It says a great deal for the state of our nation that a film like Shorgul runs into trouble simply because it is set in a town that witnesses communal killings, and which dares to create characters with a resemblance to real-life ones.
It is also the kind of film that sadly requires political intervention for it to release.
The film’s small UP town stands in, clearly, for Muzzafarnagar, which was the site of some of India’s worst rioting in 2013. It’s interesting to connect the dots between the reel and real characters: What degrees of separation are visible between Sangeet Som and Ranjeet Om, and Azam Khan and Alim Khan? But the threat of bans and so on turns the filmmakers and the film toothless.