The nationalist turn in Indian cinema
Increasingly India's cinematic output is reflecting a Hindutva interpretation of history
Long time readers of this newsletter will know I’m a big fan of the movies. Over the years I’ve seen plenty of non-English language films. Owing to his 2006 monster movie The Host, I was already a fan of Bong Joon Ho long before he encouraged audiences to “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles”, but despite that, I’d for a long time been sleeping on the movies of the country with the largest film industry. I’ve rectified that in recent years. Anubhav Sinha’s Mulk (2018), about the innocent family members of a man involved in a terrorist attack, is one of the best courtroom dramas I’ve seen, and I’m glad that the city I live in has become cosmopolitan enough that I was able to see Nag Ashwin’s Kalki 2898 AD (2024) at the local multiplex. I’m anticipating the sequel to this massive sci-fi epic as much, if not more than, the next Dune installment. But I feel like in many ways I’ve come into the world of Indian cinema at a bad time, as the movies coming out of the country increasingly reflect the politics of the Modi regime, particularly the historical epics.
Padmaavat (2018) is one of the most expensive Indian films ever made. Based on a 1540 epic poem, it tells the story of a mythical fourteenth-century Hindu queen named Padmavati, who is lionised for burning herself alive in the face of a Muslim invasion. The film upset both Muslim and Hindu audiences, with protests turned to riots taking place in several parts of India in the days leading up to its release. Karni Sena, a Hindu nationalist group, claimed that the film (which at that point no one had seen) showed the Hindu queen dancing and romancing the film’s Muslim villain. Following its release, the negative portrayal of a Muslim ruler led to the film being banned in Malaysia.
Muhammed Shah Shajahan, writing in the journal National Identities, notes that the portrayal of the Muslim ruler Alauddin Khalji in the film as “a heinous, savage, and lascivious king” has drawn much criticism from scholars who have argued that the depiction of Khalji is driven by the contemporary propaganda concept of ‘love Jihad’, a term popularised by Hindu nationalist organisations implying “the fear of Hindu community about their women being lured, wooed, and trapped by Muslim men.”
Mohimarnab Biswas, in the chapter he contributed to Historicizing Myths in Contemporary India compares this portrayal of Khalji in Padmaavat with the portrayal of Udaybhan Singh Rathore in Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior (2020). According to Biswas, the “barbaric” Muslim stereotype used in Padmaavat is reproduced in Tanhaji. Udaybhan is shown roasting a crocodile, then eating it in a manner that “has an uncanny similarity with the way the character of Alauddin Khilji eats in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2018 blockbuster Padmaavat.” The framing of Muslim characters as lecherous predators is also similar in both films:
“In Padmaavat, Khilji sprinkles the perfume on the body of a woman and rubs her against himself to acquire the scent. In Tanhaji, Udaybhan is shown going very close to Kamal and smelling her. In another scene, he voyeuristically looks at Kamal while she bathes. The so-called “sexual perversion” of the “barbaric Muslim” is ingrained in Udaybhan’s characterisation.”
Biswas notes that in contemporary Indian cinema, historical epics are “invariably made following the Brahmanical mode of historiography” —that is, through a high-caste Hindu lens. He compares the portrayal of barbarous Muslims with the “attempt at glorification of hegemonic Hindu masculinity” present in Tanhaji which tells the story of a warrior recapturing the fortress of Kondana in Pune from the Mughal empire in 1664, wiping out most of the Mughal soldiers in the process. The Mughal empire was an Islamic empire that ruled the subcontinent from the early sixteenth century until the establishment of the British Raj.
Biwas also took an aesthetic studies approach to examining the film, writing that the colours used for Tanhaji, a mixture of yellow and orange, “symbolise his courage, warmth, hope, and enthusiasm” while Udaybhan by contrast is represented through shades of black and blue “to externalise the “evil” and “manipulative” traits in him.” He describes these contrasting colours as a “fire and ice sort of binary.”
