Until two prolonged and pointed courtroom soliloquies are staged in quick succession late in the film – one is delivered by Emraan Hashmi, the other by Yami Gautam Dhar, with both actors acquitting themselves to perfection – Haq opts for sustained restraint even in its most dramatic passages. It is this temperance that defines the film.
It is rare for a Bollywood film these days not to froth at the mouth when talking about India's principal minority community and summarily stereotyping it. Directed by Suparn S. Varma and written by Reshu Nath, Haq tackles an emotive and sensitive topic. It could easily have gone overboard. That it does not is the film's greatest strength.
A fictionalised account of the Shah Bano case of the 1980s, Haq focuses on one woman's fight for her right in an environment in which the odds are heavily stacked against her. It does not, however, use the character's quiet belligerence merely as a stick to beat a religious group with. The film stays firmly centred on the question of gender assertion in the face of male entitlement.
One thought that might flash across some minds is: in a land where child marriages, female foeticide/infanticide and the lack of women's safety in public and private spaces continue to be daunting problems, why is a lawsuit from so many decades ago still of interest to Mumbai film producers? Is it because it fits into a narrative that enjoys currency today?
As Haq unfolds, the lingering misgivings over the film's larger motive are dispelled to a great extent because the script refrains from playing to the gallery in the way that movies of this nature usually tend to do. It examines legal, religious and gender issues through the prism of a protracted trial, and the eyes of one woman at the centre of it, without gloating over the well-documented verdict and its aftermath.
The plot of Haq hinges on a landmark legal battle that, four decades ago, pitchforked the practice of triple talaq and its repercussions on women into national limelight – but it is mindful of modulating the dramatisation in a manner that keeps sensationalism at bay.
Its blows are forceful all right but the film does not employ a sledgehammer to come down on its targets. Adapted from journalist Jigna Vora's book Bano: Bharat Ki Beti, the screenplay takes the liberty to incorporate fictional elements but does not overplay its hand for the most part.
The real-life woman around whom the story revolves was well past middle age when her divorce and subsequent travails turned into a nationwide talking point, the pugnacious protagonist of Haq is clearly not.
In the opening sequences of the film, Shazia Bano (Yami Gautam Dhar) sports a weatherbeaten look as she walks into a studio for an interview in 1985, but when the trial reaches its climax around the same point in her life in the film's final act, she looks much younger. Such inconsistencies notwithstanding, there isn't much that Haq muffs up.
Shazia's husband Abbas Khan (Hashmi), like the actual man he is modelled on, is a busy advocate. He is projected as somebody who knows the Constitution and the CrPC inside out but is anything but a devout Muslim steeped in the customs enjoined on followers of Islam.
Shazia, in contrast, is a barely educated daughter of a small-town maulvi (Danish Hussain) who is well-versed in the precepts of the Quran. When a personal crisis hits her out of the blue – her loving husband returns from a trip with a second wife, Saira (debutante Vartika Singh), in tow – it takes her a while to gather herself and figure a way out of the mess.
One thing leads to another and Shazia and her father, who stands by her physically and in spirit as the trial wends its way from a sessions court in Aligarh to the Allahabad high court and finally to the Supreme Court.
Shazia is represented in court by advocate Bela Jain (Sheeba Chaddha, hamstrung by an underwritten role) and her assistant Faraz Ansari (Aseem Hattangady), who is occasionally assailed by doubts over putting provisions of Muslim Personal Law on a collision course with Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
Haq stays rooted in the real world. Through its middle portions, it trains the spotlight primarily on the tussle between Abbas Khan's two wives for his attention, the steady aggravation of Shazia's plight and the actions and jibes of a mean-spirited, meddlesome neighbour who, in one early sequence, exhorts Abbas to rein in his feisty wife only to be firmly rebuffed.
Abbas is no monster. He is a law-abiding individual who, with the aim of depriving Shazia of alimony and child support, isn't averse to falling back on the powers that the Shariat purportedly bestows on men. That act of convenience pits him against Article 44 of the Constitution of India. The clash of two codes – one rooted in faith, the other in the domain of jurisprudence – constitutes the core of the film.
As a legal drama, Haq suffers no missteps that it cannot make amends for. As an exploration of a woman seeking what she deserves as the abandoned wife of a well-to-do man, it builds its case in favour of the fighter bit by bit, extracting drama not from grand confrontations but small divergences and frictions, turning a chhoti ladaai (small domestic skirmish) into a badi jung (big national war).
The script gives the two leads all the room that they need. Yami Gautam Dhar and Emraan Hashmi make the most of it with some effort to spare. Newcomer Vartika Singh, too, has her moments. But Sheeba Chaddha and Danish Husain are saddled with roles that could have done with more elucidation.
Haq manages to make its point without bursting a vein.
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Emraan Hashmi, Yami Gautam, Sheeba Chaddha, Danish Husain