A reflective, humanist reading of Sriram Raghavan’s Ikkis, Arnab Banerjee examines war beyond valor, locating memory, grief, and shared humanity in a film that resists spectacle to ask who truly pays the price of conflict.

Ikkis: Beyond Heroism, a Lament for War’s Enduring Wounds. Directed by Sriram Raghavan, Ikkis is a restrained Indian war film based on Param Vir Chakra awardee Arun Khetrapal, starring Agastya Nanda, Jaideep Ahlawat, and Dharmendra. Critic Arnab Banerjee reads the film as a meditation on war, memory, and humanism—moving beyond jingoism to examine loss, empathy, and the moral aftermath of conflict across borders.

Director: Sriram Raghavan

Cast: Dharmendra, Agastya Nanda, Jaideep Ahlawat, Simar Bhatia, Sikandar Kher, Rahul Dev, Vivaan Shah, Avani Rai, Ekavali Khanna

Screenplay: Arijit Biswas, Pooja Ladha Surti, Sriram Raghavan

Cinematography: Anil Mehta

Rating: ★★★½ / 5

Beyond the Myth of Battlefield Glory

Set against the turbulent dawn of the 1970s, Ikkis opens on the formative years of Arun Khetrapal (Agastya Nanda), a young army officer of exceptional promise undergoing rigorous training to command a tank regiment. Distinguished early for his leadership, Arun appears poised for a life defined by purpose and quiet fulfilment. Love, too, smiles upon him in the form of Kiran (Simar Bhatia), and the future stretches before him, radiant with possibility. History, however, is rarely so benevolent. The outbreak of the 1971 war with Pakistan violently disrupts this fragile equilibrium, thrusting Arun—just twenty-one—into the crucible where youth, duty, and destiny irrevocably converge.

Based on the life of Second Lieutenant Arun Khetrapal, who was posthumously awarded the Param Vir Chakra for his extraordinary valor in the 1971 war, Ikkis resists the temptation to merely recount a familiar tale of battlefield heroism. Khetrapal’s story has been extensively chronicled; Raghavan’s film instead seeks a more searching inquiry—one that asks what, beneath uniforms and national allegiance, binds men who are trained to destroy one another.

Raghavan’s conception of heroism is notably restrained. Arun is not introduced as a chest-thumping conqueror, the kind Indian cinema has too often lionized. He is self-assured yet modest, respectful without bravado, a leader who commands without demanding the spotlight. When he reports for duty carrying golf clubs, quipping that he intends to “play golf in Lahore,” his superior officer Hanut (Mukul Dev) briskly cuts him down to size: war, he reminds him, is no sport. In such moments, the film establishes its tonal clarity—measured, reflective, and quietly subversive.

Agastya Nanda inhabits the role of the young officer with composed conviction, capturing both youthful resolve and the gravity of a destiny he does not yet fully comprehend. Jaideep Ahlawat, in a performance of formidable nuance, plays Brigadier Jaan Mohammed Nisar of the Pakistan Army. Decades after the war, Nisar hosts Arun’s father during a visit to Lahore—a gesture that becomes one of the film’s most quietly devastating ironies. Ahlawat’s portrayal, as ever, is commanding without excess, his presence charged with empathy and unspoken history.

Two Nations, One Moral Memory

The narrative unfolds across two temporal planes—1971 and 2001—gradually assembling a portrait of Khetrapal through memory and recollection. His legacy is refracted through the grief and pride of his father, Brigadier Madan Lal Khetrapal (Dharmendra), and through the reflections of a former Pakistani soldier, now a cricket selector, who keeps a portrait of Sachin Tendulkar in his living room and openly acknowledges that the heroism displayed by an Indian soldier in 1971 remains worthy of admiration—even emulation—across borders.

A gentle, almost elegiac pensiveness permeates the film, lending it the texture of a shared remembrance rather than a triumphalist retelling. Rather than confining itself to the well-trodden path of glorifying battlefield valour, Ikkis ventures into more unsettled territory: the moral residue of war and the intimate costs it exacts long after the guns have fallen silent. This sensibility allows the film—co-written by Raghavan with Arijit Biswas and Pooja Ladha Surti—to stand apart from the aggressively jingoistic and relentlessly violent spectacles that have recently dominated the genre. In spirit and execution, it could scarcely be further removed from bombastic war epics such as Dhurandhar. Here, the film speaks softly, yet with profound resonance, about human connections that transcend political boundaries.

Ikkis does not deny that war may sometimes be deemed inevitable; what it insists upon, with quiet moral clarity, is that the destruction and death unleashed by military conflict diminish everyone—combatant and civilian alike, victor and vanquished, nations divided by lines drawn on maps.

The Question That Breaks Nations

This ethos finds its most powerful expression in the 2001 storyline. Brigadier Khetrapal, now eighty and aching to return to the city of his birth—Sargodha, from which he and his family were displaced—finally makes the journey. Escorted by Brigadier Nisar, and discreetly shadowed by ISI agents, the visit culminates in a sequence that distills the film’s essence. Nisar, the gracious Pakistani host, longs to speak of the young Indian officer whose martyrdom still weighs on his conscience, yet waits for the right moment. The suspense is almost unbearable: will the revelation bring solace or rupture? Will truth become a bridge, or another strand of barbed wire?

When Brigadier Khetrapal wonders aloud why his son disobeyed orders to retreat to safety, Nisar replies simply: he was fighting the enemy. The old man responds with devastating gentleness—“Dushman? Kaun dushman?” (“Enemy? Who is the enemy?”). In that moment, both character and film radiate an unshakeable humanism.

The final wartime sequences lend the film its lingering poignancy, forcing the audience to confront the unanswerable questions that hover over every conflict: Who truly wins? Who irrevocably loses? In its meditation on courage, memory, and shared humanity, Ikkis suggests that while nations may clash, human bonds persist, stubborn and luminous, across the rubble of history.

The Quiet Devastation of Loss

The performances are uniformly accomplished. Ahlawat commands every frame he occupies; Nanda delivers a dignified, assured turn that anchors the film’s emotional core. Dharmendra, in what is his final screen appearance, brings a fragile gravity to the role of a father bearing an unbearable loss—his physical frailty only deepening the quiet anguish that courses beneath his measured exterior. The pain of a parent who has outlived his child is rendered almost unbearably palpable. Simar Bhatia also contributes to the film’s essential depth, as the film gains its rightful weight from her as well.

Ikkis is a quiet, humanist meditation on war and memory, a film that questions the very meaning of victory. It tells a war story in the language of humanity, exploring a soldier’s legacy as a moral reckoning, and stands as a reflective war film that chooses empathy over spectacle, contemplation over thunder. In its restraint, moral seriousness, and emotional intelligence, Ikkis emerges as a rare war film—one less interested in spectacle than in the fragile, enduring humanity that survives in war’s long shadow.