Baijayanti Roy writes of the use of colour to make political statements in Padmaavat as well as Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s earlier film Bajirao Mastani (2015). In Padmaavat, Alauddin and his implicitly all Muslim soldiers are always depicted in black, “while the Rajput army, apparently comprising only Hindus, turn out as a sea of saffron.”
If you know a little about Indian politics, you’ll know the significance of the colour saffron. In Dev Patal’s 2024 Film Monkey Man (made by North American studios but set in India) the banners of a fictional political party were digitally changed in post production from saffron to red likely to avoid being seen as commenting on the BJP government when the film was released in India. The 2019 film Kesari (which literally translates as Saffron) is about the soldiers of the 36th Sikh Regiment of the British Indian Army at the Battle of Saragarhi on 12 September 1897, fighting off 10,000 Pashtun tribesmen in what is today Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa district. In the late nineteenth century, Gulistan Fort, the setting for most of the film, was the border between British-held territory and Afghanistan.
Silvia Tieri points out that while saffron has a symbolic meaning in different Indian religious traditions, most commonly today, “Saffron’s association with Hinduism and more recently political Hinduism remains the strongest”—so much so that adjectivising something as ‘saffron’ as in the case of Kesari “provides it with a Hindu nationalist connotation.” The protagonist Singh-Kumar’s saffron turban is “creative licence” that is not historically accurate. The symbolism of the saffron colour is stressed in a line of dramatic Punjabi dialogue, featured in the trailer for the film; “Ajj meri pagri vi kesari! Jo bahega mera lahu vi kesari! Aur mera jawab bhi kesari!” (Today the turban I wear is SAFFRON. I will bleed SAFFRON and my comeback will also be SAFFRON!)
Numerous other examples of creative licence are identified by Tieri. Appearing briefly in the film’s trailer, an official looking table appears on a blackboard, titled Sikh Regiment: Saragarhi Sanketan Choki (Sikh Regiment: Saragarhi Guard Post) in Devanagari script. At the time the film is set, Punjab had been under British colonial rule for approximately 50 years, and the language used by the British Army was Urdu, written in Nastaliq or Latin script. Using the more historically accurate Nastaliq script would cause viewers to associate it with the Urdu language, and thus Islam, complicating a simple clash of civilisations narrative, while using Latin characters would “emphasise that the trailer’s brave soldiers were serving as the armed arm of a foreign project of domination: frictions that the trailer wants to conceal and de-problematise instead.”
According to Tieri, this de-problematised depiction of Sikh soldiers fighting for the British colonial regime reinforces a “Raj nostalgia” popular in Britain in the era of Brexit. British historians writing on the history of Islam in the subcontinent portrayed Muslims as invaders, and Hindu nationalist historians have taken their cue from these colonial British histories. The British in India portrayed themselves as ‘liberators’ from centuries of Muslim rule. Prafulla Kelkar, editor of The Organiser, the magazine of the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), has argued that the periods of rule by both Muslim dynasties and the British are “identical” in their aims but different in their methods. ‘Decolonisation’ in the modern Hindutva understanding of the term is, in the words of journalist Sanya Dhingra, “as much about erasing the legacies of the “Islamic conquests” of India as it is about erasing those of the British Empire.” This provides context for the somewhat sympathetic portrayal of the British Raj in Kerasi. This historiography which divides Indian history into an ancient Hindu period, the mediaeval Muslim period, and the modern British period also allows us to place the historical epics Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior and Padmaavat in the wider historical narrative they exist in.
2022’s RRR (Rise Roar Revolt) which is one of the few Indian films to gain a wide audience among foreign English speakers, having become one of the most watched movies on Netflix, also has its own “seriously troubling politics” which are easy to miss if you’re not familiar with today’s India and the way history is being framed in contemporary cinema. Watching films from other countries is a great way to become more knowledgeable about the world, but as cinema can be a vector for propaganda- even if the movies themselves are entertaining and perhaps otherwise praiseworthy- watching these films should only be a part of your exploration of the world, and not a substitute for learning more from non-fictionalised history.