Listen to this article:

Cinema has never been just entertainment. It always tells people who they are, who they should fear, and what is worth celebrating. It shapes memory as much as it reflects reality.

The release of Dhurandhar: The Revenge last month across India is worth pausing over. Not simply because it is a sequel to a blockbuster, but because of what it represents. The film does not just entertain; it revisits recent political history and presents it in the form of a spy thriller.

Take demonetisation in 2016. Many still remember standing in long queues outside ATMs, sometimes for hours, as cash ran out and daily life came to a halt, especially for those working in the informal economy. In the film, this moment is reframed as a calculated and successful national strategy. What was, in reality, a deeply contested policy becomes an unquestioned act of decisive leadership.

More troublingly, the film appears to incorporate real events and institutional references, assigning them meanings that no official process has ever confirmed. Fiction begins to look like fact, and the audience is given no tools to distinguish between the two.

Propaganda is not new, but the scale is

Indian cinema has always had political undertones. Mother India (1957) presented suffering and sacrifice as national virtues, aligning with a Nehruvian vision of agrarian India. Upkaar (1967) celebrated a form of patriotism consistent with the Green Revolution era. Aandhi (1975) was widely interpreted as drawing on the public image of Indira Gandhi, though its political meaning remained contested at the time.

These films had ideological positions, but they existed within a wider cinematic ecosystem where different kinds of stories could also be told. There was room for critique, dissent and multiple perspectives.

What has changed in the past decade is not the existence of political cinema, but its intensity, industrial scale and alignment with state power.

Also read: At a Time of Gory Hyper-Nationalistic Blockbusters Like ‘Dhurandhar’, There are Conscientious Films That Get Ignored

Films like Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), The Kashmir Files (2022), The Kerala Story (2023) and Article 370 (2024) do not merely tell stories. They construct singular political narratives, ignore the complexity of real events and make opposing views seem wrong and unimportant. Many of these films have been heavily promoted, declared tax-free in certain states, and screened in official or semi-official settings.

The boundary between the state and the multiplex is no longer blurred; it is, increasingly, indistinguishable.

Where did the people go?

The shift becomes even more stark when compared with earlier moments in Bollywood. Films like Rang De Basanti and Swades, for instance, engaged directly with the questions of governance, accountability, and citizenship. They did not offer easy answers, but they pushed audiences to ask difficult questions: What does the state owe its people? What does it mean to be a citizen?

Even when flawed, these films treated the public as thinking individuals in a democracy, not as passive recipients of a pre-packaged national narrative. Today, that space appears to be shrinking. Stories about the working class, gender and caste inequalities, the informal sector, agrarian distress or unemployment – issues that affect millions – have largely disappeared from mainstream cinema. In their place is a growing genre of films that celebrate power rather than question it.

Cinema and the making of “common sense”

Antonio Gramsci argued that power does not operate through force alone, but through hegemony: the gradual shaping of common sense so that the interests of the powerful appear as the interests of all.

Cinema is one of the most effective hegemonic tools of this process. A film does not need to convince you directly. It works through emotion, through the characters you relate to, the stories you remember, and ideas that get repeated. Over time, what begins as narrative can start to feel like belief.

In a multicultural democracy, this has long-term effects. These films shape how people see entire communities, who they see as trustworthy, and who they come to fear. They transform political positions into emotional truths.

As sociologist C. Wright Mills observed, private experiences become public issues when they are produced and reproduced at scale. Watching a film is a private act. But when a genre dominates screens, backed by state endorsement and corporate infrastructure, it becomes part of a broader social pattern.

The political economy of propaganda

The rise of propaganda is not accidental. It is rooted in the alignment between big production houses, corporate-owned multiplex chains and a regulatory environment that facilitates certain kinds of content.

The same conglomerate capital that benefits from state policies is often involved in producing and distributing cultural narratives that legitimise those policies. Cinema, in this sense, becomes not just a medium of storytelling but a vehicle of ideological reproduction.

Also read: Mirror and Mask: Gangs of Wasseypur, Dhurandhar, and Violence We Choose to See

Pierre Bourdieu described culture as a field of contestation. Today, that contest is increasingly decided not in creative spaces, but in boardrooms where political and corporate interests come together.

In such a system, the audience does not simply watch films. It consumes ideology, often without realising it.

The question is not whether propaganda films will continue to be made. They will. The real question is whether there will remain any space, in multiplexes, on streaming platforms, or in public conversation, for cinema that refuses to celebrate power. That space is shrinking, and the speed at which it is shrinking should concern anyone who believes democracy requires more than a single story.

Because when films stop asking questions, audiences slowly stop asking them too.

Himadri Sekhar Mistri is a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems (CSSS), JNU.

Sumanta Roy is a PhD student at the Department of Anthropology, Washington State University, USA.

© The Wire