“Is RRR really fascist?” & other questions we shouldn’t have to answer in 2022
By now, Western fascination and approval of RRR have started to generate a significant international reputation for S.S. Rajamouli and his crew, with award nominations pouring in. The ubiquitous wonder and awe the film has elicited from American and European film critics — who see the film as a thrillingly entertaining anti-colonial liberal spectacle from the Global South that is more “original” than Marvel’s usual garbage — have stunned liberal & progressive spectators and critics in India, who raised alarm bells over the film’s political aesthetics even as it had just been released. And despite more than a few thinkpieces by Indians/Indian diaspora in western media outlets that have gone to great lengths to explain why this adulation is ominous, few if any of these western reviewers have corrected or qualified their readings of the film as politically good.
(See Nithin Seelan’s ‘RRR and Rajamouli’s Hindutva,’ Nitish Pahwa’s ‘A Wild Indian Blockbuster Is Ravishing Movie Fans,’ and Ritesh Babu’s ‘Unpacking RRR, Indian Politics, and Cinema.’)
So, here we are, saying “not again.”
Here we are having to say “Yes, this is a fascist AF film.”
Here we are saying, “No, this is not an overreaction or hyperbole.”
I’m tired. Because this is a deeply dispiriting moment for those of us who are longstanding lovers of popular Indian film and who have witnessed its rapid degeneracy into right-wing Sanghi spectacle.
Yes. This Is A Fascist Film.
And let’s get this out of the way. If people were a little more historically aware of how Italian Fascist ideology constructed and relied upon cinema to enact heavy embellishments of their histories and generate new impetus for a nation-building imaginary, it would be easy to see RRR for the fascist spectacle it is. Just take Umberto Eco’s famously circulated list of characteristics of Ur-Fascism.
Several of these point to fascistic tendencies already present in Indian cinemas across regions and languages — the differences from Ur-Fascism being a self-aware working-class consciousness that was embodied under certain sociopolitical conditions (i.e. a highly regulated market economy, feudal family structures, religious orthodoxy’s hold on the social imagination, small military strength, weak governance structures, weak law & order apparatus, etc.). RRR’s encoding of several of these Ur-Fascist characteristics — love of traditionalism, action, machismo and weaponry, heroism, militarism, contempt for the weak, populist anti-colonialism — in the current political-economic dispensation is a glaring red flag. And before some clueless type goes, “Dude, Hollywood has like had 90% of these characteristics for decades,” like bro, I don’t know what to tell you, because um…
Arguably, popular Indian cinemas when they emerged in the early 20th century richly inhabited the dichotomy and tensions of what Stuart Hall points to with the word “popular” — as representing either the interests of the masses of common men and women alive to a working-class politics OR being of such mass commercial appeal that it represents a debased or “low” culture that the unthinking masses consumed uncritically. Rather than subscribe to either extreme, Hall persuasively argues for an understanding of the “popular” that stages it as a continuous, uneven, unequal site of struggle by the dominant culture to disorganize and reorganize the cultural field, where there is both resistance and supersession, what he calls “the dialectic of cultural struggle.”
So while reliance upon the mass hero, machismo, violence, sexism/misogyny, and anti-intellectualism have all been strong threads in our popular cinemas, there were also strong sympathies with the poor, distrust of the state, politicians & even an amoral middle-class, anger about social injustice, heroic representations of non-violence/compassion/mercy, and finally, discomfort with religious orthodoxy, communal/caste hatred & moral policing that our popular films embodied that resisted fascistic impulses. In 1940s and 50s Hindi cinema, storytellers, music composers, performers, poets — many of them Bahujan and Muslim — constantly disrupted dominant tropes, wrested meanings out of the hands of the moneymen and dispersed them to diverse audiences thirsty to be represented on screen. The poor could thus have a filmic presence and voice, a Dalit poet could pen socialist lyrics for a khandaani Kapoor hero, and a “lowly” court-dancing beloved could ask her cowardly lover, a Mughal prince, across caste and class lines, “When you have fallen in love, why should you be afraid?” These possibilities were still full of contradictions, but they were, above all, still possible. Similar patterns existed in Telugu, Kannada and Tamil films from my own knowledge (Karunanidhi’s socialist leanings in the Tamil film Parasakthi’s screenplay, for example, are well-documented).
