A particular genre of film has taken hold in India over the past few years
A particular genre of film has taken hold in India over the past few years. It does not announce itself as propaganda. It announces itself as unearthing the truth that has been hidden for decades or even centuries. It arrives with the production values of entertainment and the authority of a document. It fills cinema halls, breaks records and exits the conversation having quietly shifted what a large number of people believe to be real. It is, in the most precise sense, not a film about the nation. It is a film that performs the nation and in performing it, claims to tell the audience who the enemies are.
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This is not a new impulse in cinema anywhere in the world. What is new in India is the speed, the scale and the degree to which the State itself has become a participant. Over the past decade, the pattern has solidified. A film arrives that claims to dramatise real events, presents its own version of contested or even contorted history as settled fact, receives official endorsement from ministers and governments and generates record collections at the box office. Critics who question its factual claims are accused of anti-nationalism. The cycle then repeats with the next film, each one more technically accomplished than the last, each extending the boundaries of pure fiction presented as undeniable facts and the audience, by and large, follows.
Starting the current wave of these trends was Uri: The Surgical Strike directed by Aditya Dhar that arrived in January 2019, a few months before India’s general election, and established what every film in this genre has since followed. It dramatised a 2016 cross-border military operation in Kashmir, a real event, classified in its details, with no camera present. The film filled in everything the public record could not: the strategy sessions, the moral weight, the human cost. Its slogan became a political rallying cry. It collected over INR 3 billion and it did something more durable than entertain, it gave the operation a shape, a story and a set of faces that millions of people now carry as their memory of what occurred even though no one outside a small circle of officials actually knows to this day as to what really occurred in that military operation.
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The Kashmir Files, released in 2022 pushed the format further than Uri. Directed by Vivek Agnihotri, it dramatised the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Kashmir in the early 1990s a genuine, underreported tragedy in which a Hindu minority fled violence and displacement. The suffering it depicted was real but the film did not present itself as one account of those events. It presented itself as the suppressed truth, kept from audiences by a media for over decades. Multiple state governments waived the entertainment tax on the film and a head of government gave it a public endorsement. Historians who pointed to distortions in its reconstruction were not engaged, they were accused of siding with the perpetrators. The film collected among the highest grosses in Indian cinema history.
The Kerala Story, released in 2023, opened with a title card claiming 32,000 women from the state had been converted and recruited by ISIS. The figure had no verified source. A court challenge led to its revision. The revision was quieter but the falsehood of the title card had already reached millions in halls and on social media across the country where, in the absence of any immediate counter-information, it read as established fact. That is the precise mechanism of this genre. The claim arrives first, at volume, in an emotionally charged setting. The correction, if it comes at all, arrives later, in a different register, to a smaller audience.
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Gadar 2, which was released in 2023, collected nearly INR 7 billion by staging its hero’s journey into Pakistan as the retrieval of civilisational honour. Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (2024) rehabilitated a figure whose historical record serious scholars continue to contest, not by engaging the scholarly debate but by treating it as already over. Article 370, which was released in 2024 dramatised the revocation of Kashmir’s constitutional status as an uncomplicated act of justice while the Supreme Court of India was still hearing the case challenging its legality.
Then came Dhurandhar in December 2025, the fullest expression of what this genre had been building toward. Directed again (which were the other films) by Aditya Dhar, it follows a fictional Indian intelligence operative working undercover in Karachi, with its story woven through the 1999 IC-814 hijacking, the 2001 Parliament attack, and the 2008 Mumbai bombings. Its fictional intelligence chief bears an obvious resemblance to India’s sitting National Security Adviser. Demonetisation, a disastrous economic policy appears in the film as a counter-terrorism masterstroke called Operation Green Leaf. It became the highest-grossing Hindi film ever made. Its sequel, Dhurandhar: The Revenge, released recently broke that record. Both were banned in Gulf countries for content the authorities there described as anti-Muslim. Critics who reviewed them sceptically faced harassment severe enough that the Film Critics Guild of India issued a formal public statement. None of this slowed the films down.