A critical look at Bollywood’s propaganda film shift: It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say how India’s sociopolitical landscape is currently at an unprecedented crossroads. During a time that most refer to as the ‘post-truth era’ – one where facts seem to have been robbed of their former eminence – the masses in the country have seemed to embrace watered-down conspiracy theories masquerading as ‘alternative facts’ to be their only reality. How do you separate truth from fallacies when mostly everything you see in mainstream media is propaganda?
In this constant hassle of separating the truth from the loud propaganda unleashed by the autocrats, one would expect cinema to push back against the sociopolitical divide. A kind of divide that’s become seethed into the conscience of the masses by the far-right forces. After all, transformation has always been the cornerstone of cinema. But in the recent few years, two things have emerged to be clear. The first is how wrong the perception of film critics and intellectuals in assuming the tolerant nature of the general movie-going audience was.
The idea that most Indians going to a place as celebrated as cinema halls would mostly consist of the politically neutral class – the ones who always chase balance while being open to different ideas – was fundamentally dismantled with the box office success of hate-propagating films such as “The Kashmir Files” and “The Kerala Story.” Thus, it became clear that it was precisely the nature of such an audience that would always favor the status quo.
The second has been the sheer inability of liberal filmmakers to actually resonate through their timely stories with the masses. Instead, we’ve been seeing most well-respected filmmakers resorting to telling reverse-engineered stories to come across as condescending to the people who had even acknowledged their well-intended place beforehand. What’s the point of cinema based on the promise of shaping the consensus when its very approach restricts it from climbing over such echo chambers?
Once the mainstream news networks of the country submitted to streamlining and amplifying state propaganda, it became inevitable for the same to get echoed on the big screen. While the trivial outings such as “The Accidental Prime Minister” and “The Tashkent Files” placarded the systemic attempts of the ruling government to discredit the former ruling party, most of the movie-going audience saw through the facade and didn’t turn up at the theaters. It’s often expected for newly elected governments to use such nefarious means to shape the general consensus.
But the defining feature of any authoritarian regime is reflected in how soon big studios decide to evolve their means. This change came in fast, especially with the success of “Uri: The Surgical Strike.” Studios began to understand just what kind of propaganda would work. Not only did the film come out during a crucial time leading up to the 2019 general election cycle, but it also relentlessly embraced the nationalist wave by glorifying the surgical strikes conducted by the current government. Dialogues such as “Yeh naya Hindustan hai, yeh ghar mein ghusega bhi, aur marega bhi (This is new India, it will infiltrate the house, as well as slay)” attempted to make the masses feel seen while reinforcing their nationalist beliefs but not without showing them who exactly passed down the orders.
Post-2019, we witnessed propaganda in Bollywood evolve to blazingly new heights. As the Hindutva nationalist wave became more aggressive, we saw more and more leaders go out to say outright unconstitutional things like, “Muslims are traitors to India.” The number of such statements eventually just became routine. Regardless of their ideologies, most people started to grow numb to the everyday bigotry stemming from the people they had once willingly elected. But clearly, such kinds of statements are always designed to reach not just supporters but also the fence-sitters.
One of any extremist party or organization’s biggest successes is its ability to provoke rather than evoke. It forms the fundamental basis for the far-right’s populist machinery – one that couldn’t care less for a nuanced dialogue and instead manifests as a brand-making project. Even when the masses grow numb from continuous hate campaigns, the same kind of demoralization of Muslims will inevitably be poured into the cinematic medium.
More recently, we’ve seen yet another stark trend begin to develop. The contrast emerges when one begins to look at the box office numbers different kinds of propaganda films have managed to cash in. Writer-director Abhishek Sharma’s “Ram Setu” tried to prove itself factual when it was based on a mythology. At one point, its protagonist, played by Akshay Kumar, describes Delhi’s Qutub Minar as a symbol of India’s defeat. The film, however, performed poorly at the Indian box office, earning ₹74.98 Crores despite being made on a whopping ₹150 Crore budget. As opposed to this, Sudipto Sen’s embarrassingly repugnant “The Kerala Story” ended up earning ₹239 Crores.
