For Agastya Nanda, the legacy of Ikkis is not being settled at the ticket window. The 2025 Sriram Raghavan war film may have underperformed commercially, but Nanda says the cast and crew do not carry the project “like failures.” Instead, he points to the film’s subject and its peace message as the measure that matters.
A martyr at 21
The film tells the story of Arun Khetarpal, a second lieutenant who was martyred at age 21 during the Battle of Basantar in the 1971 Indo-Pak war. That framing gives the title its emotional weight and gives Nanda a different way to define success. “Peace will never go out of fashion,” he told PTI.
Nanda said no one involved in the film emerged feeling like a failure, because the production preached “peace and love” in a form that outlasts any opening weekend. The cast also includes Dharmendra, Jaideep Ahlawat, Sikandar Kher and newcomer Simrar Bhatia.
Credit and commerce
Vivaan Shah, Nanda’s co-star, said the film received the strongest reviews he has observed. He added that people are still writing essays about Ikkis, evidence that it “lives on in people’s hearts.”
Shah framed that critical response as real, but subject to the laws of the marketplace. Nanda made the same point more bluntly: if a star reliably generates money, bigger films follow; if not, producers will not take the risk. “It is not a personal thing, it is commerce,” he said.
The wait after Ikkis
Nanda, who debuted in The Archies in 2023, said he has not signed another film since Ikkis. He wants large-scale projects but is comfortable treating them as achievements to be earned. A five-year wait, he said, would be acceptable if that is what the path requires.
He pointed to smaller titles finding audiences — naming Hanuman Ansh and the Hollywood film Obsession — as examples of films that can travel beyond their budgets. The best a creative team can do, in his telling, is make something they believe in and hope the audience follows.
The two scorecards
These comments land in a period when box-office figures dominate how Hindi cinema judges a project. Nanda’s reflections outline a second scorecard:
- Commercial return decides whether an actor is offered bigger films.
- Critical memory can keep a film in essays and conversations after its run.
- Values and craft can generate pride for a cast even when earnings fall short.
The lesson is not that collections are irrelevant; it is that a film’s post-release life can be measured in more than rupees. The tension is not solved by the interview. What it offers is a reminder that Hindi cinema has always negotiated between commerce and memory, and Ikkis has become a small case study in that old argument.
Source: Hindustan Times
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