There was a time when Indian cinema argued with India.

It questioned authority, mocked power, mourned injustice, and—often clumsily, sometimes courageously—held up a mirror to the republic’s contradictions. From Mother India to Garam Hawa, from Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro to Bombay, the screen was a site of contestation. It reflected the nation not as it wished to see itself, but also vented forth aspirations.

That Indian cinema is receding. In its place stands something more disciplined, more certain—and more insidious- propaganda, dressed as entertainment.

Contemporary mainstream Indian cinema, particularly since 2014, has begun to function less as cultural expression and more as political instrument. Not through crude censorship or overt diktat, but through something subtler: alignment. Alignment with power, with ideology, with a vision of the nation that is singular rather than plural, muscular rather than reflective, and majoritarian rather than democratic.

This is not a story about Dhurandhar or other similar films. It is about how an entire cultural industry learns—slowly, profitably, and often willingly—to speak the language of the state.

Entertainment Does Not Float Above Politics

Every society tells itself comforting myths about its cultural industries. One of India’s most persistent myths is that Bollywood is “just entertainment”—loud, escapist, unserious. But cinema has never been politically innocent. It is a mass medium that reaches deeper and wider than most political speeches ever will. It works not through argument, but through emotion; not through facts, but through identification.

Scholars of propaganda have long understood this. Herman and Chomsky’s famous model, developed to explain news media, applies with equal—perhaps greater—force to entertainment. When ownership structures, regulatory incentives, market pressures, and political climates align, culture does not merely reflect power. It amplifies it.

In India today, those alignments are unmistakable.

Financing increasingly flows toward narratives that flatter the ruling ideology. Regulatory institutions operate with strategic ambiguity, rewarding compliance and punishing dissent. Political leaders publicly endorse films, slogans migrate seamlessly from cinema halls to campaign rallies, and box-office success becomes indistinguishable from ideological validation; case in point being the biopic about premier Modi- but more of that later.

The result is not state censorship in the old authoritarian sense. It is something more modern and more effective: self-censorship lubricated by profit and protection.

The new nationalism on screen

The transformation is clearest in the stories Indian cinema now prefers to tell. Every ultra- nationalist project requires an adversary. Contemporary Indian cinema has grown increasingly adept at providing one, Pakistan.

The Indian cinema is no longer a complex civic idea, where ideas were sometimes negotiated among differences. It is a moral entity under siege. Enemies are everywhere—across borders, within minorities, among critics, dissenters, and sceptics. Conflict is simplified into binaries: loyal versus anti-national, patriotic versus treacherous, us versus them.

Films like Uri: The Surgical Strike did not merely dramatise military action; they aestheticised it. War became spectacle, masculinity became nationalism, and vengeance became virtue. The film’s famous catchphrase—enthusiastically adopted by politicians—revealed how easily cinematic emotion can be converted into political mobilisation.

PM Narendra Modi went further still, collapsing the distance between cinema and campaign. Released on the eve of national elections (and briefly halted by electoral authorities for precisely that reason), it presented the prime minister not as a political actor subject to scrutiny, but as a messianic figure—untouched by ambiguity, error, or dissent. It was not biography. It was hagiography.

Then came The Kashmir Files, perhaps the most consequential cultural artifact of this era. The suffering it depicts—the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits—is real and deserves remembrance. But remembrance is not the same as instrumentalisation. By stripping history of context, complexity, and competing narratives, the film transformed trauma into accusation and memory into weapon. State governments declared it tax-free; officials organised screenings. A commercial film was repurposed into ideological curriculum.

This is how propaganda works in the twenty-first century. Not by inventing lies wholesale, but by selecting truths, amplifying them, and embedding them within narratives that serve present power.

Dhurandhar & Company

Cinema is more than entertainment; it is a mirror, a megaphone, and, at its best, a bridge between worlds. When a film seizes the public imagination, topping box offices and generating oceans of commentary, it shows not just Box Office appeal but also reflection on what the audience are watching, or more critically, what they want to watch.

Dhurandhar—the latest high-octane offering from the Indian film industry is precisely such a work. Its commercial success is undeniable, its cinematic craft slick and crowd-pleasing, and its appeal is rooted in a lineage of bravura and high-energy storytelling.

And yet, nestled within this tapestry of action and spectacle lies a deeper conversation about representation, responsibility, and the narrative choices that shape how billions perceive each other across borders.

Every cultural product carries within it assumptions about the world and the people in it, and films with geopolitical subtext have an outsized influence on how audiences construct mental maps of “the Other.”

Much like others before it, Dhurandhar engages with Pakistan not as a nuanced neighbour across shared history, but as a flattened adversarial backdrop for the Indian hero’s exploits.

Why does this matter? Because nations are not abstract entities; they are aggregations of people whose lives and identities are shaped by history, culture, and shared humanity. Stories that default to reductive portrayals contribute to a climate where understanding erodes and caricature deepens.

Imagine a viewer in Lahore or Karachi watching Dhurandhar or its trailers online. The film’s action might be thrilling, its hero inspiring—but when it later folds into a narrative that casts Pakistan as convenient shorthand for malevolence or antagonism, that viewer’s experience of Indian cinema becomes tinged with a sense of exclusion or misrepresentation. A viewer might love the action, but also say about the storyline- “ Yaar buhut lambi lambi chori hui hain.”