RRR though comes particularly at a time when popular cinema — especially its Hindi avatar — has thoroughly embraced bourgeois nationalism for popular substance. The turn to national hagiography is complete and the films function inevitably as a mouthpiece for the current fascist government deeply invested in suppressing civil liberties.
But it’s worth stressing, Rajamouli’s films resist capitulating to the likes of an Akshay Kumar film — cardboard-cutout heroes, governmental policies wrapped up as social messages and comically villainous (often Muslim or Pakistani) antagonists. Instead, Rajamouli’s real skill as a storyteller stitches together the older national imaginary of a welfarist secular benevolent caste-nation (exemplified in Bahubali’s monarchic Mahishmati) alongside an ethno-nationalist Hindu Ram-Rajya where landlord and peasant can militate together against brutish British colonizers (i.e. RRR). The two national imaginaries, which most people see as being at odds today (Hindu India vs. Hindutva India), coexist with very little contradiction in Rajamouli’s films.
Anti-caste/Ambedkarite critics have long argued that this is the true Brahmin-nationalist project of India, where Hinduism & Hindutva are on a long spectrum of authoritarian/fascist tendencies that are harder to distinguish than liberal-secular activism portrays. It’s why even without pandering to the demonized Muslim or anti-working class sentiments (which arguably hark back to Gandhian-Nehruvian liberal-political aesthetics) Rajamouli’s films can call upon Sanghi desires for a glorious unified Hindu national past in extremely pleasurable ways for fascist sympathizers.
The Unification (and not Annihilation) of Caste(s) + Tribes
This brings us to RRR’s dangerous fantasy of the unified Hindu community where a Raju landlord can unite with the tribal Gond rebel to fight the British, and erase all tribal histories of resistance towards Kamma-Kapu-Raju landlords, bureaucrats, the Hyderabad Nizamate as well as the British in one fell swoop. Akash Poyam has written about this extensively on both Adivasi Resurgence and in Caravan; in the latter piece, he clearly excoriates Rajamouli for dehumanizing the Gond community by making Bheem illiterate, a ‘noble savage’ stereotype mystically attuned to forests, medicinal herbology & the animal world, and fully subservient to his dominant-caste buddy Ram. Poyam goes on to say:
The decision to have Komaram played by Junior NTR, a grandson of a former Andhra Pradesh chief minister and a member of the dominant Kamma caste, furthers the tradition of Adivasi characters in Indian cinema being played almost exclusively by upper-caste Hindus. The casting choice is in keeping with the right-wing agenda of spreading Brahminism among Adivasis. Moreover, when Alluri writes “Jal, jangal, zameen” — a slogan said to have been coined by Komaram — on the white flag, which is a sacred Gond symbol, he is not only appropriating an articulation of Adivasi demands and desecrating a religious symbol but also using a language that has been a colonising force for the erasure of Adivasi knowledge and culture. The imposition of Hindi and Hinduism, after all, has been key to the violent process of assimilating Adivasis into the Indian nation state.
Poyam also says by the end that the Gond community’s warm reception to the film signals how much the Sangh’s missionary efforts to make Adivasis “Hindu” and partake in a nationalist imaginary that affords them more citizenship than reality have yielded some fruit.
So by all accounts, historical figures Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, made into protagonists of RRR, historically never met or interacted in their separate battles against the British, and a friendship & comradeship between them as revolutionaries would be impossible considering Adivasi struggles for land rights pitted them against Telugu landlord castes. But RRR writer Vijayendra Prasad’s fantasy of this friendship serves a very important purpose in re-imagining anti-colonial history — one where the many contested, fractious, fragmented anti-colonial struggles with disparate ideologies can be rescripted as a united Hindu resistance that would not only be successful in freeing India but also constructing a homogenously Hindu vision of the nation.
