By minute eight of Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis, you start noticing its tone.
Brig. Madan Lal Kheterpal opens his wallet at a dinner table in Lahore. He is eighty years old and his fingers move slowly across a monochrome photograph. He pauses at the two boys in the frame, his children. One of them is fifty; the other, he says, his voice breaking, will always be 21.
The man sitting across from him is Brig. Jaan Mohammed Nisar, retired commander, current chief in the Pakistani Army intelligence, and younger to Kheterpal by a few decades. Nisar had pulled many strings to arrange Kheterpal’s visit to his home, a move that befuddled his family and bosses both. The year is 2001, the smoke from Kargil still circles the air, and yet, Nisar takes down pictures hung on his drawing room wall and replaces them with a large framed photograph of a young Indian soldier and several cricket posters.
Ikkis is, in some ways, a movie about war and Bollywood loves the sound of that. Roughly a third of the top ten highest grossing Hindi films from the last decade have a running theme of armed conflict. Most times, it is national defence; other times, communal pride.
But all war movies here follow a similar emotional brief—stir the blood, swell the chest, send the audience into the parking lot feeling victorious. India’s most recent mega hit, already preparing for its second instalment, is a death metal album of a film that leaves your ears aching by the time it ends. Dhurandhar was 2025’s biggest Bollywood movie. The second biggest was Chhava—a story about the Sambhaji Maharaj defending the Maratha Empire against Aurangzeb’s invading, murderous Mughals. Its theatre run left many broken screens and torn seats across the country, such was the intensity of angst it stoked amongst a passionate audience.
If the theory about cinema reflecting a nation’s mood holds any truth, there is now an evident pleasure India takes in violence. At a broader level, one saw the proof of this bloodlust during India’s most recent armed conflict—Operation Sindoor. News anchors called rumoured strikes on Karachi in the breathless cadence of cricket commentary; social media was alight and frothing with the prospect of dead Pakistanis. For most of India today, war is a Netflix show.
At a micro level, the proof is on every street. Consider three events from just this month alone: Tarun Kumar, a 26-year-old from Uttam Nagar in Delhi, was beaten to death on Holi because a water balloon fell from his balcony onto a woman from a higher social community. A week or so back, during the Men’s T20 World Cup final, a speech-impaired kid in Bihar was killed because he mistakenly cheered for the wrong wicket. At the time of publication of this essay, television channels are carrying interviews of Uttam Nagar residents threatening to play Blood Holi on the day of Eid.
Into this India came a film in which an eighty-year-old Indian veteran sits in the home of a Pakistani intelligence officer and says, on the first night of his visit, when asked why he didn’t bring his family: “You too are my family.”
His son, 2nd Lt. Arun Kheterpal, 17th Poona Horse, is the central character of this film. Arun is an energetic cadet airdropped to the Battle of Basantar during the 1971 War. Throughout the first act, we see Arun’s sparkling eyes and boyish grin every time he’s on duty. His face lights up when he stands in front of the Centurion tank, drinking in the prospect of going into battle seated inside it. Later, his dejection when the war reaches ceasefire, robbing him of the chance for more rides in that tank, more territory conquered. And by the end, when he surges forward for one last skirmish, we see the boy becoming a soldier as Pakistani tanks close around him in a circle. Out goes the babyface, and in comes the clenched jaw, dirt marks on his face, and the percussion from automatic machine guns.
As much as Ikkis is Arun’s story, it’s also the story of his father seeking closure from losing a son who had his entire life in front of him, and whose profession, he knows only too well, pushed him inside that tank. And it is the story of the man across the dinner table, who has spent years carrying the thing he needs to tell, the entire film a journey of him finding the nerve to say it.
When was the last time you saw a Bollywood war movie that knew the gravity of war?
In 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, JP Dutta released Border. The film highlights a different strand of the 1971 War, zooming in on the Battle of Longewala, in which 120 Indian soldiers held off a Pakistani tank regiment rolling through the Rajasthan desert at night. The film never leaves the frontline, from beginning to end valourising the Indian armed forces, but while acknowledging a war’s toll on the soldiers and their people.
Dharamvir Singh is the son of a martyred soldier. His mother lost her eyesight from the shock of losing her husband. When Dharamvir leaves his village for the front, he leaves behind a partner, waiting for a life together. Bhairon Singh walks away from his newly wed wife on the morning after their wedding night. Mathura Das leaves to tend to his cancer-stricken wife, then turns around midway and comes back to the regiment.
Dharamvir, Bhairon, and Mathura all die that night. As do many, many others, across both sides of the border. Loss is the single, immutable truth of all wars.
Border ends twice. Once when the Indian MiG jets rain bombs on the Pakistani tanks, forcing their regiment to retreat and effectively winning India the Battle of Longewala. And once, after all is done, after the sound is muted, when the camera pans wide and you see lifeless bodies strewn across the desert sands. The song playing in that scene, ‘Mere Dushman, Mere Bhai, Mere Hamsaaye’—translating to my enemy, my brother, my shadow—underlines what the movie has been trying to say all along.
Francois Truffaut once said there was no such thing as an anti-war film. The camera makes a spectacle of what it shows, he argued. You can’t film a battle and make it ugly enough that someone in the audience won’t find it thrilling. Spielberg disagreed. Every good war movie, he said, is an anti-war movie.
Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan begins and ends with death. The sea turning red at the Omaha Beach from young men chopped down before we can see their faces; then, Captain Miller slumped against a wall, bleeding out, asking the boy he saved to earn the life. Everything between those two frames shows you the cost of combat. The more you watch the movie, the more you realise that Normandy is the setting for that story, not the story itself.
About an hour into Ikkis, as Brig. Kheterpal is regaling Brig. Nisaar’s family with stories, he falls quiet and arrives at the question the film is written around: “I don’t know what is true—the friendships and warmth I have just experienced, the shared culture I’m familiar with, or the bullets and shrapnel flying across borders?” At the end of that sequence, when Brig. Nisaar uses the word “dushman” (enemy) to refer to opposition, Brig. Kheterpal intercepts with, “What enemy?”
The relationship between the two brigadiers forms the moral spine of the story, of humanity holding its ground against nation-state conflict.
There is a scene near the end of Border where Maj. Kuldip Singh Chandpuri tends to an injured Pakistani soldier, asks him about his family back home, gives him water, and tells him he will be treated like a soldier. It is a small scene, almost throwaway, and it would be radical if it were to be shot today—the suggestion that the man on the other side of the gun is not a concept but a person.
Ikkis reaches its emotional crescendo with its penultimate sequence. Brig. Nisaar takes Brig. Kheterpal to the spot where his son breathed his last, and reveals, looking into his eyes, that he fired the shell that killed Arun. There are no tears, no soaring monologues, just silence. Then, the 80-year-old turns to his younger colleague, a calm smile settling on his face, and says, “The wounds of war never heal. But one day, someone digs up old wounds again, and we go back to the start. Again, and again, and again. That’s how it is, and that’s how it will continue to be. No one knows for how long. It will stop when we stop it.”
As the final credits roll on Ikkis, we are given photographs and text about the Battle of Basantar and the 1971 War. The makers leave us with one number—the casualties of 1971. But, instead of filtering for the familiar crest, their number includes casualties from both sides of the border.
The essay is so well written..thank you for this. Watched this movie a couple of days ago and really loved the movie
Haven’t watched it yet, but will watch it for sure now.