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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Can a Muslim love Shivaji? Khalid Ke Shivaji asks the question, makes you answer it

Khalid Ke Shivaji is not a film that villainises Hindus or glorifies Muslims. It calls out the machinery of division.

Raj Pritam More’s Marathi film Khalid Ke Shivaji is the kind of film people in power wouldn’t want you to watch, which is precisely why you should.

The film asks questions that sound almost absurd in Maharashtra, a state that has spent centuries claiming Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj as its defining symbol of pride: does Shivaji belong to one community alone? Can a Muslim boy love him just as fiercely as anyone else?

Khalid Ke Shivaji doesn’t answer this question for us so much as force us to sit with it after the film ends. And that discomfort is the whole point.

At the center of the film is Khalid, a boy—a ‘Muslim’ boy—whose selfless devotion to and admiration for Shivaji endures until the world around him decides it shouldn’t. His classmates start calling him Afzal Khan, the Bijapur commander Shivaji killed.

Many might just overlook it, saying, ‘kids are just teasing’. But it reveals a larger picture. Prejudice in Maharashtra today, or even........

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