Desecration Of A Sacred Memory: Haq And The Pitfalls Of Dramatising History

In the dingy outhouse of her marital home, surrounded by blossoming roses, Saira (Vartika Singh) pays a visit to Shazia (Yami Gautam Dhar), the first wife of her husband Abbas (Emraan Hashmi). She is angry, desperate. A case of maintenance after divorce, filed by Shazia against Abbas, has been dragging on for years. The unrelenting legal battle is at the root of the growing distance between Saira and her husband. Abbas is now ready to move the Supreme Court against a High Court order that has been issued in favour of Shazia. “Why are you doing this? Didn’t you love him?” asks Saira. “Love isn’t always enough,” says Shazia. “I also demand dignity.”

Haq is a quietly powerful film. The performances are not necessarily hammy. The protagonist, played by Dhar, is rather restrained in her execution. The arguments of the film are moving and the undergirding logic of undoing patriarchal customs has the potential to gather public sympathies. But the crucial questions remain: Is the representation of events, as they transpired, true to the life of Shah Bano Begum, whose landmark legal case for maintenance after divorce was the ‘inspiration’ behind the film? More pertinently, must the reel bear the burden to be faithful to the real?

On November 3, Siddiqua Begum Khan, daughter of Shah Bano, filed a legal petition before the Madhya Pradesh High Court seeking a stay on the film’s release, four days before it was scheduled. In her petition, Khan alleged: “...the teasers and trailers of the film misappropriate the judgement’s moral legacy to weave a fictional narrative that distorts the personalities and private lives of the individuals involved”. She accused the makers of using the private happenings of her mother’s life for commercial gain. The court, however, dismissed her petition on the grounds that the right to privacy of an individual is not heritable and the personality rights of a deceased person (Shah Bano) cannot be protected under constitutional guarantees.

This is not the first time such a contestation has arisen with respect to films on historic personalities. The judgement in Khan’s case itself cites a 2019 petition by Deepa Jayakumar, the niece of late AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa, who sought to sue the makers of the film Thalaivii (2021) and the TV series Queen (2019-present) for basing their works on her aunt’s life. In these cases, her allegation was that if made without the family’s explicit consent, these works could tarnish Jayalalithaa’s as well as her reputation in the public domain. This petition was rejected by the Madras High Court as well, while the makers were directed not to include any character in their work that resembled the petitioner.

Earlier, the issue of personality rights—which allows an individual to control whether their identity can be used commercially—also cropped up in the case of Shah Rukh Khan's Raees (2017). Gangster Abdul Latif’s son Mushtaq Sheikh sued the actor and his production house, Red Chillies Entertainment, alongside the director and others, for ‘defaming’ his father and his family through the film. The titular character in the film, played by Khan, was said to have been loosely based on Latif. In this case too, the Gujarat High Court passed a judgement in favour of Khan and others, primarily since Sheikh, the petitioner, passed away in 2020. Here, the contestation raised by Khan’s legal representation highlighted that the right to sue for defamation and seek damages could not be passed on from parent to offspring.

Be it The Dirty Picture (2011) or Sarbjit (2016), the allegation of “misrepresenting” public personalities in films that do not claim to be biopics, by individuals from their families, has been a curious but consistent convention. Perhaps, the underlying reasons could be related to sharing of commercial profits from the film’s theatrical collections. But very often, it is not merely financial avenues that lead to such legal hassles.

The case filed by Phoolan Devi against filmmaker Shekhar Kapur in 1994 for making Bandit Queen (1994) was one such instance. Here, the issue raised by Devi was that she had not consented to the depiction of the graphic violence—which the character representing her in the film is subjected to—while handing over her prison diaries to be turned into a script. Her primary objections were against sexually explicit content and scenes of rape in the film, which violated her fundamental right to privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution. The Delhi High Court’s ruling in this case went on to become a landmark judgement on the issue of personality rights in the country. In its decision to restrain the exhibition of the film until its censorship, the court held: “No amount of money can compensate the indignities, torture, feeling of guilt and shame which has been ascribed to the plaintiff in the film”. The judgement emphasised the importance of the consent of an individual to represent the private happenings of their life on the silver screen. However, an important aspect that set this case apart from many other personality rights cases, including that of Siddiqua Begum Khan’s, was that Devi was alive and was herself the petitioner in this instance.