Conversely, imagine audiences in India or elsewhere who may never have meaningful personal encounters with Pakistanis. Their only exposure through widely distributed cinematic products could become a distorting lens—less reality than fable spun from geopolitical anxieties.

This is not to advocate for shying away from conflict narratives. Conflict is real, and art should have the courage to approach it. But it should do so with complexity, empathy, and a willingness to present adversaries at least sometimes, as human rather than as tropes. When it doesn’t, art reduces into merely propaganda.

Some might ask: “Isn’t this just a movie? Why read geopolitics into entertainment?” This is a valid question—and the answer lies in understanding how narratives shape public imagination. Stories are not inert; they are formative.

When a blockbuster normalises certain portrayals of “the Other,” especially in regions where real tensions exist, it becomes part of a larger cultural ecosystem. Audiences carry these narratives into public discourse, into social media debates, into classrooms and dinner tables. Film influences empathy just as much as it influences fashion trends.

If Hollywood blockbusters of the late 20th century often shaped American views of “the foreign,” then Indian blockbusters have a similar cultural reach. Filmmakers hold immense power. They shape how we see heroes, villains, cities, and souls. Their choices reverberate beyond ticket sales into the realm of collective perception.

Pakistani characters in Indian cinema still greet each other with an exaggerated chorus of “janab” and “aadab”, as if these words are exchanged hourly on every street corner from Karachi to Peshawar. Pakistanis themselves often snigger at this—it is so obviously and theatrically outdated, that it barely merits offence. But accuracy is besides the point. What matters is perception.

This is not how Pakistanis see themselves; it is how Indian cinema has decided to see them. Repetition does the rest. Over time, these linguistic tics harden into shorthand, and shorthand hardens into belief.

In the same way, Muslims more broadly are now routinely coded as suspect: terrorists, fanatics, infiltrators, demographic threats. There is of the occasional ‘good Muslim’ co-protagonist, thrown in to cater to Indian Muslims, but that theme is rarely now the pervasive, even important part in the storyline.

Lighting, background scores, accents, narrative arcs—all do their quiet work.

Cinema does not need to shout to persuade; it merely needs to repeat.

Edward Said once wrote that Orientalism operates not through what is said once, but through what is repeated until it feels natural. The same is true here. When audiences repeatedly see one community associated with violence and another with redemption, these associations harden into common sense.

The mastery of propaganda lies not in any single film, but in accumulation. Media scholars call this “cultivation”: the gradual shaping of worldviews through prolonged exposure. Over time, the line between cinematic fiction and social reality blurs. The screen does not merely depict prejudice; it normalises it.

Equally clear is Indian cinema’s growing role in rewriting the past.

Historical films increasingly impose contemporary political identities onto periods that were far messier and far less communal than today’s narratives by Bollywood. Medieval Muslim rulers are recast as modern villains; complex political struggles are reduced to religious binaries. Historians protest, but spectacle drowns out scholarship.

I am not the only one decrying this radicalisation of Indian cinema but there is a plethora of authoritative scholarly studies on this too (see below), many from Indian scholars themselves. The politics and mutual animosity of India Pakistan aside, as an avid movie watcher, it pains me just a bit to see the industry that produced the tear rendering, moving ‘My name is Khan’, swing so far to the right. That particular movie was a superb rebuttal of Islamophobia as ever can be, and would have won more hearts and minds for Bollywoood than Dhurnadhar ever can. It’s a pity we wont be seeing too many of the former, as jingoism takes over.

Cinema’s emotional authority gives it enormous power over collective memory. For millions, films function as history lessons. When those lessons are distorted, the consequences are not academic. They shape how citizens understand belonging, grievance, and entitlement in the present.

A democracy cannot survive long on mythic history alone. At some point, the stories it tells itself begin to demand political enforcement.

Why Bollywood goes along

It would be comforting to blame all this on coercion. The truth is less reassuring.

Bollywood’s compliance is not merely the result of fear; it is the product of incentives. Nationalist films sell. They receive political amplification, institutional protection, and often spectacular commercial returns. Dissenting films face delays, protests, boycotts, and silence.

Over time, rational actors adapt. Scripts change. Risks are avoided. Certain characters quietly disappear. This is not conspiracy; it is market logic operating within an ideologically charged environment.

Preference falsification becomes routine. Some filmmakers may even privately disagree with dominant narratives, but public dissent carries costs few are willing to bear. Silence becomes safety. Alignment becomes success.

India is not alone in this trajectory. History offers many examples of regimes that discovered the political utility of culture—from fascist Europe to the Soviet Union. The aesthetics differ; the mechanics remain eerily similar.

When cinema ceases to argue with power and learns instead to ventriloquize it, something essential is lost. Not just artistic freedom, but democratic capacity itself. And the most dangerous moment for any nation is when its stories stop questioning power—and start teaching people how to love it uncritically.

The writer is a security analyst. His works including the paper on above, and can be accessed by following him on through his LinkedIn handle ‘Manzar Zaidi PhD’

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer