In a scene from Meghna Gulzar’s Sam Bahadur, our revered military man makes his way past a lieutenant and cadet exchanging nervy glances. The senior has sentenced his junior to a punishment of 1,000 salutes for not acknowledging him. Sam admires the discipline and the rigour but believes it must flow both ways. In a sudden, crowd-pleasing twist, he commands the disgruntled senior to match each salute. It’s a sequence that paints Manekshaw as a humanising trident of honour, empathy and discipline. A man who oozes class, stature and the kind of casual bravado that can only really emanate from bodies cured of fear and self-doubt. It’s a film that works better as a religious tribute than an examination of the person behind the larger-than-life personality. A personality that though flattened to a symbol here, is worth witnessing for the lordly, humbling act of Vicky Kaushal playing him.
Kaushal is Manekshaw, in a film that functions like a straight-jacketed, unfussy chronicle of a landmark life. We begin, quite literally, in the cradle where a young Sam is given his name, before moving onto episodic bursts of history that will eventually christen the legend. Confidence and conviction seem like Sam’s two legs, for he nurtures a taste for victory from a very young age. From neighbourly doubters to the woman he courts, everyone Sam approaches is eventually bowled over by his imperious charms. The first time he meets his to-be wife Silloo (Sanya Malhotra), he says rather cockily, “I’m going to marry you.” This vein of assertiveness propels Manekshaw as he goes from conflict to conflict, undeterred by bullets or wounds, death or the fear of failing familial obligations.
One of the most tender and yet undernourished episodes in the film, is Sam’s relationship with Yayha Khan, the dictatorial military general who took over the reins of the Pakistani army after Partition. Khan seems far more vulnerable than Sam, a man the latter claims “can feel things, but can’t quite understand them”. It’s debatable if that actually qualifies as a weakness, because while Manekshaw traipses through war and its bloodletting with an unemotional gait, Khan actually looks wrecked by it all. In an excellent scene, where Khan shares supper with the Manekshaw family, he educates his friend about the triggering nature of wounds that men are trained to carry as badges of bravery. “To women they are nightmares,” he says. It’s a terrific scene, one of the few where Sam is forced back into the crease from where he seems capable of only hitting sixes and fours. A vulnerable, defensive stroke he just cannot seem to summon.
Directed by Meghna Gulzar, you can see the labour it has taken to turn Kaushal into a life-like incarnation of the late Field Marshal. The self-possessed gaze, the dip in the shoulder, the slight groove in the back are all instruments that Kaushal makes pitch-perfect use of. His job his harder because of the kindness and reverence the film dedicates to its protagonist, but dissolves into a role that eats him up for good. He is luminous, mesmerising, elegant; a burst of adrenaline encased by the drooping, unseemly body of a man who could walk into just about any room, place or maybe even country, and make it his. No wonder, the man’s reputation almost verged on narcissism, a thing the film is willing to address without really unpeeling.
Therein lies the film’s biggest challenge and maybe flaw. It’s a tick-the-box flythrough, a lifetime spent dispensing greatness with inhuman ease. It practically diminishes odds, and turns Manekshaw into the unicorn who can negotiate every situation from Kashmir’s annexation to the Bangladesh liberation war. It’s doting to say the least, and though it does entertain, glitches in the matrix by way of a tepid conflict at home with Silloo, a temperamental cook and a potential dispute with Indira Gandhi (Fatima Sana Sheikh), there is precious little working to separate the myth from the man. In more ways than one, this feels a lap of honour, one uninterested in excavating a fascinating person as opposed to awarding him with yet another accolade – a cinematic biopic.
Sam Bahadur isn’t loud, blaring jingoistic fare, but it doesn’t exactly offer nuance as a way of reading history. It’s clearly smitten by its subject and though it introduces humour as a way of breaking the onrush of the Field Marshal’s greatest hits, it can only really paraphrase his prodigiousness or summarily replace a textbook with an audio-visual one. Who was Manekshaw when he was cornered, unsure or even weak, we’ll never know. Gulzar’s film is happy to let a remarkable performance by Kaushal cycle bullet points from a staggering life, without expressing the urge to also interrogate its blips. But maybe that’s the burden of framing the greatest name in the history of the Indian military, a man perhaps too big for the people trying to study and portray him. A man no form of historical revision can really truly capture. Some forms of greatness really have to be witnessed to be suspected, studied and subsequently believed. For everything else, though, there is the indisputable brilliance of a Vicky Kaushal adaptation. A star no longer in the making. A star already made.
Sam Bahadur released in theatres on December 1, 2023.
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