The orders were to erase you: RRR’s new idiom of Hindu nationalism

Mridula Sharma

When my former classmate updated her video story on WhatsApp with impassioned calls for violence, the last thing I expected was her ecstatic participation. Fortunately, her friends were just in a cinema hall, rooting for the film’s protagonists during their final battle with a racist British Governor and his colonial army. Unfortunately, the film was S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR (Rise, Roar, Revolt).

Released in March 2022, RRR explores the possibility of kinship and collective resistance in its presentation of Telugu revolutionaries Alluri Sitarama Raju - who is mostly referred to as Ram in the film -  and Komaram Bheem’s united struggle for justice in colonial India. Grounded in alternate history, it imagines prospects of togetherness between two freedom fighters whose paths never crossed in reality.

The scene captured on my classmate’s WhatsApp story is one that I, too, had viewed on the silver screen. Here’s what happens: after a series of unnecessarily loud action sequences and gruesome close-up shots of wounded human bodies, the film proceeds to conclude with Ram and Bheem’s (the archetypal ‘goodies’ of the story)  victory over the British colonisers. This closure provides the viewers with the success story that India demands from its historical past.

As viewers, we are expected to give in to our overwhelming urges to support a fantastical story of justice. We, the people of India, are almost required to cheer for an outrageous portrayal of the country’s anti-colonial resistance, one that cuts through a curious intersection of both history and fantasy, tugging on the strands of a colonial past that continues to impact contemporary Indian culture and aesthetics.

RRR’s blend of fact and fiction isn’t a dangerous concoction by default. What makes the film troubling — apart from its neglect of female characters, questionable depiction of tribal sensibility, and tactful Nizam references — is the sense of Hindu nationalism that it invokes in, and demands, from its audience, while presenting only one solution: vigilante justice carried out in the form of anti-colonial protest.

Vigilante justice, an important trope in RRR, secures the stamp of approval as a necessary intervention, but only when it is the state that seeks to enact violence on its citizens in measures that aren’t in alignment with legal norms. When individuals attempt to resort to any form of direct action or violence, particularly against the government, they are pejoratively branded as ‘anti-national’ - named and shamed as an enemy of the state. 

In such instances where the state is opposed in the pursuit of justice, a vocabulary of terrorism tends to emerge and begins to flood the mainstream public discourse, as it attempts to convince its citizens that any action that challenges its authority is fundamentally ‘violent.’ 

For instance, the police encounter in the 2019 Hyderabad gang-rape case - involving the killing of four suspects - was applauded for its necessity and accepted for its ‘inevitability’. In contrast lies the media’s and state’s treatment of all militants in Kashmir, who continue to be vilified as dangerous terrorists in uninformed and misleading conversations on Kashmir’s autonomy. 

Even when public protests against state authority are non-violent, as many anti-CAA protests across the country were, the state still marks and treats protestors as ‘anti-nationals’ who need to be tamed by police brutality and prevented from being a national threat through harsh punishments. 

Despite its overarching narrative of anti-colonialism, RRR doesn’t just showcase two revolutionaries fighting for freedom. It also iconifies two men who undermine and rebel against colonial authority in unrealistic action sequences as a response to violence against their India. That is why its portrayal of vigilante action against colonial masters fuels an uneasy sense of nationalist pride. 

Besides, the representation of Bheem's and Ram’s political struggles are portrayed with striking contrast. On one hand, there is Bheem’s campaign, striving to retrieve a young girl purchased by Governor Scott and uprooted from his community. On the other, Ram’s mission involves the distribution of military equipment for organised anticolonial revolt.

Even if we can overlook the film’s overemphasis on Ram’s mission and the effects of this bias on social realities marked by state violence against tribal communities, it is difficult to ignore the consequences of digesting the false narrative of ‘one’ India .

Colonial India, for instance, meant many things to many people. Ambedkar’s movement against the caste system, Adivasi resistance against British colonial rule, and communal differences within the mainstream anticolonial movement were simultaneous realities. 

A preoccupation with India’s independence did gain centrality as a shared goal across, by and large, most social justice movements, but people had varying roles in contributing to the project of independence, depending upon their social positions.

Despite its projection of ‘one’ India, RRR does acknowledge the varying roles that people played, depending on their social positions. Ram’s birth in a family of anticolonial revolutionaries, for example, provides him with the sensibility and understanding of the importance of armed campaigns for defeating the British. It is his exposure to training that makes him join the British police force, rise through the ranks, and use the authority granted by his promotion to distribute weapons among anticolonial protestors. His life encounters solidify his ambition to single-handedly achieve his revolutionary goal. 

Although he risks giving up his father’s dream to protect Bheem, whose very existence he comes to regard as a meaningful revolution, it is ultimately Ram’s vision that takes priority. His means of seeking freedom gain unquestioned legitimacy. Ram and Bheem’s final fight becomes Ram’s fight. The projection of difference among social groups is, consequently, subsumed to enforce the narrative of ‘one’ India.

