In 2022, when “The Kashmir Files” was released in India, it generated unprecedented communal euphoria. Set at the start of a long-running separatist insurgency that began in 1989, the Hindi film is about the violent attacks against Kashmiri Pandits, a Hindu minority in the Muslim-majority region, that led to their mass exodus. After the film’s release, social media platforms were filled with videos of audiences raising anti-Muslim slogans in packed theaters, entreating people to “shoot the traitors.” Hindu nationalist activists called for “revenge” against Muslims, while critics panned the film as a propagandist production that painted Muslims as barbaric, exaggerated the death toll of the Pandits and sidestepped the fact that even Kashmiri Muslims were killed during the events.
One part of the Pandit community accused the filmmaker, Vivek Agnihotri, of appropriating their suffering for his anti-Muslim agenda, while others claimed that viewing the film was a cathartic experience. At the International Film Festival of India in 2022, the chief juror, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, called it “vulgar propaganda” and its submission “inappropriate,” stirring a controversy that prompted Israeli Ambassador Naor Gilon to intervene and apologize. Agnihotri, however, compared his film to Steven Spielberg’s 1994 Holocaust drama “Schindler’s List,” describing it as a “soft, emotional film” about Hindu genocide.
Supporters of the film included Prime Minister Narendra Modi and several Hindu nationalist leaders, who lauded it for showing what they said was the “truth” and an overlooked aspect of Kashmir’s history.
“They are shocked that the truth that was hidden for so many years is out and is backed by facts,” Modi said. Despite the polarizing responses, “Kashmir Files” became the third-highest-grossing film of 2022, earning over $41 million.
This fervor, however, was in sharp contrast to the reception that Dibakar Banerjee, one of the most distinctive filmmakers in Hindi cinema, received after he directed a film with a similar setting. In 2019, the streaming giant Netflix commissioned Banerjee to produce “Tees” (“30”), telling the story of three generations of a Muslim family living in India across three timelines. The first generation lives in the 1980s, when Kashmir was simmering with communal tension, and the Pandits were compelled to flee the valley. The second generation lives in the present, as rising Hindu nationalism has led to increasing discrimination against the community. This prejudice flares up in distinct ways such as Muslims being unable to find rental accommodation in a city such as Mumbai, which is a historic melting pot of people of multiple faiths and cultures. The third generation lives in 2042, in a dystopian future where Muslims are assigned scores based on stringent social etiquette. These scores, in turn, regulate their access to public spaces.
By 2022, when the film was ready, Netflix was not. The streaming giant backed out, citing uncertainty over releasing “Tees” at a time when communal and political tensions in India were on the rise, leaving Banerjee to arrange private screenings and find a buyer for his film himself. He has yet to find one.
These two conflicting examples underline the rising polarization in the Hindi film industry over the past decade, since Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ascended to power. The party’s governance has promoted Hindu nationalism, which espouses the cultural and political hegemony of Indian Hindus, who make up 80% of the population.
Hard-line Hindu nationalists have found allies in one part of the Hindi film industry. Films vilifying Muslims as terrorists, antagonizing Pakistan and making sweeping statements about the ills of Islam have proliferated. Several filmmakers have been willing to become mouthpieces of the government, prioritizing nationalistic themes and fanning jingoism at the cost of rewriting history and twisting facts.
At the same time, the small group of filmmakers who criticize the regime and its politics are operating in a culture of self-censorship and fear. They struggle to procure funding for their projects, and when they create a film that does not accommodate the politics of the Hindu nationalists, it exposes them to possible bans, threats on social media and legal action.
In a country where filmmaking is geographically widespread, the Hindi part of the industry operating out of Mumbai is the largest (roughly 1,000 films are churned out annually) and the most influential. It played an integral role in nation-building and promoted the ideas of modernization and industrialization as envisioned by India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1947, and over the years reflected the mood of the nation. Films made following independence in the 1950s and ’60s were steeped in patriotism and were intended for a young nation. In the 1970s, as India’s economy faltered, films typified the male leader as “the angry young man” who was furious and disillusioned with the system. By the 1990s, when economic liberalization yielded a middle class, films reflected the rising aspirations of the global Indian.
