Author Harinder Singh Sikka, whose espionage book Calling Sehmat was adapted into the 2018 film Raazi, insisted in a post on X on Saturday that choosing Meghna Gulzar to direct the film was his “gravest misjudgement”.
Speaking to us, Sikka says he has been raising the issue for a while and is bringing it up again in light of the buzz around the spy franchise Dhurandhar. “I wasn’t willing to sell the rights of the book but agreed because of a promise to (poet-filmmaker and Meghna’s father) Gulzar,” he shares, adding, “My problem is that she removed the tricolour from the movie, while the Pakistani flag was flaunted. Even the Pakistani army was shown in a soft light. While in the book the protagonist was welcomed with (the Indian national anthem) Jana Gana Mana when she returned to India, all that was missing in the film. The climax was made to show that Sehmat made a mistake by fighting for India, which harmed the cause of Kashmiris.”
Recalling his first meeting with Meghna, he says, “I told her that I was appointing her on her father’s request, even though she didn’t have a good reputation in the industry. She referred to me as uncle during the filming, after the film’s completion, she wrote a nasty message saying, ‘I don’t want to speak to you anymore’. The director’s cut was shown to the armed forces but not to me.” He adds that he appreciates films like Dhurandhar for showing Pakistan in its “true light”.
Harinder says that the changes done from the book for Raazi “undid” his hard work. “Meghna changed the story and then got her father to write the song Ae Watan Mere Watan. There is not a word about Bharat in it. It was cleverly worded and presented. It took me eight years to write the book, and with one film, the hard work was undone,” he says, adding that while the film was a commercial success, he knew that it won’t win any National Film Award: “It isn’t worthy of that. The film did India dirty.”
The author adds that he also didn’t agree to the film’s title change from Sehmat to Raazi. “Meghna didn’t want to acknowledge Sehmat for who she was. I was taken for a ride,” he says, claiming that Gulzar also got him excluded from speaking at an event: “I have a letter by the Jaipur Literature Festival team, that says Mr Gulzar pushed them to not let me speak at their event. When I questioned him, he said it was a typo.”
Sikka laments as he feels that films today are being made to show that “the tricolour need not be celebrated”. “Even though that is what our martyrs come home wrapped in,” he ends.
We reached out to both Gulzar and Meghna for a comment, but received no response till the time of going to press.
