Now that Rishab Shetty’s Kantara: Chapter 1 (2025) has performed exceedingly well at the box office, it is safe to say a few things about it – mostly good things – from a philosophical angle, and, perhaps, a few critical words as well.

The Īśopaniṣad, one of the smallest yet foremost of Vedantic scriptures, opens with these memorable lines: “All these transient things in the universe are inhabited by Īśa (i.e., Īśvara – the Supreme Divine). Enjoy all this through pious renunciation, do not greed over anyone’s possessions." This opening verse of the celebrated Upanishad contains a comprehensive philosophy – firstly, a profound ontology of the universe (‘everything in this world, although transient, is inhabited by God’), followed by a corollary ethical injunction (‘therefore enjoy everything with an attitude marked by piety and self-sacrifice, without coveting what either you or others possess’).

Three years ago, Rishab Shetty’s Kantara (2022) creatively deployed folklore, local traditions, clever cinematography, and brilliant storytelling to drive home the eternal relevance of this central philosophical teaching of the Vedanta. Shetty perhaps did so unintentionally – which, if true, even more strikingly highlights the Vedantic philosophy’s absolute centrality in the Indian civilisational worldview, irrespective of location or language. Vedanta captures the very soul of timeless India, the exalted and venerable Sanātana Bhāratavarṣa. No wonder Kantara (2022) quickly became popular among a pan-Indian audience, outgrowing its primary target of the Kannada-speaking public. This was no small achievement for Sandalwood – an informal moniker for the Kannada film industry – which is yet to equal the scale of its larger counterparts: the Telugu film industry and the Hindi film industry, also known as ‘Tollywood’ and ‘Bollywood’, respectively.

By now, everybody knows that Shetty’s latest offering, Kantara: Chapter 1 (2025), is something of a prequel to his 2022 flick. It builds on the theme of its previous instalment, almost historicising the folk traditions of the Bhūta Kola ritual performance as well as the worship of Coastal Karnataka’s fearsome forest-dwelling tutelary deities, Panjurli and Guliga. It establishes a link between the past and the present within the time frames depicted in the Kantara franchise. Overall, the film succeeds in offering its audience a visually appealing storytelling experience, involving some highly evocative Indian civilisational archetypes (especially through its delectable second-half narrative), based on the central theme of ‘Dharma vs. Greed’ conflict that traces the roots of the events from Kantara (2022) further back in time. The downfall of a powerful and well-respected monarch due to excessive greed, the divinely-inspired hero, the wise old man as a living repository of the community’s collective memory, brave selfless warriors dying to protect their dharma, the sacred grove, a fierce animal protecting an infant of obscure origins – these are some timeless Indian archetypes celebrated in Kantara: Chapter 1 (2025). One only wishes that the first half of this latest chapter of the Kantara universe weren’t so tedious.

Let me quickly add a few more critical remarks on some of the film’s weaker aspects, before turning to brighter ones. The background score during a particularly gratuitous action sequence (there are more such sequences) from the first half reminds one of the Pirates of the Caribbean theme, though not in a flattering or tributary sort of way. Then again, the look and battle costumes of certain characters – the king Rajasekhara, for example – remind one of contemporary Western media influences, such as the character Robert Baratheon from the popular HBO series Game of Thrones. Additionally, the first half contains a lot of unnecessarily long and word-heavy exchanges – in contrast to the wonderfully curated and edited crisp moments in Kantara (2022) that finely developed the characters and set a very colloquial cultural mood for the story, without burdening the film with redundant fluff as has happened in the latest offering.

Comparison becomes inevitable when one watches two consecutive offerings in a film series. Comparing the two films in the Kantara series, I feel tempted to say that while the first film was a poem, the latest is prose. This is not in the least due to an overdependence on special effects and CGI in Shetty’s latest offering. These techniques, while necessary for a film of such broad scope as Kantara: Chapter 1, tend to eclipse the humanistic core of a film’s visual storytelling. It was required of Shetty to strike a more delicate balance here, smoothly adjusting the computer VFX elements to the profoundly human/divine story and even limiting them to attain a harmonious blend with the very authentic folk elements and traditional backdrop of the film. One feels hopeful that he will overcome the temptation to overuse computer VFX elements in his future offerings. This is a lamentable trend, discernible of late among contemporary Indian filmmakers across languages, but I believe that the gifted filmmaker in Shetty possesses enough potential to steer clear of it and forge an original cinematic language for himself. In fact, his Sa.Hi.Pra.Shaale, Kasaragodu (2018) and Kantara (2022) were a veritable inauguration of that originality.

Back to the good things about Kantara: Chapter 1 (2025). The film’s strength lies primarily in its acting. Everyone seems to have given their best to portray the characters assigned to them. The casting could have been perfect, too, had they not signed up Gulshan Devaiah as Kulashekhara. Devaiah is undoubtedly a fine actor, but the role was just not cut out for him. Arvind S. Kashyap’s cinematography is as bright as ever, except for the aforesaid flaw of overusing computer-generated VFX that occasionally dulls it.

This film, along with its previous instalment, has tapped into a rare diplomatic potential: that of using it as a cultural product of India for our outreach efforts to cultures from various continents, and inspire them to connect with us based on shared values of worshipping nature as not only an abode but an embodiment of the divine. This Vedantic worldview championed by the film will certainly evoke an emotional connection among cultures with similar, if not identical, approaches to nature and divinity. Native African traditions, such as those of the Igbo and Yoruba of Nigeria, readily come to one’s mind in this connection. The Ministry of External Affairs would do well to arrange special screenings for both films in the Kantara series across its embassies and other suitable cultural centres in Asia, Africa, Australia, South and North America, with a particular focus on India’s official outreach to the First Nations people of these continents. Not only will this help raise awareness, build trust and foster dialogues about the deeper civilisational moorings of Indian culture and the other interlocutor cultures abroad, but it could also win India and her indigenous Hindu culture some valuable allies across the globe in these difficult times. This is a necessary measure that Indian........

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