Directors Vivek Agnihotri and Sudipto Sen are still a bit dazed by the huge success of their politically charged movies. Agnihotri’s The Kashmir Files, about the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley, was last year’s unexpected superhit and raked in an impressive Rs 250 crore domestically – despite being panned by some critics as pandering to the worst Muslim stereotypes. Now Sen’s The Kerala Story has become 2023’s giant winner, earning Rs 240 crore at last count – even though the movie was savaged by reviewers who said it contained gigantic exaggerations and also faced bans and court cases. The only question left to be answered is: which of these two polarizing cinematic dramas will turn out to be the bigger box-office winner?
Says Agnihotri: “I didn’t know it would be such a big success. But I knew The Kashmir Files would connect with people.” Adds Sen on a similar note. “We expected it to be a hit, though maybe not this big. We knew the subject would touch the right chord.”
Agniihotri and Sen are the most successful creators of a new genre of movies that have been taking over our screens. The movies are accused by many of being propagandist and peddling a line that’s strongly pro-BJP and pro-Hindutva and also clearly anti-Muslim – though both Agnihotri and Sen insist they are not against Islam but against Islamic terror. Agnihotri says, “Every frame, every word in my film is truth,” though the film contains the disclaimer in the credits that it “does not claim accurateness or factuality of historic events.” Says Sen: “Some people don’t understand that Islamic terror and Islam are not the same.” Possibly unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a big fan of both films.
The BJP and Hindutva ideologues have always seen the film industry as an ideal medium to get their viewpoint across to large swathes of the public. Now it looks like it's actually happening with more movies selling the BJP and Hindutva worldview on their way. In the coming months we will see films like Swatantra Veer Savarkar on the man revered by the BJP as the creator of Hindutva ideology. The movie, which will star Randeep Hooda, is said to have a budget of around Rs 15 crore and the producers hope to film in London and the Andaman Islands.
There are similar productions too in the works. Accident or Conspiracy: Godhra, directed by M. K. Shivaaksh, obviously intends to offer answers to what it feels are unanswered questions and has the potential to prove hugely divisive. “This movie was made after a lot of hard work and five years of research. Many shocking facts were discovered during the research for this movie,” says the film’s official release. Shivaaksh says the movie will run two hours and 20 minutes. “It’s a big subject,” says the 30-year-old filmmaker who adds that it has drawn its key facts from the Nanavati Commission findings . Shooting for the film is taking place in Godhra, Ahmedabad and Vadodara and Shivaaksh says 30 per cent to 40 per cent of it is already completed. He adds that the film will have well-known stars but won’t reveal the names yet.
Then there’s Tipu, directed by Pawan Sharma and backed by Eros International, which delves into history to paint a black picture of the south Indian ruler who has always been hailed as the only local monarch who bested the British on the battlefield – till the last pitched battle with them at Seringatnam when he was slain. But Tipu also had a record of forced conversions and that’s why he has become a modern-day bogeyman for anyone with slightly Hindutva leanings. During the Karnataka state election campaign, Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah and UP’s Yogi Adityanath all ripped into Tipu, saying he was a savage ruler who was being glorified by the Congress. The movie’s trailer is brutally clear about its opinion of the 18th-century ruler. “8,000 temples and 27 churches were destroyed. 4 million Hindus converted to Islam and forced to eat beef,” it says. The trailer also shows Tipu’s face being repeatedly blackened.
On a very different note, there’s Kangana Ranaut, the actress who is never far from controversy, who’s working on a movie called just Emergency – a name that leaves no doubt about its subject matter. The movie’s posters show Ranaut artfully made up to look uncannily like Indira Gandhi. The Emergency was a period when many BJP workers and former ministers like Arun Jaitley were jailed. The movie’s scheduled to be released around October though there has been controversy about its release date.
Are most of these new films strongly anti-Muslim as some critics and many others assert? Are they peddling pro-Hindutva propaganda? There’s no question what line a film like Tipu will take. But Agnihotri and Sen both insist they’re painting a true-to-life picture. Sen adds that he and his producer replied to critics in a 17-minute video. “We did not exaggerate any numbers,” he declares. The movie’s producer, Vipul Amrutlal Shah, has, incidentally, just been appointed to the Steering Committee of the 54th International Film Festival - so it looks like he is now an Establishment favourite.
Sen says in The Kerala Story he has told the tale of four girls who were taken out of India to Afghanistan and Syria. He says: “I stand by that – 100 per cent of the story is correct. I did not add a single word which has not been told to me by the real-life girls.” The bigger controversy revolves around Sen’s contention that thousands of girls in Kerala have been rescued and have “come back to their original religion”. The largest number of such women, he says, come from the northern Kerala districts of Kasargode, Kozhikode and Kannur where most of the film was also shot. In Kerala, these figures are almost universally reckoned to be incorrect. Sen says he doesn’t speak Malayalam but has always had a special affinity for Kerala. He went there first in 2007 and made a movie there in 2009.