Seen in this light, perhaps the current fault lines in Hindi films mirror the mood of the nation. People are divided over politics, minority communities find themselves marginalized, and there is a crackdown on freedom of expression. But the degree of propaganda and anti-Muslim rhetoric in Hindi cinema, popularly known as Bollywood, is unprecedented.
For instance, the recent film “Hamare Baarah” (“Our 12”), which focuses on population growth in India, fans demographic fears among the Hindu majority that they are at risk of being overtaken by Muslims because the latter supposedly procreate more. Many BJP leaders, including Modi, have often referred to the Muslim community as those “who have more children” or those with “four wives and 36 children,” even though government data reveals a less dramatic picture. The fertility average in Muslim families fell from 4.41 in 1992 to 2.36 in 2021. For Hindu families, it fell from 3.3 to 1.94 in the same period.
“Hamare Baarah” revolves around a Muslim man who already has 11 children but has forced his wife (who is much younger than he is) to conceive another child, even though he is aware that this 12th pregnancy poses a threat to her life. The film’s release was stalled when petitions were submitted on the grounds that it was derogatory about the community. But the Bombay High Court cleared its release after asking for the deletion of certain scenes, while stating that the film aims at “uplifting women.” Contrary to this contention, several scenes show Muslims who are being directly blamed for having additional children and obstructing India’s development path.
Similarly, in 2023, “The Kerala Story,” which was released amid much media frenzy, was based on another vicious conspiracy theory, that of “love jihad.” This theory claims that Muslim men lure Hindu women in a bid to convert them to Islam and has been endorsed by several BJP-led state governments that have introduced legislation to prevent such “forcible conversions.” Moreover, Hindu nationalists have warned women to be wary of Muslim men. Attempts to crack down on interfaith marriages by vigilante groups that have little regard for agency and personal choice are no longer uncommon.
The film originated from one such claim — that Hindu and Christian women in the state of Kerala were coerced into converting to Islam, joining the Islamic State group and moving to Afghanistan. The filmmakers asserted that this story was based on the lives of 32,000 girls and young women who faced an ordeal of this sort. But as media scrutiny grew and the producers failed to back up the claim, the number was altered to three.
“Even if one girl was subjected to this, my head would hang in shame,” Sudipto Sen, the film’s director, told New Lines. “But people are not interested in the story; they are interested in the number.”
Modi endorsed “The Kerala Story,” and the BJP organized special screenings of the film for “young Hindu women.” But critics called it a “lengthy WhatsApp forward” and suggested that it was poorly made and the acting was subpar, while the content peddled half-truths. After the release, disruptions occurred across the country, with intense protests breaking out in southern states like Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The film was banned in the state of West Bengal.
Despite the row, “The Kerala Story” emerged as one of the highest-income productions of 2023, earning $36 million at the box office. (Sen followed it up earlier this year with “Bastar: The Naxal Story,” which was based on the 2010 attack by Maoist insurgents that killed 76 paramilitary police in the state of Chhattisgarh. However, it was similarly panned and failed to perform commercially.)
The growing number of such films is making people sit up and reckon with the changing nature of Bollywood, which has long prided itself on being a secular microcosm. The Hindi film industry exercises colossal influence on the masses and shapes identities and culture; historically, the shared passion for Bollywood films united a country made up of multiple faiths. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fact that for over three decades the reigning superstars in India have been three Muslim actors: Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan. With Hindi cinema in some instances moving from a secular to a Hindu nationalist perspective, the religious identity of the three Khans is now in the forefront of debate.
In the past decade, there has been a surge of nationalistic films that glorify the aggressive stance of the Modi-led government toward terrorism and that use film plots to advance stereotypes about Muslims and antagonize Pakistan. In 2019, ahead of the general elections, an attack by a Pakistan-based group killed 40 Indian paramilitary personnel in the Pulwama district of Kashmir. After the attack, Modi’s campaign took a hypernationalist turn. Thus “Uri: The Surgical Strike” was released, based on a similar attack that killed 19 Indian soldiers in Kashmir in 2016 and on India’s retaliatory “surgical strikes” on militant launchpads in Pakistan.
