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Critic Review
Indu Sarkar (2017)Indu Sarkar tries to examine the Emergency period through the eyes of its protagonist, Indu Sarkar. Indu (Kirti Kulhari) is an orphan girl with a defined stammer due to which she is never adopted from the orphanage that she has been brought up in. Finding solace in words, Indu aspires to be a poet, but is discouraged from doing so, prodded instead to be a good housewife. Without a sense of direction, Indu is quite happy when Navin Sarkar (Tota Roy Chowdhury) marries her, providing her with a home, and more importantly, a surname. This guy, Navin Sarkar, is a sychophant. He is the quintessential babu, who loves the comfort and promise of a cushy government job and detests the public who questions his employer. He is the ‘yes man’ to the Development Minister, who tells him to milk the Emergency period for his benefit. Now, the fact that her husband is a government employee hasn’t bothered Indu at all until she tells him about the protests against the Emergency that she had witnessed at the market and he reprimands her for the same. Committed to her role of being the dutiful homemaker, Indu turns a blind eye to the injustice all around her, till, in a turn of events, she finds herself to be the sole caretaker of two kids, whose parents were killed in a government-organised slum demolition. Identifying with the struggle of the orphaned kids, she gives them asylum. But her husband, who is a loyalist of the reigning government, throws a fit over this and asks Indu to choose between him and the kids. She obviously does what she has to and moves out of his house. Unassumingly she also becomes a part of the underground movement against the government, led by Nanaji (Anupam Kher). The government in question here is obviously the one that had imposed the Emergency. And while there’s only a glimpse of the then Prime Minister (Supriya Vinod), it is her son, Chief (Neil Nitin Mukesh) who does the ordering..
Indu Sarkar opens with the declaration of Emergency but its true beginning-point is a disclaimer proclaiming it as a work of fiction bearing nothing more than a chance resemblance to people, places, and events.
I found that disclaimer to be less of a m.
Indu Sarkar is an account of, what was touted in the film to be, India’s second freedom struggle. After a steady dose of pre-independence stories, it is indeed refreshing to see the struggles that plagued a recently free India. Madhur Bhandarkar is back.
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 da.
However, Indu Sarkar is at its best when it focuses on its protagonist's emotional struggles and dilemmas, leaving the politics behind. Indu and Navin’s story by itself is far more palatable than the elaborate political schemes surrounding them. Kirti K.