Not only did the film attempt to fracture the general perception of a state that’s regarded as ‘God’s own country’ by the northern Hindi-speaking states, but it also took ‘creative’ liberties with the communal story it told. The marketing for the film claimed that it was about ‘32,000’ women from Kerala who had been misled into joining ISIS. Later, when the number was fact-checked, the filmmakers backtracked and made it to ‘3’. A statistical anomaly, sure. But one that compounds the more significant point that routine statements made by elected officials go on to provoke. Gross exaggeration of lies and their repetition has the power to make things sound more valid, even when most people tend to know better.
Watching an emotionally exploitative film doesn’t help override that knowledge either. Instead, it further compounds and sanctions the line separating suspension of belief and disbelief. That one scene from “Ram Setu” and the promos behind “The Kerala Story” attempt to do similar things. By reviling an entire community, the two films muddy the wells of knowledge while polluting the sources that have, up until now, shaped our understanding of culture and history. But only one of the two films ended up becoming a box office hit. It signals a triumph in the cinema of provocation, much like the fascist wave from which its origin was born out of.
“Are you brave enough to watch it?” – this is what the later promos for Sen’s propaganda piece featured in its posters as it premiered in foreign countries. Indeed, more remorse than thrill is attached to watching a storyteller mix dangerously fictionalized narratives with incidents drawn from reality. Most propaganda films have been following the same formula for ages. But the crushing irony of Sen’s film remained in how it used its one-noted feminist narrative, which featured lines such as “my body, my rules,” pretending to safeguard women while using the same notions of emancipation to provoke a hateful response.
A casual viewer feels a certain kind of moral high ground while rooting for such stories. But how many viewers would go through long-headed factual research to realize that their own prejudice had been masquerading as empathy in the first place? In that case, you have to be brave enough to make a narrative on the epidemic of manufactured bigotry.
But as discussed, for every “The Kashmir Files,” there’s consistently been box office disasters such as “Adipurush.” A film that should’ve been a hit in a country where everyone is familiar with the Ramayana ended up becoming one of the biggest flops in Indian cinema. But what became more interesting to follow was the promotions that led to the movie’s wide release. From performing aartis and inviting a temple priest on stage for the trailer launch to reserving a seat for Hanuman in every theatre it played across, the cast and crew of the movie wrapped themselves around all sorts of overtly religious connotations. Merely adapting a mythology, thus, isn’t enough anymore. Along with being such extravagant projects, these films also need to be ‘perfectly Hindu.’
As the far-right in the country becomes more socio-politically powerful, the film industry will tend to become even keener on capitalizing on this trend. Multiple big-budget films about the Ramayana and Mahabharata already have been greenlit, which will cloud theaters in the coming years. But what shall remain interesting to see is how films would inevitably resort to provoking sentiments instead of evoking genuine emotions – no matter how bathed in communal colors.
This past weekend, Vivek Agnihotri’s new film, “The Vaccine War,” opened up to a lukewarm response – earning merely Rs 5 Crores within the first five days of its release. While the film unsurprisingly resorted to a grounded narrative to present its dangerously alternative reality as factual, the narrative constraints limited it from provoking the kind of sentiment his earlier film excelled at exploiting.
But the groundbreaking success of “Jawan” – a film that dared to ask its viewers to hold the authorities accountable – may have provided a necessary pushback against such propaganda films. Perhaps our shared reality seems to have grown immune to hyper-nationalist films such as Agnihotri’s latest. But it would be naive to assume that people’s sensibilities may have changed so swiftly. Maybe all it would take is another communally exploitative film to undo the effects of a mass film that asked the citizens to be more responsible. After all, the discourse around most films gets as conveniently forgotten now as the promises of our bigoted politicians.
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