Agnihotri, too, strongly bristles at being painted as anti-Muslim. He points out that in one of The Kashmir Files’ early scenes a Muslim child helps a Hindu boy who is being beaten up. He says: “I’ve been challenging everyone to tell me what is anti-Muslim or what is not true. Anybody who says it is anti-Muslim has not seen the film or doesn’t know anything about Kashmir.” He adds that the movie has been a hit internationally and that people in countries like Japan and Thailand have praised it. Agnihotri says the movie has made Rs 100 crore internationally besides the Rs 250 crore in India. “Why is this movie so popular with Syrians, with Afghans and so many Muslims I meet around the world who praise me for making it?”
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Agnihotri is fully booked for the foreseeable future in the wake of his Kashmir Files triumph. He’s currently hard at work on a movie called The Vaccine Story. The movie had been slated to be released in August but that has now been pushed back to around Dussehra. Says Agnihotri: “I was planning to release in August but there were lots of new developments in the world of vaccines. So, I’m adding a few scenes. Otherwise, the film would have looked stale.”
The Vaccine Story aims to tell the inside story of Indian vaccinologists and scientists who battled Covid-19 and are fighting other diseases. Says Agnihotri: “The real victory is of the Indian Council of Medical Research and the National Institute of Virology. A bunch of women scientists led by Dr. Balram Bhargava.” Adding glamour to the movie will be Calcutta-based actress Raima Sen who has just signed up for the project.
When that’s over, Agnihotri will return to another project, The Delhi Files, which deals with the dreadful few days in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination when violent mobs went berserk in Delhi, beating up and killing Sikhs. The 1984 Delhi riots were probably the darkest moments in the Congress party’s history and it’s a subject that the BJP is fond of raising. Agnihotri says he began research on the Delhi Files script on March 22, 2020, the day when lockdown was declared. He has now just finished that research and started writing the screenplay. He aims to release the movie in 2024.
Agnihotri says that the huge success of The Kashmir Files doesn’t mean that he’ll be making a stream of movies along similar lines. He has, though, always dealt in what he calls “socio-political” films. He reckons one of his most impactful films was his 2016 movie called Buddha in a Traffic Jam which looks at the impact of radical ideologies like Naxalism on university students, highlighting the attraction of revolutionary ideas and the dangers they can pose. However, it wasn’t a commercial hit.
Another film was Tashkent Files – Who Killed Shastri? The 2019 film deals with the host of conspiracy theories surrounding the death of India’s second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri – whether he died of a coronary in Tashkent a day after signing a treaty to end the 1965 India-Pakistan war or, as as his wife and others have alleged, was assassinated. (Some of the alleged assassins included the Soviet Union, the CIA, the Congress and the Pakistan army). That movie also did modestly.
Agnihotri insists he will still work with modest-budget movies and won’t be attempting blockbusters in the foreseeable future. “Smaller budgets keep us on the edge and enable us to do nice, honest, sincere work. When you have a lot of money your biggest worry is how to spend that money and then how to recover it. We are free from all that.”
Sen also insists that the huge success of Kerala Story hasn’t changed his life or professional trajectory in any major way yet. He, too, is already fully booked for the coming year. Two films, Aasma and Lucknow Times, are due out soon. Aasma is an action-crime drama set in Jammu and Kashmir involving themes of terrorism and jihad. Sen says the plot includes a “night of terror, molestation, and other gruesome acts.” The movie tells the story of Aasma, a young girl kidnapped by four militants on their way to stage a suicide terrorist attack. One of the militants, though, gets second thoughts and tries to save Aasma. Lucknow Times is a political thriller.
One actor who’s making a big leap is The Kerala Story’s star Adah Sharma. She has acted in several Telugu and Hindi films during her career but The Kerala Story has pushed her into the public eye in an unprecedented fashion. Says Taran Adarsh, movie industry critic and trade analyst: “She’s been around but has never made a splash.” Now Adah Sharma’s abandoning her Kerala Story hijab and donning a superheroine’s outfit for her next film.
One thing’s for sure. These political – or, depending on your point of view – BJP/Hindutva propaganda films are the flavour of the season. And there’s no questioning that The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story – while their subject matters are divisive – have proved hugely popular with many audiences. The movies also have had an influence on the views of many people who take the stories to be true. The question is whether other films along similarly politically contentious lines will also strike it rich or whether audiences will demand lighter themes? Moviemaking is a fickle business and that remains to be seen. Says Adarsh: “It is too hard to predict how these movies will do.. It depends on how the curiosity for that particular subject spikes at the time of release.”
