Revisiting Shahid: An Unrelenting Quest For Hope Within The System

Advocate Shahid Azmi was shot dead in his office on February 11, 2010 by assailants who remain elusive to any consequence till date. He is believed to have been killed for representing clients who had been hurriedly incarcerated by police forces in the wake of major terrorist attacks in the 2000s in and around the city of Mumbai. Having spent seven years of his life in jail as an accused on flimsy grounds under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1994, he had developed a fair bit of insider knowledge about how these cases were handled. He had also educated himself while in jail and decided to pursue law to help others like him. Shahid (2012), a film based on his life directed by Hansal Mehta, is generally credited for putting him in the spotlight he was denied when he was alive.

Azmi was 32 when he was killed. But he had already lived through a plethora of life-altering experiences—witnessing the 1993 Bombay riots, training in a militant camp and then leaving it, being incarcerated on charges of terrorism, studying in jail and becoming a lawyer, and then defending those who had been wrongfully imprisoned. Mehta, the director, claimed in an interview that he started off by making a film on “the larger canvas of terrorism”, which featured Azmi as a passing reference. He also recalled meeting Azmi and finding him to always be in a hurry and not particularly convinced about Mehta’s reasons for making a film about what he called “hopeless guys”. After Azmi’s death, the film changed its nature and became focused on him. It was shot on locations he inhabited—his office and his neighbourhood. Azmi was, in many ways, a perfect protagonist to mount a melodramatic narrative on, by making use of the rich history of courtroom-set dramas in popular Hindi cinema. But Mehta eschewed that potential in favour of a softer, kinder approach akin to a documentary, which he would perfect further in his next two films City Lights (2014) and Aligarh (2015). In the process, what he achieved was a film where hope appears as texture and not message. Mehta sets up a very bleak world but also makes sure to consistently envelop this bleakness with moments of hope.

Shahid is, for the sake of generic definition, a biographical film, but also a rather unusual one. It opens with Shahid’s assassination. The frame is a still shot outside his office where the camera is placed in a way that does not allow us to see what has happened. But by looking a little closely, one can spot Shahid’s (played by Rajkummar Rao) head in the reflection of the office door, bloody and limp. This frame slides left to reveal a blurred frame comprising two people having a conversation on justice. The melancholic background score slowly kicks in with the sound of the sarangi, as a man wearing a white shirt comes into focus. This is how we are introduced to Shahid, our hero, speaking with resolve and a wide grin on his face—a combination that finds echoes throughout the film, especially during his flirtatious interactions with his client-turned-wife Mariam (Prabhleen Sandhu). In the sequences set in jail, Shahid is often seen smiling when spending time taking lectures from an incarcerated professor Dr. Saxena (Yusuf Hussain). His first lecture begins with a shot from outside the jail cell where he is taking his classes. The bars of the cell are in focus, and the student and teacher inside them. As they keep talking, they slowly come into focus and the bars become blurred, becoming nothing but a minor inconvenience in the exchange of ideas. This reconfigures the prison as a space of physical confinement but emotional and mental expansion. As we follow Shahid’s intellectual journey, law emerges not just as the weapon in a grandiose moral quest for justice but as a discipline in a true sense, bolstered by a general curiosity about the world we inhabit.

Shahid released in theatres in 2013, in the same year as Jolly LLB, the more high-profile and commercially oriented film that turned its gaze towards the lower courts. It made use of the popularity of Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the news media to design a new visual environment for cinematic courtrooms as chaotic and farcical. But the lawyer-protagonist of the film shared the same frustrations with the judiciary that have traditionally been a concern in Hindi cinema—where everyday courtroom procedure is seen as corrupt and inefficient and therefore a hindrance to justice. This is where Shahid stands apart. True to the spirit of the person who inspired the film, Shahid insists on hope within the coordinates of the Indian judicial system, with its existing rules and procedures. “Waqt lagta hai, lekin ho jaata hai (It takes time, but it works out)”, is a refrain in the film—Shahid hears it first from mentor figure Ghulam Navi Waar (Kay Kay Menon) and then repeats the same to his clients whenever he consults them. In the two cases that the film follows him on, meant to symbolise the proceedings of all his other cases, we get to see Shahid argue on facts, employ effective cross-examination skills, carry out the documentary legwork and puncture the police narrative repeatedly. The film contrasts the courtroom space with the city outside—framed as suffocating and prone to violence—where the courtroom is a potential sanctuary despite its numerous problems. A montage near the middle of the film presents archival footage of various terrorist attacks that occurred between the 1990s and the 26/11 attack in Mumbai. But this montage is interspersed by shots of Shahid trying to deal with the increasing crowds outside his office, waiting for his counsel. Within this montage, we also see him argue in court. The soundtrack that plays over this montage is a cacophony of sounds—sounds of police and ambulance sirens, gunshots and bomb blasts, newsreaders and the chatter of people around his office. But there is a sense of plucky enthusiasm in Shahid for his work. To him, none of the terrorist attacks seem different from the rest—just more cases to defend as he remains steadfast in his faith on the power of the adversarial model of justice.

Like most films that put any morsel of the Indian establishment under the scanner in the past, watching Shahid in 2026 is also shrouded with the now exhausting question—would this film even release now? It cannot be denied that the film’s themes have found even greater resonance in the present, with the use of laws Azmi fought against, like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), becoming even more draconian than when he was alive. It is here that the film’s parting message of hope assumes a haunting quality. In Dr. Saxena, for example, whose reason for incarceration is not made explicit in the film, we find a spectral presence from our current world in a film made 13 years ago. Watching the film in 2026 forces us to think not only about Azmi’s faith and courage in the face of extreme hostility but also find our own coordinates in the present.