Haq (2025) is an Indian Hindi-language film directed by Suparn Varma. It features Yami Gautam Dhar (as Shazia Bano) and Emraan Hashmi (as Abbas Khan) in the lead roles. In its end credits, the film acknowledges that though the makers have taken creative liberties to fictionalize the narrative, it is predominantly inspired by the landmark Supreme Court judgment in Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum 1985 INSC 97. This was an important decision in which Shah Bano succeeded to claimed maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CRPC).
Although the film is not primarily a courtroom drama, it is a must-watch for law students and legal scholars. Rather than foregrounding courtroom spectacle, Haq's significance lies in its exploration of how law functions across social, political, religious, familial, and institutional domains.
Interestingly, the narrative of Haq is situated against the backdrop of India's developing jurisprudence on Muslim women's rights. It cursorily references early Supreme Court decisions such as Bai Tahira v. Ali Hussain Fissalli Chothia 1978 INSC 203 and Fazlunbi v. K. Khader Vali 1980 INSC 112, which decided the applicability of Section 125 CrPC to divorced Muslim women. This line of reasoning culminates in the judgment of Shah Bano (1985), which declared maintenance as a secular right transcending religious boundaries. The film also references the legislative backlash in the form of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, which, inter alia, restricted maintenance to the iddat period. In the same vein, it also references the enactment of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019, which criminalizes the practice of instant triple talaq.
As a matter of fact, Haq does not retell a factual account of Shah Bano's life and her legal struggle. The real Shah Bano, a woman in her sixties from Indore and the daughter of a police constable, fought a legal battle for maintenance, winning her case after nearly seven years, and withdrew her claim under sustained social and religious pressure. In contrast, the film reimagines its central figure as Shazia Bano—a younger, educated and vocal woman who maintains a notable presence in courtroom proceedings. Her father is portrayed as a maulvi, and the narrative concludes not with withdrawal but with triumph and a favourable legal decision.
Although the timing of the film's release—shortly before the Bihar elections—and its focus on issues within a marginalized minority community may necessarily invite political interpretation, Haq itself does not frame the legal struggle as a conflict between Islam and women's rights. This approach is crucial, particularly in a socio-political climate where Muslim women's issues are often instrumentalized to stigmatize an entire Muslim community and fuel an anti-Muslim narrative.
Additionally, the film has attracted criticism on several fronts, including its uneven execution, its depiction of the protagonist to act more as a vehicle for change than as an ordinary character, and its reliance on a familiar “saviour complex” trope that risks undermining the social narrative. Yet, Haq nevertheless makes a plausible attempt to foreground important questions of rights, legal pluralism, and gender justice that merit serious attention and engagement.
It is argued that rights are never given but must be claimed. Haq translates this insight into its narrative from the very outset. The opening interview statement, “Hamari ladayi sirf ek hi cheez ki rahi hai, hamara haq”, powerfully situates the film as a rights-based struggle, steering the narrative away from communal indictment. Furthermore, the film is careful not to portray Islam or Muslims as monolithic. Instead, through characters like Faraz and Shazia's father, it offers divergent voices within the Muslim community. Perhaps this could be one of the reasons why this film fails to attract the kind of sensational attention garnered by films like 'The Kerala Story' and 'The Kashmir Files'.
The film begins in 1967 in Uttar Pradesh, highlighting the loving married life of Shazia Bano and Abbas Khan. Shazia's life happily revolves around her husband and children. The marital discord arises when Abbas contracts a second marriage. The justification offered for second marriage as swab “divine recompense“ represents individual reasoning, not a theological mandate. The film does not endorse such views. It merely documents them as part of the factual matrix in which Shazia's life struggle unfolds.
Sylvia Walby argues that patriarchy operates through several interdependent social structures rather than isolated acts of oppression. So to say, Haq becomes relevant to feminist inquiry not because it dramatizes suffering, but because it exposes how women's subordination is sustained through ordinary domestic, cultural, religious, legal and economic structures. The pressure cooker metaphor used in the film, though seemingly banal, effectively unpacks how patriarchal logic diminishes intimate relationships to mere functional utility. In doing so, it normalizes abandonment as an ordinary occurrence instead of calling it out as an injustice.
