Amidst the humdrum life of Michael O'Dwyer and the peregrinations of Udham Singh, there are two moments of cinematic illumination which set up what is the fundamental story of modern times, that is, the dialectic of motion and stillness, the mobile and the immobile. When Udham walked into Caxton Hall on March 13th, 1940 with the intention of eliminating O'Dwyer, he carried with him an identity card that bore the name "Mohamed Singh Azad". Popular tradition has improved upon historical fact and rendered the name, as does Sardar Udham, as "Ram Mohamed Singh Azad". What does this signify, asks a senior British official, to which Inspector John Swain somewhat haltingly replies: "Sir, this name signifies the religious unity of India." Udham's acolytes hold this up, quite reasonably, as an illustration of their shaheed's secular credentials, but this gesture, even as it anticipates the theatrics of Amar Akbar Anthony by a generation, is somewhat predictable. Far more arresting is the fact that Udham assumed multiple aliases, traveling incognito with passports in the names of Sher Singh, Ude Singh, Udham Singh and Frank Brazil. We moderns like to think of ourselves as living in a (to use that dreadful cliché) global village, but ours is an era not only of passport control but draconian surveillance regimes. The passport itself is a relatively modern invention just as the nation-state is the ghetto from which we cannot escape. What is most remarkable is just how mobile Udham could be, transgressing borders with relative ease. Against this mobility is the indubitable fact of the immobility of the thousands who were trapped in the walled enclosure known as Jallianwala Bagh. Some could run, but only a few metres before running into the bagh's outer wall or being mowed down by the deadly hail of fire. Many others could not run at all; hundreds were trampled under in the ensuing stampede. In what is the film's darkest and chilling moment, Udham crawls over the wall of the bagh later in the evening and stumbles upon mounds of the dead and the wounded. In an extended sequence lasting over 15 minutes, he leaves with the wounded and repeatedly returns to take them to safety: in the stillness of the night, there are at most the faint moans of the wounded. It is Ghalib, writing on Delhi as a desolate city of the dead after the British had reduced Hindustan's first city to abject submission, that comes to mind: 1857 redux, precisely what the two henchmen of the Raj thought they were averting.

Indian revolutionary

Maverick Revolutionaries

The Enigma of Udham Singh