Asian Heritage Month Film: Raazi

Raazi (transl. Agreement/Secretive) is a 2018 Indian Hindi-language spy thriller film.

Indian Army officer Lieutenant General Nikhil Bakshi addresses a group of Indian soldiers and officers including officer Samar Syed, aboard the Indian aircraft carrier INS Viraat, off the coast of Vishakapatnam. Stressing the importance of sacrifice in the performance of one’s duty to the country, he relates the greatest example of such sacrifice he has ever seen by detailing the exploits of a 20 year-old girl while serving as an undercover agent of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), India’s external intelligence agency, in Pakistan.

The story flashes back to events preceding the Bangladeshi War of Independence, 1971. Hidayat Khan is an Indian intelligence agent posing as an informant for the Pakistani military. By appearing to be an Indian traitor passing secrets to Pakistan, he cultivates a close friendship with Brigadier Parvez Syed of the Pakistan Army. Through this friendship, Khan gets wind of a big operation Pakistan is planning against India. Because Khan is dying of lung cancer, he fears he will not live long enough to uncover the details of this operation. He, therefore, asks his 20-year-old daughter Sehmat, a student at the Delhi University, to take up his mantle by becoming an agent and entering into an arranged marriage with Syed’s younger son, Iqbal, another military officer. Despite the tremendous sacrifice she will have to make, Sehmat readily agrees, declaring the paramount importance of her duty to her country over her personal desires.

See a complete list of Asian Heritage Month events.

Attend 2 or more Asian Heritage Month events for Co-Curricular Transcript (CCT) credit.

For more information, contact Vincent (Tze-Wen) Cheng at tcheng@bmcc.cuny.edu.

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