When Ram’s saffron attire and weapon, borrowed from a nearby temple statue in what appears to be a forest, initiates a process of deification, making him uncannily appear as the Hindu God Ram, Bheem ceases to be his equal. Instead, Bheem becomes Ram’s supporter. The hierarchy becomes crystal clear when, after the defeat of British colonisers, Bheem requests Ram to ‘educate’ him. Granted, the real Ram - Alluri Sitarama Raju - was well known for contributing to the welfare of tribal people. 

In the film, however, Bheem’s request following the conclusive battle disrupts the dynamics of their companionship. The request makes Bheem a disciple, Ram a guru. Additionally, within the context of the film, it overlooks the merit of tribal epistemology.

By subsuming Bheem’s campaign and the tools available at his disposal to seek justice under the larger canvas of Ram’s warfare, RRR embraces the assimilation of the demands of the minority under a majoritarian agenda, an unmistakable nod towards a nationalist sentiment. 

In such an endorsement of nationalism, one that’s claimed by, and primarily serves, the majority, RRR contributes to an increasingly pervasive culture that thrives on assertions of Hindu supremacy, which find security in patriotic rhetoric and references to a glorious history of the nation. 

But the dominant idiom of nationalism today — i.e. Hindutva or Hindu nationalism – has become the main catalyst driving the increasing acceptance of Islamophobia in contemporary India. So, what does it mean to celebrate India’s glorious past of nationalism when its fiercest advocates instinctively, and even intentionally, confuse nationalism with Islamophobia?

Consider the proactive upkeep of Islamophobia across the country by both the state and the public. In January 2022, six students were refused entry in the classroom because their hijabs violated the junior college’s uniform policy. The dispute quickly escalated, spreading to the corridors of schools and colleges alike. 

Counter protests were staged by Hindu students, who demanded the recognition of their ‘right' to wear saffron scarves in the wake of emergent conversations on uniform policy. The counter protests didn’t accompany or complement Muslim students’ demand to wear a hijab. Instead, they were aligned in opposition to protests for institutional acceptance of the hijab. The message was clear: maintain the ban on hijab.

Unfortunately, state action against Indian Muslims does not exist in isolation. It has prompted an active public investment in the cultivation of an atmosphere of fear and humiliation for Muslims. 

In December 2021, Yati Narsinghanand Giri helped organise Dharam Sansad (Religious Parliament) events in BJP-led Uttarakhand where he urged Hindu attendees to arm themselves for a ‘genocide’ against Muslims. Attendees didn’t protest the call to arms. 

In April 2022, the Delhi Police, which conducted an investigation in Dharam Sansad events organised in both Delhi and Uttarakhand, predictably concluded before the Supreme Court that it did not find any evidence of hate speech in the two events.

The public’s silent complicity and, at times, participation in the state’s Orwellian agendas signals a dangerous precedent. It illustrates the increasing normalisation and acceptance of Islamophobic violence enacted under the falsified threat of Hindu victimhood. Armed mobs invoking the Hindu God Ram by repeatedly chanting ‘Jai Sri Ram’ during Ramadan encapsulates the extent to which overt acts of violence targeting Muslims have become quotidian.

 As India confronts record-high unemployment and increasing poverty, state-led distractions keep the public misinformed, maintaining an insensible faith in the leadership. An Indian woman’s victory in the Miss Universe pageant, the appointment of Indian-origin men in executive positions at leading multinational corporations like Google and Twitter, and, more recently, an exaggeration of Chinese incursions divert attention away from the failures of the BJP government. 

Recurring episodes of violence against Muslims, which the BJP either explicitly sanctions, or conveniently glosses over, fosters hate speech and bigotry in a country that’s already acclimatised to accept violence against its religious minorities.

When cultural productions such as RRR fuel aggressive nationalism and, subsequently, normalise physical violence, the reality of state violence is ignored, while the absent glory of the nation is overemphasised. Films, after all, cannot be detached from their social and political context, nor from their real-life implications. 

RRR’s uninformed diegesis subliminally contributes to a national climate of Hindu nationalism. Viewers are invited to believe in and advocate for the nation’s glory, with the architects of India’s glory almost always being portrayed as Hindus.

Muslims, in contrast, become reminiscent of a violent past of Islamisation. The social implications of such cultural artefacts ripple through legislation, with the threat of religious conversion ringing the loudest in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, in which Chief Minister Ajay Singh Bisht passed a law in 2020 to counter the unfounded conspiracy of love jihad, which presumes that Muslim men are attempting to marry and covert Hindu women to change the country’s demographic.

As we continue to witness the real-life effects of cinema, its role in culture and politics cannot be ignored. The success of films that aim to bolster nationalism depend on the instigation of their viewers. Such films have become participants in an overarching climate that seeks to erase Muslim expression and identity.

The people rooting for Ram and Bheem in RRR’s final fight sequence will not extend similar support to militants fighting Indian occupation in Kashmir. They will not stand in solidarity with Muslim women’s campaign against the hijab ban. Instead, they will purchase the narrative of Hindu India’s glory and feed on its remains.