There have also been other films where injunctions have been sought from the court against their release, fearing the impact that may have on ongoing legal trials. Both Black Friday (2004) and the more recent BBC documentary The Killing Call (2025) on Punjabi singer Sidhu Moose Wala’s murder had their releases challenged on these grounds. While Black Friday was not allowed to release until a verdict on the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts was out in 2006, BBC went on to release The Killing Call on YouTube despite the objections from Moose Wala’s family. A Mansa court in Punjab did hear the family’s case, but refused to stay the release of the film.

However, one must circle back to asking the questions that lie at the root of such legal quagmires—is ethical consent possible in cinema, especially fiction, where dramatising events is an essential artistic liberty? Is it possible to create art that does not offend anybody? Does the responsibility of the filmmaker, who translates real-life incidents to film, end at one-minute disclaimers that refute any “resemblance to any person living or dead”? And can the ends to which such cinematic translations are done be put to question? The answers are seldom easy.

In 2019, Richie Mehta’s Netflix series Delhi Crime took audiences by storm as the 2012 Nirbhaya rape case became a talking point again with its release. The series, which won an international Emmy award in 2020, arrived a year before the rapists were subjected to capital punishment at Tihar jail—which meant that the case was still ongoing. While no legal suit was filed against the series, it did distress a lot of the stakeholders in one of the most shocking cases that have come to light in India’s criminal history. This included the victim’s mother, Asha Devi and her friend as well as the second victim, Awindra Pandey, apart from certain members of the police who were shown in dubious light. Devi, who was firmly of the opinion that the series would not benefit the trial in anyway, accused the makers of “encashing their plight” and reviving their trauma for their personal gain. Delhi Crime, with its sophisticated cinematography and sharp editing, brought back the Nirbhaya case into public discourse, at a time when the events had taken a backseat in collective memory. However, it did so by glorifying the role of the Delhi police, while glossing over crucial lapses in procedure and trivialising the role of public outrage in accelerating the investigation.

Similar complexities plague the presentation of the Shah Bano case in Haq. While the overt stereotyping of Muslims—almost a norm in the latest crop of Bollywood films and OTT series across genres—has been given a miss, the film revives a rather painful, lonely and prolonged experience of Bano’s life and the life of her children to tell its story. Moreover, even as the film seemingly embarks on revealing a journey of collective emancipation, it very gently lays the ground for advocating the present regime’s agenda of establishing a Uniform Civil Code in the country. The arguments almost appear organic as the film goes on to highlight the incumbent government’s step of abolishing triple talaq towards its conclusion—a step which effectively turned a civil matter into a criminal one. Haq shirks from revealing the larger socio-political context within which the events of Shah Bano’s case were taking place, just as it does from revealing the present scenario, when there is a multi-pronged attack on Muslims in the country, especially in the last decade. With its supposed intent of questioning patriarchal practices in the community, it simultaneously teeters on the edge of reinforcing the overall existing perceptions of Islamic law as being regressive towards women.

Therefore, even when films are premised on social issues that have moulded the nation’s history in significant ways and deserve cinematic re-telling, the concerns about artistic intent and responsible interpretation continue to hold water. Whether these concerns can be resolved through the legal means of right to privacy and safeguarding of personality rights by the kin of the affected is a matter that warrants a deeper interrogation in public discourse.

Apeksha Priyadarshini is Senior Assistant Editor, Outlook.

This article appeared as 'Desecration of a Sacred Memory' in Outlook’s December 1, 2025 issue as 'The Burden of Bihar' which explores how the latest election results tell their own story of continuity and aspiration, and the new government inherits a mandate weighted with expectations. The issue reveals how politics, people, and power intersect in ways that shape who we are—and where we go next.