Ikkis gets it right

About one hundred and fifty years separate the Battle of Bhima Koregaon and the Battle of Basantar. Yet a thin, unbroken line runs between the two—the regiment that fought at both. The Poona Auxiliary Horse regiment of the British Indian army, which earned its first battle honour at “Corygaum,” or Koregaon, in 1818, for defeating the Peshwa’s forces in the closing engagement of the Maratha Wars, stood again as the Poona Horse regiment of the Indian Army in 1971 at Basantar. The Roll of Honour tile on the Jaystambh, a monument commemorating the battle, has the names of the soldiers of Poona Horse who fell in battle in 1971. At the top of that list is the name of Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal, the focus of the director Sriram Raghavan’s new film, Ikkis.

In recent years, there have been calls from members of the Dalit community to remove the Roll of Honour tile. The Jaystambh is considered important by the Dalit community— most soldiers in the British Army, who defeated the Peshwas, belonged to the Mahar caste, and considered the win an assertion against the caste oppression they faced. Many see the act of putting the tile on Jaystambh as “a conspiracy by Brahminical forces to distort the history of the battle.” What began as a site of historical remembrance has become entangled in contemporary politics; activists and writers invoking its message of equality and resistance have faced vilification and imprisonment. The place has turned into a focal point of unanswered questions over caste identity and social justice, a hot-button issue many are afraid to touch in a Hindutva regime. But Ikkis engages with a very different part of the charged legacy: personal courage amid the futility of war, and a quest for peace between India and Pakistan.

Indian cinema rarely gets war right. It often mistakes spectacle for heroism, and noise for patriotism. Ikkis pulls away from that circus and turns its gaze where it belongs. It depicts courage as an act of clarity in chaos, not a cinematic pose. The film takes a measured view of courage, professionalism and the human cost of war. It remembers war as it is lived and lost, not as it is marketed. Raghavan achieves an alignment between the raw reality of battle and the humanity that survives within it. This restraint makes the film remarkable, and in some ways, redemptive, for Indian war cinema.

Khetarpal’s story has been told in outlines before—having been freshly commissioned into Poona Horse before the 1971 war, he was killed at the age of 21 and posthumously received the Param Vir Chakra. But Ikkis is not another routine biopic ticking off patriotic boxes. It traces Khetarpal’s journey not through mythic construction but ordinary detail. There are no exaggerated childhood tales of wrestling crocodiles in a river in Gujarat. Instead, we see a boy at the military academy missing cross-country enclosures, stumbling through after having caused the relegation of a course mate, and avoiding a tough boxing bout by faking illness. Even though the film starts with two lines of a Kaifi Azmi song from the 1964 war film Haqeeqat, it feels more like the spiritual heir of Vijeta, the 1982 Govind Nihalani film supported by the Indian Air Force, which also focussed on the 1971 war. Vijeta was rooted in the horrors of Partition—a Sikh father, played by Shashi Kapoor, refuses to pass on his trauma and hatred to his fighter pilot son who fights in the war. Like Farhan Akhtar’s Lakshya, which came much later, Vijeta held a contemplative gaze towards a young man’s self-discovery within military discipline. The difference is that Khetrapal never grew old enough to complete that arc. He remains twenty-one forever, a boy frozen between youth and eternity.