Rajkumar Santoshi on Sunny Deol’s Batwara 1947 character says, “Better than Iron Man”

Rajkumar Santoshi on Sunny Deol’s Batwara 1947 character: Batwara 1947, dropping on the eve of Independence Day this year, is a Rajkumar Santoshi film starring Sunny Deol. While there is a lot of hype around the film, there has also been a little comparison with Gadar, which Deol refused. Amidst all of this is Rajkumar Santoshi’s claim that Sunny Deol’s role is ‘better than Iron Man’.

While the claim itself does a lot of work, creating a narrative, a discourse fans are now fuelled by, and a sense of excitement for the film itself, the sentence is worth dissecting at the heart of it. 

The Claim: Rajkumar Santoshi on Sunny Deol’s Batwara 1947 character

Rajkumar Santoshi did not just give away a passing compliment when he compared Sunny Deol’s character in Batwara 1947 to Iron Man, a character of the superhero genre; he rather made a direct and ranked claim as someone who has genuine authority to make it. According to the reports, he says, “He is STRONGER than #IronMan, #Superman put together!” 

Rajkumar Santoshi has undoubtedly written good action heroes like Ghatak and Ghayal; thus, the character written for Sunny Deol for Batwara 1947 can be expected of a higher level.

The claim that Rajkumar Santoshi makes is not a director vouching for an actor he has just discovered. Santoshi directed Ghayal, which won the National Film Award for Best Popular Film Providing Wholesome Entertainment and the Filmfare Award for Best Director among other awards, followed by Damini and Ghatak: all starring Sunny Deol. Thus the claim of this new character above the two superheroes combined comes after three decades of writing action heroes.

There is also an element of loyalty attached. When such a claim is made, one ought to look at the premise around which it is built.

The Loyalty Factor

If somebody asks for proof that the “Deol pull” is hypothetical, Gadar 2 is a case study. The film finished its theatrical run at over Rs. 600 cr worldwide, with a total net in India collection of over Rs. 500 cr and an overseas gross of about Rs. 65 cr. Thus, the fan loyalty seems believable.

So what films like Gadar 2 and Border 2 expose is the fact that Sunny Deol’s box office is not driven by discovery alone, but the core remains the element of memory or nostalgia. Even for sequels that critics did not consider perfect, the nostalgia attached to the character, the nostalgia that shaped the audience’s psyche so completely that the film succeeded in its own sense.

Star power does make the audience, especially the fans, get curious about an opening weekend. Loyalty gets the people to show up in the theatres even if the reviews are mixed because these transactions value the renewal of the ‘decade-old relations’ and ‘memories’.

That is the part a superhero franchise might find difficult because the audience gets invested in cameos, crossovers, and mid-credit teases. Sunny Deol’s audience does not need reasons to show up; they just want him to show up in a role that rhymes with a character they already love. Similar to SRK’s “Rahul phenomenon of the 2000s”. The loyalty is not transferable but follows the hero: the actor, something difficult to explain with numbers and data.

The Real Revelation

Marvel uses a decade and more than six interlinked films and a studio-set universe, finished off with post-credits cameos and a release calendar built in advance to build the kind of audience devotion that fills theatres on opening weekend and not just a single trailer view. Deol needed some banger premises and some dialogues like, “Ye dhai kilo ka haath jab kisi pe padta hai na” and some years of patience for the loyalty to compound.

The comparison Santoshi made about Sunny Deol’s Batwara character being better than Superman and Iron Man perhaps accidentally says something about the actor behind it rather than about the character itself. It suggests that Deol may be one of the rare Hindi film stars whose name alone functions as intellectual property: it is just him showing up. 

Intention, Influence and Indian Masses

Indian masses do not do fandoms halfway, or the older fans do not take a lot to the internet, but when their hero enters the frame, they shout, blow whistles, clap and celebrate; it is a complete festival, especially if their hero appears once in a while. It is not just a screening for the fans but prayers being heard. The masses do not chase the plot much; they chase the one dialogue, the moment, the actor that controls the moment. Stardom here is not just inherited but created; manufactured and built like a palace: brick by brick, without a hypeman.

Indian cinema at large is star-driven, and Sunny Deol on the theatre screen in itself would have been enough for the fans to block their dates, but Rajkumar Santoshi’s claim builds further excitement for the August 14 release Batwara 1947.

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