This then is a fantasy of the unification of castes, which along with violent Islamophobia, is a foundational mythology the Sangh needs to fabricate to construct an unproblematic category of the “Hindu.” It also stitches together the religious imagination of castes as sectarian “Hindu” religious practices with the material imagination (and to be clear, it is imagination and not a reality) of a plurality of castes organizing land and labor in “Hindu” society with harmonious social relations amongst them.
And in case this message of unification was too subtle for his audience, Rajamouli seals this idea in concrete by literally making Ram and Bheem one-mind-one-body at a key moment, a cyborg-esque pan-caste male ideal (but with the upper caste as upper body, the lower caste as lower body, isn’t it amazing) that is optimized for climbing, running, fighting, even flying at one point in total harmony. Bheem and Ram don’t even talk to communicate, just flexes of muscle, nods, and nudges to execute complex fighting moves.
Rajamouli also crafts this unification vision in highly specific ways in RRR’s plot. Not only is Bheem’s intellectual inferiority (and physical superiority) to Ram stressed in multiple scenes, it is Bheem as the Gond Adivasi who adorns Ram in saffron, puts a tilak on him, gives him his bow & arrows — the Adivasi as anointing the caste-Hindu demi-god in exchange for his own education and “upliftment.” This is revisionism. And this is at a political time when Gond activists are being slapped with UAPA cases and being incarcerated without chance of bail or even a day in court. It’s all well and good to show them as nationalists on screen fighting alongside caste-Hindus when you forget what the Indian state is doing RIGHT NOW with Adivasi struggles, using dehumanizing & violent terms like “Naxals” and “Maoists.”
So it’s not just the saffron images of Raju/Ram (when did Raju become Ram?) fighting a righteous battle that make this film a Sanghi spectacle, but also the fabrication of a Hindu unity among anti-colonial revolutionaries that fantasizes a fictive glorious Hindu past so essential to Hindutva. Long forgotten is Dr. Ambedkar’s call to annihilate caste. Of course, there is no reckoning with the question of tribal rights, sovereignty and citizenship, which have deeply complex, contentious relationships to “modernizing.”
These are eerie parallels with the rise of Italian Fascism and the role that cinema had to play in generating consent for Fascist rule. In particular, the rise of the historical costume film in Italy concentrating primarily on ancient Rome and the Risorgimento, that is, Italy’s national unification in the nineteenth century, became the most enduring genre of cinema leading up to Fascist rule. In Steven Ricci’s book Cinema and Fascism — Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943, Ricci quotes Bernardini, who suggested that Italian nationalist fervor was the larger social context in which films operated, and that “What’s more, the ideology and, above all, the mentality of nationalism was taking shape and gaining strength in Italy. It depended on traditions, on patriotic memories, on historical and cultural heredity, in order to reinforce that unity of Italy and of our people which, after forty years, was still quite far from being a reality.”
Ricci also notes:
It’s not just RRR but also the Bahubali films that become key here in imagining national-cultural unity — as one of the earliest films pitched as a “pan-Indian” release, simultaneously shot in Telugu and Tamil and simultaneously released in dubbed formats across North and South Indian theatres, and inspired by the dynastic politics & warfare from the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, Bahubali was pioneering in how cinema could nationalize Brahmin culture i.e. varna ideology for the masses.
In an excellent analogy, Kuffir on the Ambedkarite portal Round Table India terms Bahubali as India’s equivalent of The Birth of A Nation, saying
Like Rajamouli, D W Griffith used unprecedented spectacle and scale to whitewash his inherently inegalitarian philosophy. As the film critic Richard Brody says in The New Yorker:
‘The worst thing about “Birth of a Nation” is how good it is. The merits of its grand and enduring aesthetic make it impossible to ignore and, despite its disgusting content, also make it hard not to love. And it’s that very conflict that renders the film all the more despicable, the experience of the film more of a torment — together with the acknowledgment that Griffith, whose short films for Biograph were already among the treasures of world cinema, yoked his mighty talent to the cause of hatred (which, still worse, he sincerely depicted as virtuous).’
That’s only half true about Bahubali. The film is slick and grandly presented but it doesn’t display the virtue of creating any new ‘grand and enduring aesthetic’. That’s where the parallels with Griffith’s film end. It is essentially a film of the Modi age: as loud, as crude and as shameless about celebrating unequal power and prejudice. It is a film that celebrates the unabashed assertion of caste pride of the young, successful, new age Brahmin-savarna, of the grandchildren of Nehru and Savarkar, across India and the world.
