First, let’s dispense with the notion that there’s something wrong with any form of art, including cinema, espousing an ideology or emerging from a political worldview. The idea of art as something fragile, to be protected from the heat and dust of reality, became irrelevant in the late 19th-early 20th century when modernist movements challenged existing power structures and tore apart the illusion of neutrality. It is hard to imagine that any serious critic today would believe that for a work of art to qualify for greatness, it must be shorn of perspective, political and otherwise. Perspective, after all, is where meaning is made.

Now to the debate of the moment, which has been spurred by allegations that the non-rapturous reviews of Dhurandhar, or for that matter other recent films which have embraced an aesthetic of hyper-nationalism, violence and machismo — like The Kashmir Files (2022), The Kerala Story (2023), The Bengal Files (2025) and Section 370 (2024) — are motivated by political or ideological bias. Is it really the case that........

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