Tara Singh tears a handpump out of the ground and a theatre erupts. Somewhere else, in a much quieter film, Mohan Bhargava watches a village struggle for electricity, says nothing dramatic about it, and just decides to stay.
Hindi cinema has never agreed on what loving a country is supposed to look like. For every Gadar (2001), screaming its love from a border checkpoint, there’s a Swades (2004), building a bridge instead of crossing one. Neither is wrong. But it’s worth asking why one version tends to leave the theatre with you, and the other tends to stay in it.
Newton (2017) takes the same instinct into a Naxal-affected forest, where a clerk insists on election process nobody around him believes in anymore. Its patriotism is about believing the machinery of democracy still has to work.
Lagaan (2001) looks, on paper, like it belongs to the loud camp — songs, a sneering colonial villain, a three-and-a-half-hour running time. But what actually drives Bhuvan isn’t hatred of the British, it’s a tax he and his people can’t pay. The match is the spectacle. The real film is villagers divided by caste and religion, learning, slowly and unglamorously, to stand together, without turning it into a sermon.
In Lakshya (2004) Karan Shergill isn’t a patriot when the film opens. He’s aimless, unsure of what he wants from his own life. His transformation into a soldier is also a transformation into a responsible adult. Service first, then conviction. The film doesn’t tell us that Karan loves India. It shows us a young man discovering purpose, discipline and responsibility. Patriotism becomes part of growing up.
Haqeeqat (1964), decades earlier, refuses the victory-parade version of war. Its soldiers are frightened, exhausted, beaten down — and that’s exactly why their courage has such deep meaning.
Raazi (2018) doesn’t let Sehmat off easy. It was never a film about a woman completing a mission. It’s about what the mission does to her, long after the mission is over.
Sardar Udham (2021) refuses to turn Jallianwala Bagh into spectacle, or Udham Singh’s revenge into a victory lap. It makes memory painful and revenge tragic, on purpose, scene by scene.
Chak De! India (2007) finds it in a fractured hockey team — the flag only shows up once regional distrust has already been replaced by something real between the women on the field. A Wednesday (2008) hands patriotism to an angry, ordinary citizen instead of a soldier, and asks an uncomfortable question about what happens once a person’s faith in the system runs out.
Rang De Basanti (2006) makes the case most directly. Its characters don’t begin as patriots. They begin cynical, distracted, mostly indifferent to a country they’ve quietly written off. The film’s real argument is that loving a country was never about agreeing it’s fine as it is. It’s about refusing to accept that it has to stay broken. The anger, once it finally shows up, isn’t a betrayal of that love. It’s the clearest form the love ends up taking.
In Ikkis (2026), the story of Second Lieutenant Arun Khetarpal could easily have been turned into a conventional war film, but it spends most of its runtime with Khetarpal the person — his friendships, his ambitions, impatience of a 21-year-old — before it gets anywhere near Khetarpal the martyr. A soldier isn’t born a symbol. He’s someone’s son first. The more a film makes you know that, the more his death actually costs you.
It would be easy to treat this as settled that the quieter films are simply the better ones. They aren’t, not entirely.
Gadar, Uri, Border, Kesari didn’t just get lucky at the box office. Gadar released in 2001, three years after Kargil, when the country’s mood toward Pakistan was raw. Judge it only on restraint and you miss why it worked when it did. Uri gave an audience something Swades never tried to give them — two hours of feeling like the country could hit back, cleanly, and win. People go to the cinema for exactly that, and there’s nothing dishonest about a film that delivers it.
Even the quiet films aren’t as quiet as this argument makes them sound. Chak De! India ends with a hockey final and a national anthem — a big, loud, unapologetic finish. That doesn’t cancel out the two hours of work it did to get there. The difference was never about how loud a film gets by the end. It’s about what it made you sit through first.
The honest version of this argument isn’t that the quiet films last longer than the loud ones. Gadar is still quoted, still played on television every Independence Day, still very much remembered. The real difference was never whether a film sticks. It’s what it leaves behind once it does.
“How’s the josh” survives the way any good line survives — you can repeat it, shout it at a cricket match, and it asks nothing more of you once you have.
Patriotism that leaves no room for doubt turns into something closer to propaganda. Patriotism that admits anger, grief, and disappointment feels more like an actual relationship — one you keep coming back to, because it was never really finished with you.
Not the film that shouts the loudest, then. Just the one you can’t fully walk out of.