By equating the grandchildren of both Nehru and Savarkar i.e. the Brahmin liberal and the Brahmin ethnonationalist, Kuffir’s point here is that Bahubali’s valorization of Kshatriya-dharma, so loudly proclaimed in several scenes in the films (by men AND women), is contemporary propaganda for varnashrama ideology. (Alluri Sitharama Raju’s community interestingly also claims Kshatriya ancestry today, which is not accidental; glorious pasts for each caste establishing its place in the hierarchy are very necessary for a universalizing Hindu past.) That both of these films happen to be masculinity porn is also key in many ways.
Every Woman Adores a Fascist/Every Fan Desires the Kshatriya
This brings me to fascist and Nazi idealizations of the white male body as the instrumental “will of the people.” European film historians have meticulously detailed how Nazi obsession with the ideal Aryan body type i.e. white, male, German-ancestral. Daniel Wildmann, in a book chapter on Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia, explores how the film documenting the 1938 Olympics staged and constructed “Aryan” masculinity through fantasies of the male body from Classical Greek statues. Wildmann notes that Riefenstahl’s compositional choices in framing Greek statues alongside human bodies fundamentally underscore desire, saying:
“…the film also relies on the individual’s potential desire for model bodies, as well as on the desire to mirror oneself in these bodies as part of a larger community; that of the Volk. The ideal forms are not only supposed to prompt submission but also identification. The orientation around this corporeal ideal is linked with the promised dissolution of a difference, since — in contrast with the ideal — one’s own body is characterized as flawed.”
Riefenstahl stages the Olympic torchbearer as a modern Prometheus — Hitler himself in Mein Kampf had defined the“Aryan” as the “Prometheus of humanity”, and as the sole bearer of culture and progress. This athlete’s body was later also superimposed onto the body of the Nazi soldier, the ideal fighting machine of the Volksgemeinschaft.
In Rajamouli’s films, it is the Kshatriya warrior-king adorned with the sacred thread whose body becomes this typified ideal for male perfection. In Bahubali, both Mahendra Bahubali and Bhallaldeva are the idealized prototypes of Kshatriya masculinity, despite one being the hero and the other the villain — both are characters from the same varna, after all. Scenes showcasing their physical prowess are meant to elevate them as supra-human semi-divine figures, and the diegetic audience within the film itself stands in for the filmic audience, gasping, oohing and aahing in our stead to validate their semi-divine Kshatriya masculinity. While Bahubali’s character isn’t shown with a sacred thread here in this shot — he lives in ignorance with an indigenous tribe at this point — when he is in his princely avatar, he is also shown with the thread, like Bhallaldeva.
In RRR as well, introductory scenes for both Bheem and Ram involve a stunning showcase of physical strength — but an introductory montage for each was released as a promotional clip well before the film’s release and they, of course, feature the semi-naked male body, Raju/Ram’s along with the sacred thread. The question of the caste-masculine body here is interesting. Bheem’s character is Gond-Adivasi and clearly outside of caste and so cannot wear the thread or symbolize Kshatriya masculinity within the logic of the film — but it is also questionable that Komaram Bheem could be idealized as an Adivasi/indigenous body in the same way as a Kshatriya. Historically, visual art involving Adivasis, especially Gonds, has not centered a muscular self-aware masculinity in the way that hypermasculine images of kings and courtly figures have done so. Instead, it is worth reading this shot & scene through the star-body of Junior NTR, whose Kamma lineage from a prominent film dynasty is always the Ur-script over which his protagonist’s arc can be scripted (see S.V. Srinivas’ work here on Telugu film stardom and Kamma dominance).
