Vivek Agnihotri keeps pulling skeletons out of cupboards India would rather keep locked. The Tashkent Files poked at a suspicious death. The Kashmir Files tore open the wound of a genocide that the nation pretended never happened. Now The Bengal Files turns to a darker chapter still—the cycles of violence that Hindus in Bengal endured, and the studied silence that followed.

This is Agnihotri’s most accomplished work yet. The pacing is tighter, the characters richer, the narrative unrelenting. Yet, ironically, the film has not reached the same cult status that The Kashmir Files did. If you haven’t seen it, then you need to go ahead and see it. Perhaps that itself is telling. India is still not prepared to confront the reality of its effete slogans like “secularism" and come to terms with the real blood-stained, inconvenient, and unsanitised past.

The power of the film lies in its reclamation of memory. Gopal Patha, for instance, a real figure, who organised Hindu resistance during the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946. When the state became complicit in the killings of Hindus, Gopal stood up and organised a fightback so his people could survive. A hero by any standard. And yet his name is absent from our textbooks, absent from our national consciousness. That silence is not accidental. It is the result of decades of carefully curated history, where the courage of Hindus defending themselves........

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