“Uri” was among the highest-grossing films of 2019. Politicians and the public alike responded enthusiastically. A quote from the film — “This is the new India. It will enter your home and kill you” — turned into a catchphrase used by several BJP leaders during the election season. Filmmaker Aditya Dhar and actor Vicky Kaushal both received prestigious National Film Awards from the government, which many perceived as an official acknowledgment of the undertaking.
Since then, films inspired by stories of intelligence officers and spies running covert operations against “India’s enemies” (ranging from Pakistanis to homegrown Muslim militants, China or separatist groups like the Kashmiris or the Khalistanis) have proliferated on Indian screens. For instance, the 2023 film “Mission Majnu,” starring popular actor Siddharth Malhotra, told the story of an Indian spy in Pakistan who was tasked with finding information about the country’s nuclear tests. Malhotra had previously played the role of Indian army officer Vikram Batra, who died during the 1999 Kargil War between the two nations.
Ahead of the 2024 elections, a number of films and web series were released based on the 2019 Pulwama attack and the subsequent response by India, which claimed its air force killed “a large number of terrorists” in the town of Balakot in Pakistan. One of the highest-profile films was “Fighter,” which starred A-list actors like Hrithik Roshan, Deepika Padukone and Anil Kapoor. Another was “Article 370,” which uncritically celebrated the Modi government’s controversial decision to revoke the semiautonomous status previously granted to the region of Jammu and Kashmir. (Kashmir has been contested between India and Pakistan since 1947 and has been dealing with a separatist insurgency since the early 1990s.) But the film remained silent on the rampant house arrests, lockdowns and the blanket ban on communications — all of which were imposed for almost 18 months in the aftermath of the government’s decision.
In the book “H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars,” journalist Kunal Purohit explains the appeal of this sort of soft indoctrination: “What makes propaganda-as-pop culture so effective is its everydayness, the easy access that it has to its prey. Its prey does not need to take the effort to visit a political public meeting. … The prey just has to feel the need to be entertained.”
Apart from politics, these narratives have one other thing in common: Their depictions of Muslims and Pakistanis are wrapped in stereotypes. The male characters are portrayed as excessively religious, wearing skull caps and donning kohl. They are hypersexualized beings who are either enablers of Pakistan’s agenda in India or betrayers of India’s security. The women, on the other hand, are mostly presented without any agency over their bodies. In reference to “Fighter,” film critic Uday Bhatia points out that a “dreaded Pakistani pilot wears more kohl [eyeliner] than Deepika Padukone has in her last three films.”
There were similar criticisms in 2018, when “Padmaavat” portrayed Alauddin Khilji, a Muslim ruler of the Khilji dynasty, and his blind obsession with the beautiful Rajput (Hindu) queen, Padmavati, which led him to attack her kingdom. Although commercially successful, the film was criticized by many historians for bypassing facts and depicting Khilji as an unhinged barbarian who ate raw meat and displayed animalistic tendencies.
“Padmaavat” was part of a rising trend of revisionist historical dramas that render India’s complex history in simplistic terms as Hindu versus Muslim, with Hindu historical figures shown as benign rulers, brave and kind to a fault. Hindu nationalists have argued that both Indian curricula and pop culture have for too long celebrated “Islamic rulers” who ruled over the region and ignored the nation’s “glorious Hindu history.”
As if to correct this, in 2022, Yash Raj Films, one of the most prominent studios in India, produced the biopic of Prithviraj Chauhan, the 12th-century Hindu king who fought two battles against Muhammad Ghori of the Ghurid dynasty in Ghazni (in present-day Afghanistan) and lost. The film dubbed him the “last Hindu ruler of Delhi,” whose death marked the beginning of the “Islamic conquest” of India. The film was widely criticized for its historical inaccuracy and for catering to present-day polarization. In fact, in its bid to valorize the Hindu ruler, the film excluded depictions of his losses in battle.
