Review: Shahid.

The lives of the titular characters of Paan Singh Tomar and Shahid are almost twisted mirror images of each other. Paan Singh, as we see in Tigmanshu Dhulia’s film, starts out as a law-abiding citizen—a soldier in the Indian army, no less, and a successful athlete to boot—who, owing to a tragic set of circumstances, ends up an outlaw wanted across three states. Shahid Azmi, terrified and angered by the communal riots in Mumbai in 1992, opts for the life of a militant in order to avenge his slain fellow community members, but renounces that path and returns to law—literally. He becomes a lawyer. We could therefore say that Paan Singh’s is a story of disillusionment with the System and the renouncement of it once and for all, while Azmi’s is that of regaining faith in the System and coming back within its fold. Yet, there's an insistent implication that Azmi remained, in his own way, as unyielding a rebel as Paan Singh. Like the militants he once aspired to join, Azmi feels that Muslims in India are ill-treated and denied justice. Only, he ceases to believe that picking up arms and shedding blood in the name of God is going to improve their lot. Rather than destroy the System, he learns, under the tutelage of somebody who has followed the same trajectory as him, to walk the more difficult path of being a part of the System and changing it for the better. He decides to defend those who are harassed after every terrorist attack, because they belong to a particular community that’s an easy target, for a few of its people have joined terrorist organizations. In doing so, he takes a stand against those who fan the fires of prejudice, who shirk the responsibility of tracking down the actual, major culprits and instead pin the blame on scapegoats who have no means to prove their innocence, whose only ‘crime’ is that they had lent a laptop to a friend they didn’t know is a militant. That Azmi succeeded, as the film informs us, in acquitting seventeen such innocents within his brief career of seven years, is a far greater service than any he could have rendered with a gun or a bomb, and in the process, he becomes a rebel against both the violent militants who recruit the gullible through brainwashing and the equally violent powers that be who discriminate against Muslims. A rebel so resolute, in fact, that his enemies had no option but to put a bullet in his head.

It may be noted, however, that Shahid is not quite interested in charting the transformation of Azmi from wayward youth to upright lawyer the way Paan Singh Tomar chronicled its protagonist’s deviation from running tracks to Chambal’s ravines. Hansal Mehta, the director, is keener on Azmi’s life after the transformation. As a result, the scenes showing the riots and his stint in a militant training camp in Kashmir are a little perfunctory. They are staged competently, but they don’t tell us much about what Azmi felt during this phase of his life. I would certainly have liked to know more about what he had seen in Kashmir that made him reject militancy. All that we are shown is his horror when a captive of the militants is beheaded, following which he flees the camp. Surely there was more to it than that, and surely escaping those fanatical militant instructors wasn’t this easy?

To the film's credit, though, these niggles are forgotten once Azmi returns from Kashmir, and the remarkable feat that Mehta has accomplished here is his infusion of a quiet idealism into the grim proceedings. Azmi, through his own turmoil and that of his clients, sees it all—police brutality, framing of the guiltless, a near-mercenary attitude to the legal profession that views it as a means of minting money rather than serving justice, mudslinging by the media, and threatening phone calls that order him to drop the cases he is fighting. Above all, he sees prejudice and procrastination at their ugliest. People are thrown behind the bars, Azmi notes, for the mere reason that they have names like Zaheer as opposed to Donald, Matthew, Suresh or More. Even before the judge has delivered a verdict, the world at large has branded these people as guilty—once again because of their religion—going so far as to sack a man from his job of thirty years because his son has only been accused of terrorist activities. The stain that’s put on the reputation of the accused is enhanced further by their prolonged incarceration under the pretext of “investigation chal rahi hain”, that the case is still being looked into, and hence bail cannot be granted. The idea that a man is innocent until proven otherwise, and that the delaying of justice is the same as denying it, are the two cornerstones of any legal system worth its salt, and these are the two very principles that go for a toss, Azmi regrets, when it comes to Muslims suspected of terrorism. Of course, one reason why he is so determined to fight for these people is that he has been one of them once: the police arrested him on false charges after his return from Kashmir. The man who issues threats to Azmi on the phone refers to this at one point, sneeringly calling him an “aatankvaadi.” Azmi, of course, is anything but, and nor are the people he represents in court, though proving as much turns out to be an uphill task. Mehta underscores this through the way he shoots the trial scenes, which depict the courts as underlit, congested, claustrophobia-inducing spaces; they intimidate us almost the same way as the scenes in the prison do. The verbal sparring between the lawyers is presented as a veritable cacophony, with both Azmi and his rival interrupting each other and trying to drown the other’s voice by raising his own higher and higher, while the judge desperately tries to make the two stop, sometimes by appealing to the seniority of Azmi’s opponent, at other times by threatening Azmi with contempt of court. It’s almost impossible, in the midst of it all, to comprehend the arguments: there’s little of the clear, articulate, individuated, back-and-forth rhetoric that Hindi cinema usually resorts to while shooting courtroom procedures. The chaotic verisimilitude of these scenes go a long way in highlighting the difficult, demanding nature of Azmi’s work as well as the sorry state of affairs in India when it comes to law and order. 

