Concerned by the unrest in the name of religion, Subcontinental leaders of Muslims and Hindus, the Imam and the Shankaracharya, announce that they're attending the International Peace Conference in Krakow in a joint effort to help unite the two religions in perpetual harmony. See more at: īangistan is a whip smart and uproarious satire on fundamentalism and the story of two unlikely terrorists, the antitheses of each other, with a common destructive goal. My tip: watch ‘Umrao Jaan’ instead, and after that pull out the even older ‘Gaman’, Ali’s other timeless triumph. The awful Englishman (Carl Wharton), representative of the Queen and cruel collector of ‘lagaan’, is theatrical, as are the rest of the supporting acts. The way they speak is also very here and now. A period film demands correct body language: both look modish but contemporary. Neither Imran Abbas nor Pernia Qureshi do justice to their meaty parts, except he is a tad better than her. You reach out reflexively for its memory when you see ‘Jaanisaar’: the older film is rightfully a classic, with Rekha acing her part as the gorgeous ‘naatch-girl’ and the superb Farooq Sheikh as the noble-man who loses his heart to her, the film a lyrical testament to its times of this one, the less said the better. Muzaffar Ali’s period piece comes to us more than three decades after his ‘Umrao Jaan’, which was based on practically the same theme. He also learns that the British are not-not all of them, at any rate – the truthful people he has come to believe some of them can be conniving liars and savage murderers. A handsome prince returns from England, falls in love with a ‘tawaaif’, and gets to know some deep dark secrets about his parentage.
It is 1877 in Avadh, twenty years after India’s first ‘war’ of Independence.