Similarly, “Panipat,” based on an 18th-century battle between Sadashivrao Bhau, an ethnic Maratha and Hindu ruler in India, and the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Durrani, was released in 2019.
Earlier films set in the Islamic era would emphasize the pluralistic and interfaith nature of those times. However, now it seems that parts of history may be out of bounds for Indian filmmakers. For instance, in 2019 Karan Johar — one of the most visible directors in Hindi cinema — announced his passion project, “Takht,” set in the Mughal era. But when it was not released in 2020 as planned, speculation was rife that this was because of the political climate in the country.
The past decade has also witnessed a steady rise in films that elevate Modi’s persona, while former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s political legacy is being scrutinized. Later this year, “Emergency” will explore the 21-month period in the 1970s when fundamental rights were curtailed and the press was censored. Gandhi will be played by popular actor Kangana Ranaut, who, as one of the most vocal supporters of the BJP in the film industry, recently won election as a parliamentarian representing the party.
“India: The Modi Question,” a BBC documentary on Modi’s complicity in the 2002 Gujarat riots, was banned in India following tax raids on the corporation’s offices in Delhi. Conversely, trailers for films that suit the BJP’s agenda on the riots, when over 1,000 people died under Modi’s watch, are being released.
A film demeaning the Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) was also released recently. JNU has historically been a hotbed of student activism and left-leaning politics in the country but has recently been on the radar of the Modi government and has also been attacked by right-wing trolls on social media.
The tremendous success of some propaganda releases, however, has proved the saleability of certain kinds of films. Many of these films also received tax breaks from governments in BJP-led states. Providing tax breaks has become one method of endorsing films and making them more accessible.
“When the state follows a certain kind of bias, in this case, majoritarianism, the society transforms according to its oppressive pressure,” Banerjee said. “The message is: ‘If you profess what the state is practicing, you will get more rewards.’”
“Once you have incentive for a certain theme, you tend to become lazy in the overall detailing of it,” said filmmaker and lyricist Varun Grover, reflecting on the simplistic politics of recent Hindi films and the agenda-driven filmmaking.
At the other end of the spectrum, a handful of filmmakers who criticize the regime and its politics are operating on small budgets and limited releases. For instance, the prominent filmmaker, Anurag Kashyap, was forced to pour all his savings into making one of his latest films, “Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat” (in which a Hindu girl falls in love with a Muslim boy), after a big studio dumped it midway through production.
In 2021, Netflix shelved Kashyap’s three-part adaptation of New York-based author Suketu Mehta’s “Maximum City.” Mehta’s 2004 narrative nonfiction book detailed the social and political life of Mumbai. Kashyap’s health spiraled downward in the aftermath of this reversal and he suffered two heart attacks.
“Why greenlight it, then change your mind?” he told The Washington Post in an interview last year. In 2021, his properties and businesses were raided by tax officials — a move that he called “politically motivated.” One of the most vocal critics of the BJP, Kashyap temporarily quit X (formerly Twitter) in 2019, after his parents and daughter began receiving threats.
British actor Dev Patel experienced something similar with his directorial debut “Monkey Man,” a revenge action drama that draws on Hindu mythology — especially Lord Hanuman, the popular monkey god — and depicts the rise of a right-wing government and persecution of minorities in a city that bears similarities to Mumbai.
The film was slated to stream on Netflix, but the streamer allegedly dropped it, leaving Patel to look for a buyer. That led to filmmaker Jordan Peele’s involvement in the project, which culminated in the theatrical release by Universal Studios. The film was not released in India, however, and reports reveal that it is stuck indefinitely in the certification process, despite cuts and changes.
Fears arose in the industry in 2019 when the Amazon Prime streaming series “Tandav” was accused of hurting the religious sentiments of Hindus. The objection was to a scene in which a student in a university similar to JNU was playing the Hindu god Shiva in a stage play.