It must be taken into consideration that a subtle danger in feminist analysis, specifically in postcolonial contexts, is the tendency to consider religion as inherently antithetical to women's rights. Scholars such as Saba Mahmood and Amina Wadud have long cautioned against this reductionism. Wadud's work on Qur'anic interpretation demonstrates that patriarchal outcomes habitually stem from historical power dynamics rather than theological necessity. In Haq, the life of Shazia is not presented as a rejection of faith, but as a challenge to gendered authority structures, a distinction central to contemporary feminist theory. As Flavia Agnes rightly observes that the issue is not the existence of personal law, but whose interpretation of that law prevails in courts.
Scholars such as Amina Wadud and Asma Barlas contend that Islamic jurisprudence embodies interpretive plurality, and that patriarchal outcomes often stem from socio-political dynamics. The film illustrates this by portraying Shazia as directly engaging with religious texts, including the recitation of the Qur'an and reliance on Qur'anic verses and Hadith to oppose instant triple talaq and to support her claim for maintenance. This depiction underscores that her arguments are rooted in interpretive engagement with religious sources, not as a rejection of faith. Similarly, before approaching the courts for maintenance, Shazia's father consults a Kazi, who strongly advises conciliation with Abbas on terms favourable to him, and emphasises not to disrupt Islamic harmony. Shazia's father who himself is a Maulana, struggles to understand how Shazia's claims are anti-Islamic.
One of the most significant contributions of Haq is its engagement with legal pluralism. Plural legal systems often place women in a “jurisdictional maze,” where access to justice depends on navigating overlapping terrains of religious, customary, and state institutions. The depiction of the tension between personal law and Section 125 of the CrPC serves as clear evidence of this conflict. Additionally, the social critique here is not directed at religion per se, but at institutional hierarchies that treat women's claims as disruptive rather than legitimate. As Ratna Kapur notes, women who approach courts are often framed as “bad subjects” for refusing silence. The film echoes this critique without portraying the Muslim community as uniquely regressive, as similar patterns are well-documented across personal laws governing different religious groups.
Moreover, the film depicts a social boycott of Shazia's family, withdrawal of students from her father's Qur'an classes, and even attacks on the family home. This social distancing faced by Shazia and her family reflects what Judith Butler identifies as the withdrawal of recognition (a powerful form of social control). It is found that women who assert rights often face penalties outside the courtroom, penalties that law neither anticipates nor remedies.
The film also makes an important feminist intervention by demonstrating that patriarchy is sustained not only through male authority but through social conditioning that is often internalized and reproduced by women themselves. This is reflected in the dialogue of Abbas's mother, who remarks, “Ab tum koi pehli aurat to ho nahi, jisne apna shauhar banta hai,”. Similarly, Shazia's own mother urges her to compromise with Abbas. In this way, the film exposes patriarchy as a structural and cultural construct quietly sustained through persuasive conditioning.
For students of law, The significance of Haq lies in its exposure of structural gender inequality, the conundrum of legal pluralism and the manner in which law operates in practice. The struggle for Haq here is legal and constitutional, not communal. It also offers a nuanced reminder that gender justice cannot be achieved by vilifying communities, but through reform and by questioning legal, social, and economic centres of power.
Interpreting the film as singling out Muslims as uniquely patriarchal and obscurantist or casting Islam as intrinsically oppressive to women would be to miss the forest for the trees. Such an analysis will surely obscure its central critique of structural inequalities operating through social, religious and institutional systems. When Shazia sits in the courtroom, she represents not only one community but millions of women awaiting justice.
The film ultimately reminds us that gender justice requires continuous institutional engagement and persistent vigilance grounded in rights. In this sense, it powerfully echoes Simone de Beauvoir's warning: “Never forget that it will be enough for a political, economic or religious crisis for the rights of women to be called into question. These rights are never acquired. You will have to remain vigilant throughout your life.”
The Author is a research scholar at Delhi University. Views Are Personal