The imaginary saffron past

Express Tribune

12-05-2025

As a ceasefire takes hold, one of the starkest takeaways from the final days of India's military aggression in Pakistan is Bollywood's resounding cheerleading for Modi's Hindutva regime. With a tightening ideological bandwidth, the range of stories the Hindi film industry is willing to tell has diminished. What has replaced them are large-scale historical dramas, nationalist spectacles, and biopics that elevate grand origin myths of Brahminism and Hindutva's raj.
From medieval queens to modern exoduses, here are five films that blur fact and fiction, painting civilisational clashes in stark black-and-saffron. Be it snow-dusted plains of 1761 or the contested valleys of Kashmir, each film projects a meticulously curated past, where every stirring speech and every grand tableau sends a clear message: this is the India of today's ruling ideology – and the truth, as always, is what you're told to believe.
'Panipat' (2019)
Ashutosh Gowariker's Panipat promised sweeping battle scenes and Maratha bravado but instead served up a hyper-nationalist reimagining of the 1761 clash with Ahmad Shah Durrani. In the film, Sadashiv Rao Bhau (Arjun Kapoor) is the very personification of righteous Maratha valour, clad in polished armour and delivering stirring monologues on "saving motherland's soil." On the other side, Durrani (Sanjay Dutt) is framed almost exclusively as a bloodthirsty "invader," his Afghan warriors snarling like cartoon villains.
What Gowariker erases is the realpolitik of the era: alliances between Hindu and Muslim chiefs, intermarriages among royal families, and even the fact that Durrani once maintained cordial ties with some Maratha sardars. Instead, Panipat substitutes nuance with a binary narrative – Hindu heroes vs Muslim hordes – to satisfy a contemporary appetite for "us versus them." Between the flagrant distortion of history and the sheer unbelievability of Arjun as a formidable force, on or off-screen, the film marked yet another Hindutva-inspired box-office dud. Naturally, it won applause in right-wing circles for "honouring Indian history."
'Adipurush' (2023)
Who thought the Ramayana could be weaponised via CGI? Adipurush resurrects the epic with militaristic punchlines and beefed-up action sequences worthy of a modern war film. Director Om Raut repaints Ravana, played by Saif Ali Khan, not as the multi-dimensional rakshasa king of lore but as a "dark-bearded tyrant" dressed in black robes, evoking orientalist tropes of medieval Muslim invaders.
Opposite him stands Prabhas's Raghava: chiseled, righteous, fate-driven. Every arrow loosed is a pledge to defend Hindu dharma, and every shot celebrates mythic heroism as a blueprint for today's politics. Costume designers even gave Janaki (Kriti Sanon), avatar of goddess Lakshmi and Raghava's wife, abducted by Ravana, a warrior-queen makeover. Clearly, ancient ideals needed a modern feminist spin, however poorly backed by the original text.
Critics panned the VFX and whirled at the militarisation of sacred stories, but for audiences primed by nationalist fervour, Adipurush sandwiched both a rallying cry and a holy legend repurposed as contemporary propaganda.
'Samrat Prithviraj' (2022)
Akshay Kumar's swagger-filled turn as Prithviraj Chauhan was pitched as the crown jewel of medieval glory. But all the actor brings is the incredibility shaping his humour in Priyadarshan films. Samrat Prithviraj ransacks history to present the 12th-century ruler as India's final pagan sovereign, standing alone against Muhammad Ghori (Manav Vij) and his "barbaric onslaught." In truth, Prithviraj lost to Ghori in the second battle of Tarain, not to mention, the subcontinent's political map was already crisscrossed by fluid alliances, not monolithic faith blocs.
Screenwriters borrow selectively from the semi-mythical Prithviraj Raso, amplifying heroic duels and noble martyrdom, while glossing over Prithviraj's own strategic errors and his partnerships with Muslim generals. Despite its noisy marketing, the film fizzled commercially – a telling reminder that jingoism alone can't replace coherent storytelling.
'Padmaavat' (2018)
Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Padmaavat arrived already engulfed in controversy: mobs threatened to burn down theatres; protesters demanded cuts to imaginary "love scenes." Once released, the film's strengths – luminous cinematography, opulent sets, skilled performances – couldn't mask its saffron-tinged undercurrents. Queen Padmavati (Deepika Padukone) becomes the paragon of Rajput honour, while Alauddin Khilji (Ranveer Singh) transmogrifies into a blood-lusty caricature, prowling Delhi's marble corridors in inky robes.
Bhansali leans into the legend from Malik Muhammad Jayasi's 16th-century poem without ever acknowledging its fictional basis. Khilji's character is stripped of historical context – no mention of his architectural patronage or his complex administrative reforms. Instead, he's an animalistic antagonist, reinforcing a trope of the "predatory Muslim invader." Meanwhile, the Rajputs are a monolith of virtue, united in a mass jauhar rather than divided by the internecine politics that actually plagued Chittor. The film is a tragic addition to Bhansali's many exhausted attempts at historical fiction.
'The Kashmir Files' (2022)
If Panipat and Padmaavat weaponise myth, The Kashmir Files weaponises trauma. Starring Mithun Chakraborty, Anupam Kher, Darshan Kumar, and Pallavi Joshi, the film centres on a young Kashmiri Hindu student raised by his exiled grandfather and kept in the dark about his parents' deaths.
Vivek Agnihotri's film foregrounds the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits in 1990 – an under-told horror story of death threats, bomb blasts, and mass displacement. But in compressing years of conflict into slickly edited set pieces, the film trades nuance for punchy outrage. Graphic scenes – bloodied bodies, impassioned pleas – feed a binary of "innocent Pandit victim" versus "evil Muslim militant," with hardly a nod to the insurgency's broader political context or the simultaneous suffering of Kashmiri Muslims.
The film's ascension to tax-free status in BJP-ruled states, plus public endorsements from senior party figures, cemented its political status beyond cinema. Online, hashtags surged, and hardline voices trafficked in fresh Islamophobic hate speech. Real historians have pointed out factual slippages – dates conflated, characters invented, events reordered – to sculpt a narrative that fits neatly into a Hindutva playbook.