A Wednesday: Unpacking the complicated legacy of Naseeruddin Shah and Anupam Kher’s contemporary classic

Released just two years after the 2006 Mumbai train bombings, the film was designed as quite the overt response. But debutante writer-director Pandey also made sure to highlight other recent attacks on Indian soil, each of which were perpetrated by Islamic fundamentalists. So, Shah’s question shouldn’t be why the four central terrorists in the film were all Muslims, but why Pandey didn’t have his protagonist cast a wider net in his revenge mission.

In A Wednesday, which remains as thrilling as ever once the cat-and-mouse chase begins — although the first 15 minutes, in which Pandey introduces the central characters, are less engaging on a rewatch — a man holds the city of Mumbai hostage by demanding the release of four terrorists. After engaging Mumbai’s outgoing Police Commissioner in a delicious negotiation in which they discuss politics and morality, it is revealed that the protagonist didn’t want to free convicted terrorists at all, but instead, he wanted to kill them in retaliation for what they’d done to his city.

But even if the central character (who remains pointedly nameless because the movie asserts that names invariably attach a person to a religion) hadn’t been a blank slate onto which the ‘common man’ of India could project himself, A Wednesday still felt it necessary to give his mission a personal touch. And by doing this, by giving Shah’s character a backstory that tied him to the 2006 train blasts, the movie robbed itself of the opportunity to make larger statements about terrorism.

His explanation for why he selected those terrorists in particular from arguably the hundreds that were in Indian prisons is explained rather unconvincingly. He tells the Commissioner that he drew lots, and the four names that he pulled out just happened to belong to people with ties to some of the most high-profile terror attacks perpetrated on Indian soil. Each of these attacks, as chance would have it, was carried out by Islamic terror organisations. And yet, the movie goes out of its way to assure the audience that it doesn’t want to suggest that only Muslims can be terrorists, but this is a case of having your cake and eating it too. If it really felt this strongly about this, it should’ve done something about it. Repeated assertions can become suspicious after a point. It’s like telling somebody that you aren’t racist. 

Of course, what Shah said isn’t wrong. And certainly, even though Pandey has played in similar sandboxes since A Wednesday, the intent behind his follow-up work hasn’t been outrightly questionable, at least not until his recent series The Freelancer. But there’s something to be said about his continued obsession with Islamic terror. If anything, it has validated Shah’s suspicions from 15 years ago.

Naseeruddin Shah in a still from A Wednesday.

In a passionate speech that the protagonist delivers towards the end of the movie — Shah is magnetic in this scene — he compares the terrorists to ‘cockroaches’ who’ve infested his ‘home’, cockroaches that deserve extermination. The choice of words is, unfortunately, very telling. The protagonist admits that people have become suspicious of anybody who carries an amulet, but says that he also empathises with those who cannot grow beards or wear clothes that would identify them as Muslim. 

But even though Shah was very vocal about this admittedly delicate situation, which remains more ambiguous than it perhaps seems, he neglected to complain about a more egregious statement that the movie makes. By having his character essentially coerce two cops — one an upstanding rule-follower played by Aamir Bashir and the second a rogue enforcer played by Jimmy Shergill — to execute one of the terrorists in cold blood, it whole-heartedly endorsed the concept of ‘encounter killings’. And then, if anybody was having doubts about its stance on the matter, it gets Anupam Kher’s Commissioner shake the protagonist’s hand in the final scene, as if to congratulate him for taking matters into his own hands and doing what the police couldn’t. 

Once again, Pandey made sure to address any possible complaints about the morality of the protagonist’s actions, when he has him admit that what he was doing is unambiguously ‘wrong’. But, purely by virtue of being the protagonist — A Wednesday is told through his perspective, and not the Commissioner’s — the movie is effectively approving of his vigilante methods. If it wanted to, A Wednesday could’ve had the Commissioner confront the protagonist in their one and only meeting at the end. But instead, the Commissioner shook his hand, forever compromising the film’s own morality. 

And this is the complicated legacy that A Wednesday has left behind. As times change, our sensibilities (ideally) evolve. What was considered justifiable even as recently as 15 years ago can no longer fly. It’s important to reevaluate cultural landmarks through a new lens every once in a while. The acting by the two leads is excellent, and the filmmaking in A Wednesday is still exemplary for the most part — there is an energy and an anger with which Pandey directs — but it would be interesting to ask him if his own beliefs have changed over the years.

Post Credits Scene is a column in which we dissect new releases every week, with particular focus on context, craft, and characters. Because there’s always something to fixate about once the dust has settled.