer magnitude of Vicky Kaushal’s turn. In contrast, Khan sabotages every moment of Ae Watan Mere Watan with her presence. The actress has acted in seven films since debuting with Kedarnath in 2018 and has revealed herself to be a grating performer, consistently prone to mistaking over-acting as acting. In not one of these films has she proved herself to be the kind of performer capable of headlining a dramatic film, much less carrying a period film solely on her shoulders.

And yet, she is cast in film after film, continuing to bag ambitious projects that require her to lose herself in varying characters. And in film after film, Sara Ali Khan struggles to add depth to any of these characters, playing all of them only and only as Sara Ali Khan. She is without doubt, the weakest link in each of these films (a fact that was on full display even in an ensemble film like Murder Mubarak). I don’t want to have to draw a line between the innumerable chances Hindi cinema affords star-kids who barely possess acting acumen and show little improvement, and the dismal state of Hindi cinema, but Khan’s terrible dialogue delivery and stilted acting over seven films leaves me with little choice.

A squandered opportunity

The makers of Ae Watan Mere Watan are equally complicit: The film is backed by Dharmatic Entertainment, the digital arm of Dharma Productions, and releases on Amazon Prime Video, which is to say, there are no box-office records to chase or break here. It’s why I believe that films that land directly on streaming platforms should be held to a higher standard because they have that much room to be creative-minded and ambitious, especially with their casting.

The decision to cast Sara Ali Khan as Usha Mehta, without being able to extract a performance out of her then, is the biggest disservice that the film could do to itself. It’s hard to read the casting decision as something more than a gimmick and it’s about time Hindi filmmakers and producers stop treating cinema as a gimmick. It’s not only disappointing, but downright disingenuous.

The wasted potential of Ae Watan Mere Watan feels all the more glaring because the film has so much potential in the first place. Even within its formulaic plotting, the screenplay — by Kannan Iyer and Daroob Farooqui — infuses small, often overlooked details that rewrite the freedom struggle as an act of Hindu nationalism. Whether it is in a young Muslim revolutionary (a standout Sparsh Srivastav, last seen in Laapataa Ladies) agreeing with the idea of an independent nation but disagreeing with the thought of Partition or the chants of “Jai Bhim” being used as a call for action against the British regime.  

The casting of Emraan Hashmi as Ram Manohar Lohia is also an inspired choice. It’s with his arrival that the film finds some of its spark and levity — the actor’s introductory sequence in the dark is a hoot. It’s really wonderful to see Hashmi command the screen with a singular authority, painting the portrait of a leader whose optimism is tinged with helplessness even when the writing tends to paint him in broad strokes. And then there’s the handsome production design by Amrita Mahal Nakai and Sabrina Singh that does all the heavy-lifting in recreating the tense atmosphere of pre-Independence Bombay.

Mehta: A secondary character in her own story

Which brings me back again to the continuous disservice that the film does to Usha Mehta over the course of its 133-minute runtime. That a fictional period film shouldn’t be inclined to embellish or invent stories is a misguided expectation. I don’t personally think a good period film is necessarily the same as a historically accurate period film (although a bad period film is definitely one that openly rewrites history). Still, the problem with Ae Watan Mere Watan is that it completely loses sight of Usha Mehta in its earnest fervour towards patriotic sloganeering. The selective characterization of Mehta — or rather the part of her life that the film takes an interest in — is telling, given the film omits details about her individuality or an understanding of her mind.

By which I mean, there is a visible disconnect between the writing, which sees Mehta as a secondary character in her own story, and the filmmaking, which repeatedly underlines the extraordinary quality of her patriotism without providing much insight into her firebrand personality. Iyer’s gaze seems intent on putting Mehta on a pedestal using the melodramatic background score to remove the ordinariness of her rebellion. Every moment is designed as an extraordinary moment, as the defining moment, as the moment that changed it all in the fight for India’s independence. Even though India gained Independence only in 1947, six whole years after the Quit India Movement, and one year after Mehta was freed from prison.

There is a line toward the end of the film that moved me, one that posits the fight against a tyrannical regime not as a radical act of bravery, but just as a fight against a tyrannical regime. That there is a record of a fight at all is more than enough. If the makers of Ae Watan Mere Watan took this advice, we would be seeing a very different — and more worthy — account of Usha Mehta.