A.R. Rahman has been trusted to do the heavy lifting in the climaxes of his recent films. The wailing vocals at the end of Chhaava (2025), Arijit Singh blazing through the title track in the climax of Tere Ishk Mein (2025) or the wistful ache of ‘Tere Paas Main’ (sung by Deepali Sahay) making Main Vaapas Aaunga (2026) a pristine tearjerker.Even in Rajkumar Santoshi’s Batwara 1947, Rahman shows up in the final minutes of the film, this time with a guttural hum by the man himself. The effect isn’t nearly as visceral as his last few films. Rahman’s score and songs for Batwara 1947 feel half-hearted compared to his work in the other partition drama from a few months ago. That nearly-there-but-not-quite feeling around Rahman’s music is what I might also say about my reaction to Santoshi’s film on the whole.Adapted from Asghar Wajahat’s 1989 play Jis Lahore Nai Vekhya, O Jamiya E Nai (‘The one who hasn’t seen Lahore, hasn’t lived’), Santoshi’s film seems partitioned between its progressive source material and dumbing down the narrative for an audience used to propaganda films like The Kashmir Files (2021) and The Kerala Story (2023).As a result, surprisingly political choices for the current climate are undone by Santoshi’s dated, TV-serial treatment. Maybe it’s the language the makers feel the audience will be receptive to, where nuance is sacrificed for absolutism. Maybe they’re worried audiences are on their phones, and therefore trying to make it ‘second screen’ enough – where plot points are repeated, reaction-shots are emphasised, the acting is deliberately unsubtle. Either that, or Santoshi (a personal favourite, once upon a time) has lost his edge.‘Batwara 1947’ (Partition 1947), directed by Rajkumar Santoshi.It’s a vital story, swimming against the tide of films monetising hatred. Produced by Aamir Khan, Batwara 1947 makes a radical choice to preach harmony. I can already imagine comments trolling the film as another product of the aman ki asha (hope for peace) initiative. And it’s primed for someone with Santoshi’s talents, who can marry the potboiler intensity with the integrity of parallel cinema.Headlined by Sunny Deol, who has made a career out of patronising Pakistan, the film is engineered to show a softer side to the man with the fabled bicep. Sikandar Mirza (Deol), a well-off cloth merchant living in Meerut on Aug 14, 1947, is a patriotic Muslim. When someone tells him about the anti-Muslim riots taking place in some neighbourhoods, he dismisses it as “kuch badmaash” (some miscreants) exploiting the partition to vent their communal feelings. Little does he know that he will have to flee the country he loves later that night.Turned homeless overnight, Mirza’s family lives in the refugee camps for months, waiting to be allotted a home. It leads to a nice Santoshi-Deol callback from Ghatak (1995), when someone whispers a suggestion about paying a bribe at a government office. Once Deol uses his high-decibel voice, suffice to say Mirza’s family gets a home in the very next scene. The only issue is there’s an elderly Hindu lady (Shabana Azmi) at the home allotted to Mirza’s family. Mother of a jeweller, she stays put upstairs while the family occupies the ground level. What begins as an acrimonious relationship soon mutates into something more familial and tolerant.There are refreshing choices here by Santoshi, where Pakistani officials are shown to be as mundane and lazy as Indian bureaucrats – so it’s hard to tell Lucknow from Lahore. A group of Sikh men offer to take a Muslim boy to see his beloved in a hospital after identifying him as a nek bandah (righteous person). There’s a chilling anecdote about a Muslim family being killed by their Hindu neighbour, whom the kids used to call ‘Mausi’ – where she poisoned them. For a change, Hindus are shown massacring Muslims, something most Hindi films have shied away from. These little details might explain the ‘A’ certificate given to Santoshi’s film, which is otherwise as family–friendly and sanskaari (pious) as Ekta Kapoor’s TV serials.As the elderly Hindu woman living in Pakistan, Azmi is disarmingly fragile, making the audience immediately protective of her on a subconscious level. She’s the last shred of decency left in the mohalla in Lahore, before the partition eviscerated it all. I also appreciated the choice of bringing back Anuradha Paudwal to sing an original song – a bhajan (Hindu devotional song) – written by Javed Akhtar and composed by Rahman. In many ways, this used to be the idea of India, before it began being challenged in the last decade.Apart from Azmi, most of the performances – including Deol, Preity Zinta (who plays Mirza’s wife, Hameeda), Karan Deol (as Mirza’s son, Javed) are stilted. Abhimanyu Singh, one of the most underutilised actors in the industry, plays Yakub Khan – the local brute, who has profited immensely from the partition and who threatens Mirza to evict the Hindu lady. Singh plays Yakub like a caricature, adding ’80s catch-phrases like “halke mein” as a suffix for every other dialogue. One detail, although too theatrical, I couldn’t help but enjoy was Yakub doing “Isda matbal?” (What does it mean?) after someone quotes the Quran. It’s a telling detail about India in 2026, where the ones loudest about religion are also usually the most illiterate about it.The three Sunny Deol action set-pieces seem tentative. It’s a shame, because the film teases the subversion of one of the strongest men to have graced our screen, by showing him batting for peace and dialogue. Instead, the makers pander to the audience with some mechanical bone-breaking. There’s some old-fashioned dialoguebaazi like “Har insaan ka pehla mazhab Maa hai” (every person’s first religion is their mother) – which could do with more self-belief, like in Suresh Triveni’s Subedaar from a few months ago.I’m not the audience for this film, but if the message of peaceful co-existence is communicated to those inhaling dishonest, selectively factual, indecent propaganda films, then I guess all the artistic dilution might have been worth it.Batwara 1947 is playing in theatres.