A young girl tells her father, she wants to fly. He buys a radio. An obvious bit of foreshadowing, since she grows up to be Usha Mehta, who had defied British crack down on communication by starting an underground radio station.
Directed by Kannan Iyer, Ae Watan Mere Watan, picks up a true story and gives it a superficial, Bollywood treatment. The first problem is casting Sara Ali Khan as Usha Mehta and Emraan Hashmi as Ram Manohar Lohia, not because stars cannot play real characters, but because they are unwilling or unable to dissolve their star persona.
When Sara Ali Khan runs in slow motion, carrying a flag and shouting Karo Ya Maro kind of slogans, she looks like she is acting in a school play. She must have been told to look serious and earnest and she never stops. Even a committed freedom fighter must laugh once in a while.
A Wikipedia entry on Usha Mehta has some lovely nuggets of information, which could have enhanced the film. Darab Farooqi’s script credits the Gujarati play Kharr Kharr by Pritesh Sodha and Amatya Goradia.
Usha’s father (Sachin Khedekar) is a judge, who admires the British. Usha lectures him, and leaves home; inspired by Gandhi, she adopts celibacy and starts wearing khadi. With two friends (Abhay Verma, Sparsh Shrivastav), she starts Congress Radio and gets an instant fan following. With senior Congress leaders arrested, Lohia is the only one outside and he needs the radio to send out anti-British messages.
A snarling British cop (Alexx O’ Nell), a cross between a Nazi and a Hindi cinema villain of the Eighties, goes after the gutsy miscreants with all the means at his disposal. In one scene, Usha wears a burqa to take the delivery of a crucial gizmo, right when there’s a qawwali on. Muslim stereotype alert!
One of Usha’s helpers is a polio-afflicted Muslim…so inclusivity at two levels.
It’s sweet that Karan Johar’s Dharmatic is wearing its nationalistic heart of its sleeve. But it needs more than noble intentions. Usha was a heroine in the true sense of the term, she deserved a better tribute.
Ae Watan Mere Watan
Directed by Kannann Iyer
Cast; Sara Ali Khan, Emraan Hashmi, Abhay Verma, Sparsh Shrivastav, Sachin Khedekar and others
On Amazon Prime Video
