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Buried between shipping manifests for "Bombay Talkies Equipment" and "Lime & Gypsum (Kolar Mines)" is a single typed card: One (1) sealed metal canister, marked "Sikander 2 – Rushes, Reel 4." No declared contents. Detained under Section 7(b) of the Official Secrets Act, 1923. Transferred to Military Intelligence, Delhi Cantonment. Disposition: Unknown. Mira’s heart hammers. Sikander 2 wasn’t just lost. It was seized . Chapter 2: The Index Over the next three weeks, Mira builds what she calls The Index —a cross-referenced database of every document, rumor, and redacted file relating to the sequel.
The image flickers: black-and-white, nitrate-rich, ghostly. Sikander (played by the forgotten actor Sohrab Modi’s cousin, Kersi) stands on a rocky outcrop. Behind him, his Macedonian army looks exhausted. In front, the green plains of India.
But then—the twist. Sikander removes his helmet. He is not Greek. He is Indian. A spy? A changeling? The film doesn’t explain. It simply holds his face in close-up as he says:
Rohan shares his own index: newspaper clippings of "accidents" befalling everyone connected to the film. The cinematographer drowned in a bathtub. The lead actor (playing Porus) vanished from a train. The only survivor: a clapper boy who later became a folk singer in Kerala, singing a strange song about "the second Alexander who laid down his sword." Together, Mira and Rohan trace the reel to a disused radio station in the Himalayas, built by the British in 1942. The vault is real. The canister is real. index of sikander 2
After the screening, Mira always adds a new entry to her Index. Not about the film. About the audience.
Logline: A film archivist discovers a classified government file labeled INDEX OF SIKANDER 2 , leading her down a rabbit hole where a legendary unfinished movie intersects with a real-life espionage mystery. Prologue: The Missing Reel In the annals of Indian cinema, few myths are as tantalizing as Sikander 2 . The original 1941 film Sikander , about the young Alexander the Great’s clash with King Porus, was a roaring success. But its sequel—announced in 1944, shot partially in 1945, and then… erased—exists only in whispers.
She calls it
But the Index is never really closed.
Sikander speaks in Urdu—flawless, poetic, devastating: "I came to burn the world. But the world taught me to plant. They call me ‘Great’ because I conquer. But greatness is not a crown. It is a seed. Tonight, I order my generals: break the swords. Build schools. Stay. Not as rulers. As guests." The scene cuts to Porus’s camp. Porus laughs. "A wolf who asks to be a sheep is still a wolf."
"I am not the first Alexander. I am the last. And this is my Index: a list of all the kings who forgot that empires are just stories. Time is the only emperor." Disposition: Unknown
Only a single line in the official film registry: Chapter 1: The Archivist Mira Nair (no relation to the filmmaker) is a digital archaeologist for the National Film Archive of India. Her specialty: recovering "lost negatives" from the Partition era. She’s seen it all—moldy reels, silent-era ghosts, even a nitrate fire that singed her eyebrows.
A private collector named Rohan Khurana contacts her. "I own the first Sikander’s original costume," he says. "I’ve been looking for the sequel for twenty years. There’s a rumor: the lost reel contains not just a film, but a cipher —a message the British didn’t want Indians to see."
That night, in a freezing bunker, they project onto a sheet nailed to the wall. It was seized