While Bollywood celebrates fiction, have we forgotten Amar Nath of Jammu & Roshan Lal Jalla of Kashmir?
(Kashmir Rechords Exclusive)
Cinema loves its spies—men of steel who slip across borders, endure torture and return to a grateful nation. Films like Dhurrandhar romanticize the world of espionage as a theatre of courage, sacrifice and silent victories.
As Dhurrandhar Part 2 stands released on March 19, 2026, with Ranveer Kapoor once again stepping into the shoes of a daring cross-border spy, cinema will celebrate courage in shadows—slick, stylized and ultimately reassuring.
On screen, the spy always returns. In reality, some never truly come back.
Long before Bollywood discovered the drama of espionage, Jammu and Kashmir had already lived their own Dhurrandhars—not scripted, not celebrated and not even acknowledged.These were the real Dhurrandhars.
Amar Nath: The Spy Who Returned to Be Forgotten
In the early 1980s, a young ex-serviceman from Jammu—Amar Nath—crossed into Pakistan, not once but repeatedly, on missions that would never officially exist.
He went because the nation asked him to. He returned because he survived.
Each time, he brought back intelligence that mattered. Each time, he slipped quietly into anonymity—no medals, no citations, only the next instruction and the unspoken promise that the country stood behind him.
Until the day it didn’t.
Captured during one such mission, Amar Nath spent nearly a decade in Pakistani prisons. Tortured, broken, yet unyielding—his body became a map of suffering, scars he would later call his “medals.”
But the real blow came after his release.
In July 1992, outside Raj Bhawan Jammu, this man—who had risked everything for the nation—sat on a fast unto death, pleading not for glory, but for recognition. For survival.
Denied even his basic entitlements as an ex-serviceman—pension, gratuity, dignity—Amar Nath spoke openly to journalists about betrayal. The system he had served refused to acknowledge him. Even former colleagues chose silence.
He had crossed borders for India. Now he could not cross the distance between neglect and justice within it.
Homeless, having lost family and shelter during his incarceration, Amar Nath lived on the margins—until public outrage briefly forced the administration to act. He was picked up.
And then, he vanished from public memory.
Unconfirmed whispers suggest he may have been quietly “handled,” given some subsistence. But officially, like his missions—he ceased to exist.
Roshan Lal Jalla: Kashmir’s Silent Sentinel
If Amar Nath’s story unsettles, Roshan Lal Jalla’s story devastates.
Recently chronicled by Kashmir Rechords, Jalla—a Kashmiri intelligence operative—was captured in 1972 while returning from a mission across the border. What followed were fifteen years of disappearance inside Pakistani prisons. Fifteen years of interrogation cells. Fifteen years of calculated brutality.
He was beaten, electrocuted, stabbed while unconscious. His mind bore wounds deeper than his body. Yet through it all—he did not betray his mission.
Back home, tragedy unfolded in parallel. His wife, Santosh, died waiting. His father, Jia Lal Jalla, passed away without closure .His young son, Rajesh, grew up in absence and uncertainty.
Only his mother, Roopawati Jalla of Rainawari, Srinagar, kept knocking on doors that rarely opened.
A letter dated July 14, 1985, from the Indian Embassy in Pakistan confirmed what the system would later deny—that the State knew who Roshan Lal Jalla was, and where he was.
When he was finally released in 1987 as part of a prisoner exchange, he returned not to honour—but to indifference. No rehabilitation. No pension.No recognition.
Like Amar Nath, he too had been used, then erased.
👉 Read Spy Roshan Lal Jalla’s full story here:
https://kashmir-rechords.com/kashmirs-real-dhurandhar/
A Question That Lingers
Cinema will move on. Audiences will applaud. Another spy film will follow.
But somewhere in the forgotten margins of history lies Amar Nath and Roshan Lal, the men who once crossed into enemy territory for their country and then vanished . Amar Nath or Roshan Lal Jalla were not characters. They were commitments.
And perhaps, remembering them is not an act of charity—it is an overdue act of justice.
Some heroes don’t die in war. They disappear in neglect.
And perhaps the real question is not why Bollywood tells these stories—but why it never tells these ones.