Fiza at 25: Politics, Faith & the Women Who Remember

By Kalpana Kumari

I was nine when Fiza released. My mother took my sister and me to a theatre in Nehru Place, Delhi, along with my Masi and her kids. I was the youngest. Before that day, I would often try to understand films that spoke of things beyond my world, about people, politics, or pain, but the meanings always escaped me. My mother would smile and say that some films were meant to be understood only when we were older.

But Fiza was different. It was the first movie of its kind that I truly understood.

I didn’t have the language for it then, but I remember being stunned, feeling something deep I couldn’t name. For the first time, I grasped a film that spoke of society and politics, not just stories. I wanted to share my feelings and when I came home, I asked my father about communalism. He tried to explain gently, but the idea was too big for me to grasp in its entirety. But the film had planted something in me.

The scene that moved me the most was Amaan, played by Hrithik Roshan, desperately trying to save a child during the riot yet ending up accused of doing the opposite. In that moment, hate swallowed innocence. The gesture of saving a life turned into an act of suspicion of extinguishing it. That single reversal captured everything the film wanted to say about how hate distorts truth, and it has stayed with me ever since.

I never got to watch Fiza again for years, yet it kept returning, in fragments, in songs, in feelings. It amazes me how much of it stayed. Its return was not coincidence but consequence, born of a film made with rare truthfulness. Fiza is a heartbreaking story told with sincerity and grace. Its beauty lies in how it frames communal politics through the lens of a family torn apart by it. It is not only a social commentary but an emotional landscape of faith and endurance, told without embellishment, showing neither pain as drama nor politics as theory, only the quiet cost of surviving them.

The story unfolds through Fiza’s eyes, played by Karisma Kapoor, a woman who has lost her innocent younger brother to the politics of hate. What makes her condition unbearable is not only that he is gone, but that she doesn’t know how he has ended up. Between imagining a dead brother and fearing a living one who may have crossed into violence, she is suspended between hope and denial.

Fiza’s pain is deepened by that of her mother, Ammi, played by Jaya Bachchan, a woman who continues to live only through the hope of seeing her son again. Ammi embodies the quiet resistance of a mother. She prays, she waits, she breaks and, in her silence, lies the film’s most human statement: that faith without humanity is a death in itself. Yet they live, though not in any real way. 

Ammi’s faith was sealed the moment the riots broke out. She became a woman destined for grief, and a mother unable to accept the loss of her son; both literal and emotional. She died two deaths: first, of her soul, when she could not find him for years; and second, of her entire being, after she found him and learnt his truth. The faith that had been her last chance at survival collapsed under the weight of hate and politics.

Fiza too is unlike most women written for Hindi cinema. She is not an object of pursuit or a prize to be won. She is a person trying to survive an unbearable reality. Her anger is quiet but purposeful, the kind that comes from seeing too much and still choosing compassion. Beneath it lies honesty, sincerity, and an unshakable moral clarity. She refuses leisure and safety, anything that could dull her sense of duty. She even refuses love because she knows she cannot live halfway. There is tenderness in her restraint, and dignity in her pain. 

She is vulnerable but not weak, lost yet deeply self-aware, strong yet tender, perceptive and quietly defiant. Her quiet rebellion is beautifully captured in the song Main Nachun Bin Payal. The song is her way of showing what she is not, a woman untouched by pain, unburdened by memory. She performs others’ idea of freedom only to reveal its impossibility in her life. The song becomes a metaphor for every woman who refuses to be molded into someone else’s idea of joy and freedom.

Anirudh, who loves Fiza quietly, is written with rare sensitivity. He loves her without possession, never mistaking closeness for control. His affection is patient, grounded in respect, and free of the usual noise of pursuit. In the title song, the essence of his love becomes clear, he sees Fiza as someone quiet and sacred, a presence he reveres rather than desires. There is truth in her eyes and sincerity in the way he looks at her, a kind of love rarely written for women in Hindi cinema.

Even Amaan’s lover, Shenaz, played by Shabana Raza, whom we remember from the beautiful song Aa Dhoop Malu, becomes part of this emotional map. Her story shows another face of loss, love reshaped by time and circumstance, forced to let go before the heart is ready. Her brief presence captures the quiet sorrow of women who must keep living. She waits for Amaan until she runs out of time. Moving on becomes a duty, as a daughter, as a woman expected to belong to someone.

Through Fiza, Nishat and Shenaz, the film constructs a feminine archive of trauma, women who remember what the world tries to forget.

Amaan stands at the fault line of this turmoil, not its cause, but its casualty. He is both victim and perpetrator, a boy whose gentleness is swallowed by the noise of hate. You can sense the innocence in him, someone who once wanted to protect, now pulled into a violence he doesn’t fully understand. His anger isn’t born of cruelty but of confusion, the kind that takes seed in a world that offers no meaning but violence. His passion, sincere but tragically misdirected, finds its voice in the song Mere Watan, where love for one’s land turns into a yearning for belonging. 

His transformation into a militant is not dramatized as evil. It is shown as a slow corrosion, one decision after another made under the illusion of purpose. Amaan is an impressionable young mind who lost his reflection in the mirror of ideology, used by men who feed on hate. When he finally breaks, you see both the tenderness he represented and the despair he became. It remains one of Hrithik Roshan’s most affecting performances. He brought beauty to bewilderment, and ache to conviction.

As I grew older and began questioning the world around me, including art, I realised how much trash I had consumed in the name of cinema, especially from Bollywood. I saw how courage and sensitivity were rarely part of our stories, how women were written as possessions, how love was turned into pursuit, and how honest emotions had no place in a world that preferred spectacle over sincerity. Above all, I saw how cinema had become detached from reality — how it traded truth for noise, and reflection for display. We learned to celebrate noise, to mistake aggression for strength and detachment for depth. Our cinema mirrored that emptiness back to us, teaching us to feel less, not more.

In that blur, a film like Fiza stood out, quiet in tone yet courageous in feeling. It created art at the crossroads of our reality, where emotion and politics met without spectacle. It carried honesty and sincerity, reminding us that strength can exist without cruelty and love without possession. It also showed that art could still be meaningful. And in the midst of those realisations, as the world outside grew angrier and more fractured, Fiza kept returning to me as proof that sincerity endures; that truth can still be told and sustained. We may not see it often, but when it comes, it keeps us alive, keeps us moving, and helps us not drown in the lies, hate, and insincerity of the world, both artistic and otherwise.

Twenty-five years later, the child who once sat in that dark theatre thinking about the film, its beauty, its sadness, its meaning, now stands as an adult realising that what she saw that day wasn’t just a movie. It was a mirror: one that reflected not only the politics of a country, but the conscience of a young girl trying to make sense of it.

And it still does.

By Kalpana Kumari