Opinion | Reel Narratives, Real Politics: The Changing Grammar Of Indian Cinema

When politics becomes sharply adversarial, every institution—media, academia, cinema—gets drawn into its vortex

Indian cinema has always been more than a flicker of light on a silver screen. In a country of India’s civilisational depth and democratic ferment, films are not merely diversion; they are mirrors, sometimes distorted, sometimes luminous, reflecting our anxieties, aspirations, and arguments. The question that now confronts us is not whether cinema carries a message — it always has — but whether a segment of Indian films is being crafted less as art and more as a political instrument, calibrated to serve partisan, short-term electoral objectives.

This concern has gained currency in the wake of films such as The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, and Dhurandhar. Each of these productions has been lauded by some as the bold articulation of suppressed truths, and denounced by others as selective narratives designed to inflame sentiment and consolidate vote banks. When cinema enters this fraught terrain, the debate ceases to be aesthetic; it becomes political in the most immediate sense.

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To be sure, Indian cinema has never been ideologically sterile. From the early decades after Independence, filmmakers engaged with pressing social issues. Films like Do Bigha Zamin, Sujata, and Ankur........

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