Saffronising Our Screens: Bollywood Bets on Hindutva
During the student protests of 2026, jokes proliferated online that a ticket to the Dhurandhar movie was better proof of loyalty to the regime than an Aadhar Card. Humour, as ever, is rooted in some truth. Dhurandhar’s articulation of the militarised, hypermasculine and Hinduised vision of “New India” gives it immense propagandist potential, yet it is closer to the norm. Each year, a large number of the films Bollywood produces (and awards) mirror narratives that serve a right-wing agenda, focusing on revisionist historical epics, nationalism, and geopolitical conflict. Bollywood reaches audiences at a scale that no political debate or pamphlet can, with tens of millions of viewers subconsciously absorbing a film’s version of history and ideology as fact. It is then one of the most effective channels for the current regime because it dispenses propaganda under the guise of entertainment.
Dhurandhar opens with a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “If you fall upholding Dharma, you will attain heaven/ If you are victorious, the world is yours/ So rise, O Arjuna, and prepare yourself for battle.” (Chapter 2, Verse 37). This is Krishna’s argument for war, urging Arjuna to focus on his righteous duty (dharma) without fearing success or failure. With this frame, Dhurandhar casts conflict with a communal enemy as an allegorical war to uphold dharma. In the Mahabharata, the enemy were the Kauravas, but in this earthly retelling, it is implied to be the Hindu nation’s adversaries— Pakistan, muslims and “anti-national” elements within India.
Dhurandhar, of course, is not inventing this reading. It does what Hindutva itself has been trying to do for a century—positing a civilisational order it holds to be inherently sacred and casting its history as one of continuous desecration by Islamic invasion and conquest. The claim of Hindu victimhood is a recurring device used in the film. In one scene, a Pakistani hijacker taunts IB Chief Ajay Sanyal, declaring, “You Hindus are so cowardly.” This line, like the film, seems to reinstate the familiar sentiment of Hindu khatre me hain (Hindus are in danger). This is a claim of civilisational endangerment issued on behalf of roughly 80% of a population of 1.4 billion people, voiced through the film’s Pakistani villain and unearned through anything the plot itself demonstrates. This claim has never needed to be plausible to be effective. Its political utility lies in converting a demographic and political majority into a besieged minority, which is what licenses assertion as self-defense rather than aggression. For the audience, when a claim such as this is repeated across enough films—from The Kashmir Files to The Kerala Story— this sense of siege stops registering as a political position but rather as an open secret.
Dhurandhar’s othering of Muslims works less through any overt statement than through relentless visual and narrative associations. The film’s only exposure of Muslims is its heavy focus on terror networks, underworld activities, and cross-border conflict which rarely depicts “normal” or everyday Muslims. The consequence is a monolithic perception that associates the entire community with terror and violence.
This association does not begin and end with Dhurandhar. The Kerala Story, which follows a group of women from Kerala who are coerced into converting to Islam and joining the Islamic State, establishes this perception with its poster itself. A before-and-after image shows four women—in the “before” image, the women (one of whom is wearing a hijab, the rest none) smile and beam at the camera. In the “after” picture, placed directly below, three women wear hijabs with solemn, joyless expressions on their faces. The plot extends this through the character of Asifa, who coaxes her Hindu friends toward Islam. The story ends with the protagonist Shalini adopting the name Fatima and being flown to Pakistan, trafficked across multiple borders, and taken to Syria, where she ultimately becomes a suicide bomber. The hijab in the poster and the new name read as a visual marker of this narrative in which conversion means a loss of self, and violence follows naturally.
What makes such a premise dangerous is both the films’ constant blurring of fact and fiction. While Dhurandhar contains a disclaimer claiming it is fictional, it immediately undercuts that claim by splicing real archival footage against fictional scenes. The Kerala Story was marketed based on the true stories of more than 30,000 women recruited by ISIS until a court found the claim had no factual basis. In fact, in response to further litigation, director Sudipto Sen retracted and claimed that the film was a “fictionalised” portrayal of real-life events. Such a hazy display of what is true and what isn’t makes for a brilliant propaganda tool by letting it borrow the emotional authority of documented history, while retaining full deniability for whatever it invents.
Thus state patronage, ideological content, and intentional ambiguity is combined to create films that can easily be co-opted by the state. Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP)-run governments made The Kerala Story tax-free in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand within days of release; The Kashmir Files received similar treatment in Uttar Pradesh where a BJP legislator personally funded a week of free screenings. The BJP and RSS promoted The Kerala Story extensively. Prime Minister Modi endorsed it at an election rally in Karnataka, while BJP president JP Nadda held special screenings of the film and invited “young Hindu girls” to watch it with them. These films can thus easily be branded as propaganda, with their message readily absorbed by audiences.
Dhurandhar and The Kerala Story are not the only films guilty of carrying such theology. Aakhri Sawal is more on-the-nose as a fictional political drama released to coincide with the centenary anniversary of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), dedicated to “humanise the organisation” and “honour their journey”. The RSS, we are meant to understand, is not an organisation with a documented history of communal violence and supremacist ideology, but a cultural and wholesome group that has been misunderstood and vilified for a century. Notably, the film was personally financed by producer Nikhil Nanda, who has served in the RSS for forty years, as what he called his guru dakshina to the organisation. While the film ended up being a box office flop (grossing 3 crore against its 33 crore budget), its production showcases Bollywood’s insidious tango with the RSS.
Hindu nationalism has long found willing partners in Bollywood and this is hardly a new revelation. Vipul Shah, producer of The Kerala Story, called the RSS “guardian angels” who supported the making of the film. On 6 February 2026, some of Bollywood’s biggest stars—including Salman Khan, Vicky Kaushal and Ranbir Kapoor—attended the RSS centenary events in Mumbai, featuring the organisation’s current supreme leader, Mohan Bhagwat. Prolific director Karan Johar later told the media that “listening to Mohan Bhagwat’s ideas was inspiring” and that Bhagwat “has a great sense of humour”. The reconstituted Central Board of Film Certification now includes two BJP leaders, and the actors who support them such as Yami Gautum or Paresh Rawal. This does not signal a series of isolated gestures. However, it does signal a structural realignment. The industry’s most bankable stars publicly court the RSS, becoming instruments for saffronisation and the normalisation of the Hindutva ideology. It then stops being sympathetic but becomes a conduit that carries a majoritarian, nationalist perspective into entertainment.
Bollywood trades in fantasy. A commercialised, profit-driven film empire is always going to follow the mainstream political climate—politics is peripheral to the eternal quest for a box-office hit. But if Bollywood is merely mirroring the political climate, it is also amplifying it. Opportunism and ideology are not opposites here. Tax exemptions and ministerial endorsements make ideological content the safer commercial bet, which provides production houses with an incentive to maintain this template for future releases, lest any projects become censored or banned.
A war epic or a geopolitical drama may not outright proclaim its politics, but it does the deed by implying which figures are heroic and which communities are suspicious. Repeated enough and endorsed by faces revered by fans, this shifts public sentiment just as much as any overtly political messaging. Films such as Dhurandhar and The Kerala Story, then, do more than just tell stories—they recruit.
(Edited by Suryansh Jalan and Avika Mantri)
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