After its release in 2001, Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha could boast of record-breaking success in India. Set in 1947, the film dealt with the horrors of the partition before leading into a tale of an interfaith couple trying to be reunited across borders.
The film opens with instances of riots across India and Pakistan – Sikh and Hindu families traveling back to India from Pakistan are killed on their way and Muslim families traveling to Lahore from India are then attacked. To its credit, the film starts off with an attempt to touch upon all the cost to human life post-Partition – including the prevalence of sexual violence perpetrated against women.
Tara recognises Sakina while her family is trying to board a train to Lahore and eventually faux-marries her by applying blood to her maang to save her from a mob. This is no ‘marriage leads to a happily-ever-after’ story so this is where their problems start to snowball.
While Sakina deals with her separation from her family, Tara wards off repeated attacks from angry mobs and jibes from miffed relatives. Over time, they fall in love but that is still not where the story ends. But why does he recognise her, you might wonder.
Turns out, he has been in love with her for a while. Tara is a Sikh truck driver from Amritsar who would regularly visit a college to deliver food supplies where a camaraderie of sorts had developed between him and the students. It’s at this college that he meets Sakina (Ameesha Patel) when she agrees to help her friends prank Tara.
I found myself questioning the morality of this adult man befriending and later falling in love with a college student, my eyebrows crooked in doubt. My brows never got any relief because later in the film, Sakina tells Tara that she would willingly accept domestic violence because she wants to be his wife. Does he protest and say, ‘No, I would never treat you that way’? Nope, he just agrees.
I understand the appeal of Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. Its songs are memorable, dare I say, iconic. It follows the Bollywood three-act structure. It has a love story, a separation, the good guy fighting the baddies, the ever-so-popular hand pump scene, a hypermasculine protagonist who is practically a superhero. What more could we ask for?
To add to that, it’s not hiding its jingoistic message, like when Tara Singh says something along the lines, ‘Tumhara Pakistan zindabad hai, usse humein koi aitraaz nahi, par Hindustan zindabad hai aur rahega’. The film replaces religious identity with nationalism at many points and that’s a dicey (and clearly effective) formula.
Sunny Deol is at his loud, hyper machismo best in this film – he beats up enemies without a second thought, takes on who I assume are Pakistani soldiers singlehandedly while beating the effects of inertia on top of a train, crawls underneath a train to reach an engine…need I say more?
Ameesha Patel as Sakina is the perfect manic pixie dream girl that hypermasculine films require. She also has horrible luck with crowds but at least Tara is always there to rescue her. To the actor's credit, this is one of her best performances and elicits the reaction it must.
But at least the film’s messaging isn’t hateful. If anything, it advocates for love winning over all other obstacles and most notably, hate. There are allies on both sides, in both countries.
Further, it posits that ‘hate is an effective political tool’ and amplifies that message through Sakina’s father’s political ambition, adding that innocent people are often the ones who face the brunt of violence and rioting.
Even so, the majority of the second half of the film is set in Pakistan and the main family’s journey back to India. This setting becomes the ground for the hero fighting the enemy and the little shades of gray that the two nations were afforded soon melds into clearer shades of black and white.
As long as audiences remember the message the film is trying to talk of and see the characters on screen within their circumstances and their actions as solo entities, Gadar: Ek Prem Katha will have succeeded as a film about love and the triumph of humanity over hate.
(At The Quint, we question everything. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member today.)