Critics’ Verdict: ‘Indu Sarkar’ Is Unimpressive, Totally Missable

Critics react to Madhur Bhandarkar’s take on the Emergency of 1975.

Film: Indu Sarkar
Director: Madhur Bhandarkar
Cast: Kirti Kulhari, Tota Roy Chowdhary, Anupam Kher, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Supriya Vinod

Excerpts from reviews of Indu Sarkar:

Indu Sarkar is as tacky as any Bhandarkar production, but the filmmaker has pared down the bombast that has characterised some of his previous films and allowed Kirti Kulhari’s assured and sensitive performance to set the tone. Rowchowdhury is impressive as the bureaucrat Navin, but it is Kulhari’s Indu who stands out as the movie’s best-sketched and most impressive character. The movie halts in its stride when Indu stammers, and is all the better for it. The way Indu Sarkar tells it, the Emergency was yet another smash-and-grab moment, but in reality, it was so much more.

Nandini Ramnath (Scroll)

Bollywood has never been great with political cinema. Even by those lax standards, Indu Sarkar is the pits. It is high on dramatic flourish, low on impact. So insipid is the 139-minute film, it leaves you wondering why on earth it has seen the light of day unless you deign to consider the political purpose that it serves in the current political scenario. It’s hard to find a purely cinematic reason for its existence.

Saibal Chatterjee (Ndtv)

Even with a sympathetic government and a pliant CBFC, what we get is a watered-down, bloodless version of that time. The long-winded disclaimers, in Hindi and English, before the film begins, tell us firmly that it is all a figment of the filmmaker’s imagination: how are we to take what follows seriously? A better film could have unpacked the horrors better. Indu Sarkar doesn’t break fresh ground, even as it does bring alive some of the most disturbing aspects of the time. And we relive it, even as we cringe at the heavy melodrama, and the over-simplification of many of the issues the film raises. 

Shubhra Gupta (Indian Express)

Indu Sarkar starts off with brutal scenes of the forced sterilisation drive, one of Sanjay’s most catastrophically cockamamie schemes, but here’s something striking: before the cops arrive to cart the men off to the shears, people are dancing to a film song. This, I decided, can be no coincidence, dancing to a Bobby song before being nearly bobbited, and - coupled with the caricatured acting, straight out of Jaspal Bhatti’s Flop Show, all bombast and exaggeration - I began to think Mr Bhandarkar has pulled the wool over our eyes and actually made an audacious farce, a full-throated absurdist satire. (Spoiler alert: he has not, and the film is merely and disappointingly bad.)

Raja Sen (Ndtv)