The dispute snowballed into multiple legal cases, with the streaming giant’s chief principal in India, Aparna Purohit, on the verge of being jailed. Platforms dropped several political shows and films that had already been created and were ready for release.
Since then, streamers and filmmakers have become inordinately vigilant about unwritten censorship diktats in this “new India.” This reporter reached out to many filmmakers and producers, but they refused to speak about the restrictions under which they are working.
Other films have made similar attempts to respond to the Indian political climate with a critical lens. They include veteran filmmaker Sudhir Mishra’s “Afwaah” (“Rumor”). In this film, a Muslim man who helps a girl falls victim to bloodthirsty Hindutva trolls on social media, who circulate fake news about a love jihad. In another film, “Bheed” (“The Crowd”), Anubhav Sinha presents an unvarnished portrait of the government’s incompetence during the COVID-19 pandemic, when its ill-planned and sudden lockdown rendered scores of migrant workers homeless overnight. “Bheed” suffered the same fate as “Almost Pyaar with DJ Mohabbat” when a studio backing it chose to distance itself.
Yet film critics say many of these films seem to be blunted by the rage and frustration of the makers who have had to navigate the hostile system. Most ventures choosing to critique the government are rendered ineffective by their unsubtle directness.
“Certain filmmakers appear to be overcompensating for the general depoliticization. There is too much they want to say at one time,” said Apeksha Priyadarshini, an India-based film scholar. By depoliticization, she means how people in the film industry shy away from taking political stands or making comments publicly beyond the cover of films.
“When you don’t curry with the state, you are forever paranoid of how to protect yourself from its displeasure,” said Banerjee. “Art naturally suffers because it is fraught with stress. There is a genuine crisis of meaning; it doesn’t know what language to speak in.”
Within the narrow freedom, however, some filmmakers are succeeding more than others. Hansal Mehta has been one of the few directors in recent times to sneak in less overt commentaries about the state. In 2023, he directed “Faraaz,” which centered on a militant attack in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is a country that routinely features in Hindi films lately as a means to disparage Pakistan’s violence against it and to extol the key role that India played in its independence. In “Faraaz” Mehta was able to highlight the difference between religion and religious extremism.
“My primary objective is to tell a story. The environment you live in will automatically reflect as the subtext. You don’t have to spoon-feed people — they will get it,” Mehta told New Lines. Last year he also directed the six-episode Netflix series “Scoop,” based on the story of Jigna Vora, who reported on organized crime in Mumbai in the 1990s but found herself wrongfully implicated in a colleague’s murder. Beneath the personal documentation, however, the filmmaker made a persuasive case for the need for press freedom.
Similarly, superstar Shah Rukh Khan made a comeback in 2023, after a gap of five years, with “Pathaan,” a spy thriller, and “Jawan,” a vigilante drama. He was able to subvert the usual tropes associated with the genres, however. In “Pathaan,” he played an orphan who grew up to be an army and intelligence officer. But the story highlighted the flaws of India’s militaristic approach to conflicts, and his romantic interest was a Pakistani agent.
In “Jawan,” apart from breaking the fourth wall and asking Indian citizens to vote responsibly, he said in a popular dialogue: “Bete ko hath lagane se pehle, baap se baat kar” (“Before touching the son, deal with the father”), which had both personal and political undertones. In 2021, Khan’s son Aryan was arrested on false drug charges. Many observers perceived the arrest as politically motivated because Khan was known for criticizing the culture of religious intolerance in the country. “Jawan” earned $140 million worldwide, and “Pathaan” made $130 million.
Nuance today is a rarity. “The existing political scenario is binarized so people only read films as ‘this’ or ‘that,’” Priyadarshini said.
The upshot of this lack of nuance is that the discourse about political films has flattened. Everything has come to be regarded as a political film, and the resulting levity and crassness undo the whole industry.
“Mainstream Hindi cinema is highly corrupted and corruptible,” Mehta said. “We have to find that niche again where politically committed filmmakers found an audience and commercial success. We have to find that balance.”
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