Home Entertainment The Forgotten Army – Azaadi Ke Liye.

The Forgotten Army – Azaadi Ke Liye.

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History is whose story? Ask the women of the world, and they will tell you it is ‘his’ story. Ask the oppressed and the marginalised, and they will tell you it is the story of the high and mighty. Ask the colonies, and they will tell you it is the story of the colonisers. History has mostly been kind to winners. Because they wrote it. So when you discuss the ‘history’ of a country, of a people, you cannot have all sides of the story. That is the inherent nature of history.

Take India’s history. If you grew up in Bengal, you probably had to write an ‘essay’ on Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. If outside the state, you most likely learnt about him as a footnote in the independence struggle of India.

The history of a country is also a history of appropriation.

In countering the ‘history’ of India, in that sense, director Kabir Khan takes on a mammoth project in The Forgotten Army. The Amazon Prime Original is on India’s ‘forgotten army’, the army that, till 2014, found no mention in our academic curriculum but for an aside in a chapter on India’s independence. You found pages after pages on hunger strikes and salt marches, but hardly anything on the Indian National Army.

The Azad Hind Fauj. It existed. That’s the muffled cry that Kabir Khan’s Forgotten Army sets out to give voice to.

These 60,000 men and women who gave up their lives, took on a journey on foot across countries from Singapore to Burma, were made ‘refugees’ in their own country. Their sin? When the founding fathers of the nation were drawing up their version of history, these freedom fighters fell on the wrong side. With time, they were forgotten.

Kabir Khan pushes the viewer into the story at the word go. His story is set in two time frames and crisscrosses through 1942-45 and 1996. While Khan takes liberties in likening the student protests in Burma to India’s Independence struggle quite a few times, and dilutes the message of the series, he stays on course otherwise. At its core, The Forgotten Army is the story of Colonel Surinder Sodhi (Sunny Kaushal, MK Raina) and Maya Srinivasan (Sharvari). It is a story of falling in love on the battlefield; in a time of war, when you seem to be living on borrowed time. The youngsters are swallowed up by Netaji’s call of Chalo Dilli.

The Forgotten Army starts in 1945, when the ‘prisoners of war’ are brought to Delhi by the British government from the India-Burma border. As they disembark the truck, hands and feet in shackles on a rainy August night, the Red Fort seems to be laughing at them. This group of prisoners have finally arrived in Delhi. It is a cold, cauterised, sanitised Delhi; no longer the Dilli of Netaji’s dreams.

As the voice of Shah Rukh Khan leads you into this story of a forgotten time, we see a father and son at the Singapore airport, waiting for a ‘family weirdo’ to land. It is 1996. The family black sheep is taken into the city by his nephew and the latter’s son. Who is this elusive person? Why doesn’t he say anything about himself? A 70-something Sodhi (MK Raina) takes his grandnephew to the Indian National Army memorial in Singapore. And we are taken to Sodhi’s youth.

Over the course of the next episodes, Kabir Khan succeeds in telling the story of the Azad Hind Fauj with precision. He lets his actors take the lead. Sunny Kaushal makes The Forgotten Army his own Uri. The younger Kaushal grabs the role of the younger Surinder Sodhi with both his arms and becomes one with him. We have seen Sunny Kaushal’s performance in the 2018 Akshay Kumar-starrer Gold. With The Forgotten Army, Sunny takes his skill a notch above.

Sharvari, on the other hand, doesn’t let you feel for even a moment that you’re not watching Maya. She makes the fiery Maya her own. Veteran actor MK Raina shines as the older Sodhi, from Singapore to Rangoon.

The Forgotten Army wins in its runtime. At just five episodes, it doesn’t demand more than 3 hours of your time in this overpopulated OTT universe. That’s the average length of Kabir Khan’s feature films (and this is no Tubelight). The war scenes and the futility of war are all well told in the first few episodes. The series brings back a time when women fought alongside men in the battlefield. The Rani Jhansi Regiment of the Indian National Army, we are told, was the first time the world saw women in a warzone.

Kabir Khan makes a binge-worthy series out of the research material that has been with him for over 20 years. His Doordarshan documentary of the same name was on screen in 1999. This time, it had to be different.

So when Kabir Khan holds you by the neck and pushes facts into your face, you feel a little betrayed. These facts are put on a platter and served to you way too many times. We don’t need a lesson-lesson in history now, right? Khan’s work also feels overdone in the over-Bollywoodisation of the series. The last episode, especially, could be out of a Phantom, for all you know. Also, Surinder and Maya’s own cave is a little too reminiscent of Jon Snow and Yggrite’s from Game of Thrones.

But none of that takes away from the main task at hand: exorcising the ghosts of a forgotten army. The series gives you goosebumps at points and makes you weep at others. And at the end of those three hours, it does make you wonder: whose history is it anyway?