None of which manage to shake that dignified idealism which prompted Azmi to take up these cases in the first place. “By subjecting me to injustice, the Almighty taught me the importance of fairness. By putting me through pain and humiliation, He made me appreciate mercy”, we hear Azmi say at the beginning of the films. He is quoting Roy Black, the famed American lawyer, but it is, of course, his own story too. The entire quote of Black’s is stuck on a board in Azmi’s office, and its latter sentences—“Fight against prejudice, battle the oppressors, support the underdog. Question authority, shake up the system, never be discouraged by hard times and hard people. Embrace those who are placed last, to whom even bottom looks like up”—constitute his work ethic. It’s all too common to find such noble words hung on the walls in people’s houses, but to see a person who actually lives by them is a humbling experience. Azmi often works pro bono. He brushes aside an imam’s offer to pay him some money in return for his services. His clients are clearly from the bottommost rungs of the society, for whom legal counsel is almost a fantasy. Azmi’s commitment to aiding these people is unwavering, and that such unqualified goodness doesn’t appear suspect is largely owing to Raj Kumar Yadav, who, in his portrayal of Azmi, makes idealism look credible and grounded. Azmi lives by high ideals, but his modus operandi is as unglamorous as staying up at night, bent over the case files, and even when he performs such humane gestures as arranging a meeting between an imprisoned client and his young daughter, he doesn’t forget to discuss an aspect of the case with the said client. He isn’t, then, a superhero, or even a hero in the conventional sense, but an ordinary man who decides to right certain wrongs, and does so by means not miraculous but methodical. Such a role needs an actor who would be equally convincing as a commoner and a crusader, and Yadav is that actor. He looks and speaks like somebody off the streets, somebody who could be your next-door-neighbour, who belongs to the impoverished locality where we see him living, but once he dons the lawyer’s black cape, Yadav’s slight build and nondescript features do not for once get in the way of his portrayal of Azmi’s grit and moral fortitude. The fortitude itself is expressed through very little theatrics: the fixed stares, dogged tone and occasional smirk Yadav employs in the courtroom scenes amply establish his character as a force to reckon with. This is the sort of performance that can be called an inhabitation of the role, and a very unfussy one at that, which, as I said, convinces us of a character’s goodness without going overboard about it.

It helps, also, I think, that we do not see Azmi only in his idealist mode. We see him as a student, studying hard for examinations. We see him as a young man who, like many of his age, is easily swayed; when in jail, he has a second brush with militants, before being whisked away by Ghulam Nabi Wad (Kay Kay Menon), who made the same mistake as Azmi and who comes to look upon the boy as a protégé, a brother even, who deserves much better. (Menon is excellent in this tiny part that has him play a type as opposed to a character—in Morality Play terms, his role could be dubbed ‘Conscience’). We see him as vulnerable, as a man haunted by his past, when a lawyer scathingly insinuates that he is still in touch with terror groups (this scene is perhaps the most poignant in the film. Azmi stares at the lawyer, shocked by the sheer unfairness and cruelty of her remark, before spluttering out a protest, and trying, desperately, to get back the composure he needs to defend his client). And we see him as a son, a sibling, a spouse—Mehta details the world around Azmi rather than a focus exclusively on his legal battles. There’s his mother (Baljinder Kaur), whom he loves but is also a little intimidated by. His elder brother Arif (Mohammad Zeeshan Ayyub) is the provider of the household, burdened with every duty from making tea for guests to getting loans for Azmi’s studies; in a touching scene, he explodes, asking Azmi if it’s his lot to shoulder responsibilities at the expense of a life of his own, and Azmi’s silence bespeaks an acknowledgement that his achievements indeed owe a lot to Arif. The relationship between Azmi and Mariam (Prabhleen Sandhu), a client whom he falls for and marries, is beautifully rendered, dotted with moments that are funny (such as the proposal scene; he asks her to marry him, she walks off, as though in a huff, and the next scene shows them coming out of the marriage registrar’s office, surrounded by congratulating friends) and tellingly grim (like the observation that idealism is easier to appreciate when you have little to lose: Mariam encourages Azmi to ignore the threatening phone calls when he is her lawyer, but once he becomes her husband, she urges him to agree to the blackmailer’s demand). When he is with these people, Azmi himself reveals the many layers to his character, such as that for all his championing of truth in courts, he isn’t above a bit of subterfuge himself. He forces Mariam into a burkha when he takes her to meet his mother, to make the latter think he has wedded a ‘proper’ girl and not the jeans-and-kurta clad single mother that Mariam really is. 

Such nuances ensure that these characters register as fully realized human beings, whom you come to care for and whose fates you are invested in. You smile when Azmi cradles the newborn child of a client on his lap and croons to the infant that he shall see his father soon. You share his nervousness as he fidgets around Mariam, wondering when and how to tell her about his feelings. You feel for Mariam as she waits in vain for Azmi to return for dinner while he is busy with his cases, for Azmi’s mother when a couple of burly men force their way into her house, questioning her about her son’s whereabouts, for Azmi himself when he calls up Mariam and asks her to come back to him (she has departed after too many of those missed dinners) because he’s all alone and everybody’s against him and he needs someone by his side. And when he mistakes his killers as clients and invites them into his chamber, you feel that irrational, compulsive urge to shout out a warning to Azmi, to tell him he’s making a mistake, before the gunshot occurs and you remember you are watching a film and that the man on whom it’s based has long since died. For those couple of hours in the darkness of the theatre, though, Shahid Azmi lives again.