A dummy’s guide to propaganda films in Bollywood

Propaganda cinema, typically associated with autocracies like North Korea, Russia and Nazi-era Germany, appears to have found a home in India too. Several recent theatrical releases from Bollywood in particular have been labelled propaganda films. But how to tell these movies apart from the regular Friday offerings?

Should The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, The Vaccine War, Article 370, Bastar – The Naxal Story, Swatantrya Veer Savarkar, and the upcoming JNU: Jahangir National University and The Sabarmati Report be clubbed together? Is it fair to add Uri: The Surgical Strike, Tejas and Fighter to the list? Are all propagandist productions successful, or do only some of them work, and if so, why?

When trying to identify propaganda films, it isn’t enough to deploy the phrase “I know it when I see it”, used by an American judge in a case about whether a movie was obscene. Here’s a guide to understanding this variety of cinema, from what it represents to what it hopes to achieve.

What is propagandist about these films?

Derived from Latin and meaning to spread or propagate, the word “propaganda” can be applied to Films Division newsreels extolling government programmes as well as wartime efforts to boost the national spirit. In the current context, it simply means the pro-government film, or more specifically, the pro-Bharatiya Janata Party government film.

Ideology-loaded movies began appearing around 2019, a...

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