What They Don’t Want You to See in Phule: Why India’s Caste Truths Keep Getting Censored

The film’s delay reveals the strategic denial of caste in service of Hindu nationalism—and the fear of a Hinduism that liberates rather than dominates.

Caste hasn’t disappeared—it’s been blurred, euphemized, and folded into a nationalist idea of Hindu unity that erases its specific harms, while reframing any critique as an attack on Brahmins and the Hindu nation.

That’s the real story behind the suppression of Phule, the delayed biopic on Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule. The film’s postponement isn’t about artistic integrity or protecting “sentiments”—it’s about preserving the ideological structure of a Hindu nationalism that depends on caste hierarchy while denying its existence. A film that centers anti-caste resistance threatens the entire illusion of unity that makes the nationalist project possible.

Originally slated for release on April 11, 2025, to mark Jyotirao Phule’s birth anniversary, Phule was delayed after objections from groups like the All-India Brahmin Samaj, who claimed it portrayed Brahmins negatively and could incite tensions. In response, the Central Board of Film Certification reportedly recommended cuts to scenes depicting caste-based violence and resistance—the very truths the Phules spent their lives revealing.

The trailer for Phule, directed by Ananth Narayan Mahadevan

We’ve seen this before. Not outright bans, but a more insidious strategy: delay, dilute, and disappear. A slow bleeding out of meaning. Revolutionary figures are repackaged as generic social reformers. Caste is reduced from a structural system to a matter of “hurt feelings.” Movements are stripped of context until what remains is safe enough to ignore.

What’s being fought over isn’t just a film. It’s the right to define what Hinduism is—and what it isn’t. Whether it must serve power or speak truth. Whether it has space for contradiction, or only for control.

The Phules weren’t incidental reformers. They were theological insurgents. Savitribai’s schools for Dalits and girls, Jyotirao’s pointed critiques of Brahminical authority over knowledge and ritual—these weren’t just educational initiatives. They were acts of defiance. They drew from within the tradition to challenge its weaponization, offering a radically different Hinduism—rooted in satya (truth), karuna (compassion), and nyaya (justice)—not in ritual purity or social control.

This is exactly what the Hindu nationalist project cannot accommodate: a Hinduism that doesn’t dominate.

Poster for Phule starring Pratik Gandhi, Darsheel Safary, Alexx O'Nell and Patralekhaa Paul.

The dominant political imagination depends on a flattened idea of Hinduism—singular, timeless, undivided. It has no room for figures who challenged caste from within the tradition, or who insisted that spiritual integrity cannot exist without social justice. In this vision, caste doesn’t exist unless you name it—and when you do, you become the problem.

That’s why Phule wasn’t banned outright—it has been delayed, edited, and softened into something less disruptive, less truthful, and ultimately less offensive to dominant caste comfort.

We’re watching a strategic and selective censorship regime unfold. Films like The Kashmir Files or The Kerala Story—which openly fuel nationalist grievance—are released and even promoted. But a film like Phule, which might prompt reflection on the inequality at the core of India’s social structure, is stalled.

The logic is consistent: caste critique destabilizes the narrative that Hinduism is, and always has been, just and unified. It exposes internal systems of harm. It shows that not all wounds are colonial. Some are homegrown.

And when the truth threatens to surface, dominant groups invoke the familiar script: inversion. The most privileged claim oppression. Any naming of caste violence is cast as “anti-Brahmin.” This move mirrors global right-wing talking points: “anti-racism is anti-white,” “feminism is anti-male,” and now, “anti-caste is anti-Hindu.”

But the Phules were not anti-Brahmin. They were anti-oppression. And that distinction is exactly what must be erased in order to maintain the illusion that there is only one, unbroken Hindu tradition—unchallenged, unchanging, and unaccountable.

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The stakes are high. This is not just about a movie. It’s about who gets to tell Indian history. Who gets to define Hinduism. And who is allowed to speak about caste—not as distant abstraction, but as lived reality.

The discomfort surrounding Phule reveals a deeper anxiety: that Hinduism, like any living tradition, has always contained contradiction and struggle. To suppress that complexity is not to protect the tradition—it’s to hollow it out.

Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule’s legacy reminds us that another Hinduism is possible—and has always existed. One that confronts power rather than serves it. One that places justice above supremacy. One that believes liberation is not a threat to faith, but the very soul of it.

Their story doesn’t flatter the present. It complicates it. And that’s precisely why it matters.

So let us be clear: Phule wasn’t postponed because it distorts Hinduism. It was postponed because it dares to show that Hinduism, like the nation itself, has always been a site of struggle—between supremacy and equality, silence and truth.

And in a moment when that truth is most at risk, telling it becomes not just an act of ar. It becomes a test of conscience.

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