The spectatorial gaze in the case of popular Indian film must be understood through the dynamics of stardom and affect operating with caste. In the case of Telugu regional cinema, the predominance of stars from Kamma and Kapu castes (often claiming Kshatriya-varna lineages) has resulted in enormous fandoms around stars based on caste hierarchies. The adoring gaze of the camera towards Ram & Bheem’s bodies, therefore, invites affective connotations centered around caste ownership, colloquially sometimes referred to as “caste feelings” from audiences steeped in Kamma-Kapu fandoms. The Kamma fan idealizes the Kamma star regardless of story/character. So to be clear, the fandoms around Bheem and Ram are not around Raju-Gond communities (going by the characters’ identities) but by the Kamma-Kapu dynastic ancestry of the stars. The caste of the star, therefore, supersedes narratological priorities of character and script. Rohitha Naraharisetty has noted this in an article that caste feelings amongst audiences are primarily driven by the stars’ identities themselves, which has historically fueled violent fights among their fans.
And did I mention? Rajamouli is also of the Kamma caste.
The camera lovingly tracing the bodies of its Kamma and Kapu stars is thus fetishistic of dominant-caste masculinity that becomes the key revolutionary force against the British. What the camera conveniently occludes is that violent outbursts of Kamma-Kapu masculinity have often historically targeted Bahujan/lower-caste groups in Andhra-Telangana. The Kammas, for instance, were a community primarily charged with the massacre of Dalits at Karamchedu in 1985. The brute masculinity of RRR’s protagonists showcased in the perfectly sculpted bodies of its Kshatriya-status aspiring stars thus calls upon very specific histories of both masculine and casteist violence.
Not Just Fascism But Brahminism
What makes Rajamouli’s films more complex than your run-of-the-mill propaganda is, therefore, not just his collusion with fascism but its older facsimile in the South Asian subcontinent — Brahminism. One only needs to skim the Manusmriti to understand the deeply controlling fantasies of Brahmins over the rest of “Hindu” i.e. caste society. The Manusmriti, with its visions of varnashrama dharma as the ideal mode of governance, deeply desired a state apparatus to enact its violently caste-segregationist law & order protocols, something historical kingdoms have never brought to fruition.
Rajamouli’s Bahubali fleshes out this fantasy varna imaginary in Mahishmati with great glee (why couldn’t Bahubali be a historical film is a question that’s haunted me; the answer is likely because no strictly varna-society like Mahishmati historically existed, so it had to come from mythology). RRR in contrast may seem more “modern” in its orientation towards anti-colonial liberatory struggles and revolutionary violence to birth the new nation, but it remains deeply mired in caste politics that suggest the same dharmic rule of the Manusmriti, the golden age of caste. Raju, after all, becomes Rama to Bheem by the end of the film, his transformation from a fellow caste subject — who is an egalitarian friend to Bheem — to a divine figure offering him education and his village the weaponry to fight the British. This elevation/deification is the traditional-modern construction that is Brahminism’s relationship to modernity — and note, no Brahmin character in cinema has returned to being a mythic priest in cultural narratives (yet). The Brahmin gets to be the most modern subject of all, while all the other castes can now fabricate antiquities… but I’ll save that for another reading some other day.
Rajamouli Is A Nice Guy Who Makes Fun Films
Before I end, I fear I will be besieged by Telugu fans eviscerating me for targeting their fave, and let me say, I think Rajamouli is a nice chap whose primary agenda is to make big-spectacle masala films that are profitable and pleasurable. He would likely be horrified by the accusation that his films are fascistic and argue that he just gets the audience's desires and fantasies for popular cinema rather accurately. And yes, he isn’t explicitly a member of the RSS (though his father, Vijayendra Prasad, the writer of RRR has come out as a Sangh-admirer and has announced he wants to write a film about the RSS).
All of that is okay. One does not have to be a Riefenstahl who is hired and rewarded by the brute state to be a propagandist; just getting the pulse on the political currents of our time correctly can make him a sharp filmmaker, highly popular with a right-wing audience, and therefore an effective propagandist. Those of us who can read the signs just need to read the signs.
And yes, RRR and Bahubali were fun films, deeply engrossing to watch on the big screen, and not without their whistle-worthy moments. But that’s just what the pleasure of popular cinema can be, and that doesn’t mean it doesn’t also come with problems that in a fascist time, we recognize can be deeply implicated in fascist aesthetics.
Foreign film bros, please sit down, listen, and read a little.
