When the Past Plays the Villain: Watching Chhaava in a Time of Fire
I’ve always believed that film is one of the most powerful ways we tell stories—not just about others, but about ourselves. As a younger viewer, I watched Indian movies (before the term Bollywood was even in use) not just for the songs or the grand visuals, but because they carried echoes of something deeper: how we wanted to see our past, and how we hoped to shape our future. But lately, I’ve been thinking more about how those stories are shifting—especially when the past isn’t just remembered, but reimagined for battle.
Earlier this year, I watched Chhaava, a new historical epic centered on Maratha warrior Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj and his defiant struggle against Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. It wasn’t just another entry in India’s growing list of period dramas—it felt like a cultural event. Across social media, in speeches, and even on the streets, people weren’t just talking about the film. They were reacting to it. Reenacting it. Retelling it. And sometimes, burning things down because of it.
That’s when it struck me: Chhaava isn’t just about history. It’s about how history is being used right now.
Like so many historical films today, Chhaava doesn’t ask viewers to understand the past—it dares them to feel it. It encourages a kind of emotional allegiance to a simplified version of history that turns complex figures like Aurangzeb into convenient villains and inflates nationalist pride into something combustible. Soon after its release, violence broke out in Nagpur—sparked by anger over Aurangzeb’s tomb. Suddenly, a centuries-old emperor was back on trial, and the country was the courtroom.
The film itself is visually stunning, and Vicky Kaushal brings undeniable charisma to the role. But what lingers isn’t the artistry. It’s how easily that artistry slides into propaganda. That’s the danger of historical cinema today—it doesn’t just entertain, it mobilizes.
What’s especially disheartening is how quickly these cinematic myths become political weapons. In Chhaava, masculinity is reborn as defiance, valor, and revenge. The strong, righteous Hindu king vs. the cruel, oppressive Muslim emperor—how many times have we seen this setup? But this version of masculinity is one that feels stuck in the past, or perhaps more dangerously, weaponized for the present.
The genre of historical epic has always walked a tightrope between grandeur and propaganda. Its appeal lies in spectacle—battles, betrayals, and dramatic turns of fate—and in how it channels collective memory into shared feeling. But it’s never just storytelling. In Chhaava, as in a growing number of Indian period films, history becomes a pretext for revisiting familiar antagonisms. Hollywood has had its own cycles of villainy—Germans during and after WWII, Russians through the Cold War, Arabs post-9/11—often harmful, but largely understood as trends that reflected the anxieties of their era. What’s striking about contemporary Indian cinema is not just its fixation on the Mughal figure as the default antagonist, but the knowingness with which that choice is made. This isn’t just narrative shorthand—it’s strategy. The return to the image of the Muslim autocrat isn’t incidental; at a minimum, it capitalizes on present-day communal tensions, and at its most sinister, it feeds a growing appetite for division, with cinematic spectacle lending emotional weight to political enthusiasm.
Read more at The Critical Script
What makes this repetition so striking is not that it's unfaithful to history, but that it narrows the imaginative field to the same well-worn antagonisms. Entire registers of Indian life—its heterodox saints, layered caste realities, regional complexities, poets, rebels, mystics—fade quietly from view. Figures like Kabir and Tukaram, who wrote and lived against the grain of division, don’t slot easily into scripts of civilizational clash, nor do the administrative collaborations, intermarriages, and alliances that complicate the easy binary of hero and invader. Yet Indian cinema need not be confined by these limits. If anything, it has always drawn strength from reinterpreting its own past—reviving genres, reinventing icons, remixing myth and memory into something resonant for the present. This is the essence of a truly popular art form: not repetition for comfort, but reinvention with purpose. The archive is full of untapped epics, pluralistic visions, and radical experiments in identity. The call now is not to abandon the historical canvas, but to broaden it—to allow the national imagination the scope it deserves, and to tell the many stories that history still holds.
And then there’s the diaspora. Watching these films from abroad can feel both empowering and alienating. On one hand, it’s a connection to roots. On the other, it can foster dangerous nostalgia—a version of India that never really existed, but one we cling to for identity. Some in the diaspora use these films to reinforce their sense of belonging. But what if that belonging comes at the cost of someone else’s exclusion?
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What’s unfolding in Indian cinema right now isn’t just a storytelling trend. It’s part of a broader movement to reshape national identity—one historical epic at a time. Under Modi’s government, Bollywood increasingly serves as a tool of messaging, sometimes explicitly so. Critics and scholars have noted how films echo speeches, reference political enemies, and offer visual validation for policies of division. Cinema becomes campaign.
What unfolds, then, is less a failure of imagination than a pattern of containment—where the past is repeatedly mined not for its complexity but for its usefulness. In this cycle, history becomes a toolkit for affective certainty: heroes to revere, villains to burn, borders to redraw in the mind. That so much of this is filtered through cinema, a medium defined by its ability to dream expansively, makes the narrowing all the more noticeable. These films do not simply reflect dominant moods; they help orchestrate them, echoing the anxieties and ambitions of a nation in flux. - DD Kalal