Indian action films have two common cheat codes: fridging—killing off someone close to the protagonist to incite them—and Kashmir. Throw in either and any sort of overreaction on the part of the hero is permitted. In its opening sequence, Vedaa uses both. Abhimanyu (John Abraham) is an Indian army major in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. He infiltrates a terrorist’s home and proceeds to tear it apart to catch the man who, we learn, slit his wife’s throat on camera. He finds him and, in defiance of his orders, executes him. His last words to the man are: “Jhatka or halaal?”
This kind of whistle-moment Islamophobia is so easy for our filmmakers to include if they link it to Pakistan or Kashmir. It’s almost an automatism; director Nikkhil Advani and writer Aseem Arora probably didn’t think twice about it. It's grimly amusing, though, that the rest of the film is a stern indictment of the evils of casteism. You can’t even criticise your own nation without making a big show about attacking Pakistan first.
After he’s court-martialled, Abhimanyu heads to his late wife’s hometown of Barmer in Rajasthan. Built like a tree and about as talkative as one, he’s unmoored but looking for a purpose. He finds one almost immediately. The town is under the thumb of one family: the all-powerful pradhaan Jitendar Pratap Singh (Abhishek Banerjee), his loose cannon brother Suyog (Kshitij Chauhan), and corrosive patriarch Kaka (Ashish Vidyarthi, his second tradition-bound antagonist this year after Kill). Abhimanyu might just have ignored their casteist bullying—it’s not like he’s fond of Barmer. But then Suyog starts messing with Vedaa.
The first time we see Vedaa (Sharvari), she requests a classmate to fill her water bottle from a tap. The film is relentless in presenting her in the context of her caste. Her all-consuming desire to learn boxing from the new coach at school—Abhimanyu—is linked to her oppression at the hands of Suyog; she wants to become a fighter and rearrange his face. But when she tries to sign up, Suyog makes her clean the floor. The pradhaan makes a show of allowing her to have lessons; the only surprise is Vedaa believing her fortunes have turned. All the while Abraham simmers: you can see a beatdown coming.
The first explosion comes after Vedaa is waylaid and badly injured. Abhimanyu, his face covered, takes apart a house-full of Suyog’s men with lethal efficiency. Perhaps inspired by John Wick 4, Advani and action director Amin Khatib do a neat god’s-eye view; the camera diving and somersaulting with the performers is fun too, though overused. The film takes Abhimanyu off the boil again, during which time Vedaa and her family are further persecuted. This is an unrelentingly harsh film—much more than you’d expect an I-day Abraham-starrer to be. It’s also an unusually direct treatment of caste violence for a mainstream Hindi film, which usually tiptoe around the subject.
I don’t doubt Advani’s sincerity in trying to make a full-throttle action film that’s also a hard look at caste oppression. But you have to look at other language cinemas in India to see what Hindi films about caste are missing. Films like Karnan and Asuran and Sairat don’t shy away from the harsh lives of their Bahujan protagonists, but neither are they shown as perpetual victims. In Advani’s film, the Dalit characters show resignation and fear and subservience but only Vedaa is allowed to have hope, fleetingly, and even that is dependent on her upper-caste protector.
Vedaa turns into a grim chase film after the interval. Abraham and Sharvari operate at opposite ends of the spectrum: he gives us nothing, she projects a little too much. I like the death stare she develops in last half hour, though, and there's a good scene where she keeps repeating variations on “no crying”. The most interesting character might be Jitendar, who’s trying to bring his family’s casteism into a new era, where it thrives but isn’t as apparent. Banerjee, a riot as the grinning Jana in this week’s other big release, Stree 2, is wonderfully odious.
The film ends with intertitles about Vedas and varnas; they feel tacked-on, a possible by-product of the film’s long wait at the censors. It’s a strange end to a film that, to its credit, is unequivocal about its position on caste, even if its despairing outlook cuts off storytelling possibilities.
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