Are Bollywood Movies Political Theater? The Case of Panipat.

Cinema and the teaching of history are some of the fields on which modern battles of narratives are fought. Some people even seek to connect both fields by producing historical movies or, more often, historical fiction films with a political message. But is this happening in today’s India?

Ever since Hindu nationalists, in the form of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), rose to power in India in 2014, a high number of big-budget Bollywood movies have retold the historical struggles between Hindu and Muslim rulers. In all of these films, the Hindus were presented as heroes, and the Muslims as villains, and characters were often painted with hard strokes of the brush. This list includes at least four famous films: “Bajirao Mastani” (2015), “Padmaavat” (2018), “Panipat: The Great Betrayal” (2019) and “Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior” (2020). 

Some commentators see these as deliberate political choices. “Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior” was for instance summarized by one commentator as having “the quality of a ballad – it’s heavily embellished, romantic and simplistic.” The reviewer, Nandini Ramnath for Scroll.in, also concluded that battles which “took place centuries ago are viewed through the prism of present-day politics and prejudices.” In turn, one reviewer of “Panipat: The Great Betrayal” –  L. Ravichander for Telangana Today – summarized it as “chest beating ‘deshbhakti’ [patriotism]” and termed the “filmmaker’s capacity at falsification of history” as “amazing.”

We should certainly consider these movies case by case. Here I will restrict myself to one of them – “Panipat: The Great Betrayal.” Like the other four movies mentioned here, “Panipat” is a work of historical fiction, for which the event, the stage, and the heroes were obviously carefully chosen. Just like with “Bajirao Mastani” and “Tanhaji,” the film’s protagonists are the Marathas. Historically, the military accomplishments of this community are incredible. About halfway into the 17th century, they were a group of little more than local Hindu military chiefs, in service of more powerful monarchs and limited in presence to chunks of western India. By 1674, they proclaimed their own kingdom. By the mid-18th century they grew into a group of kingdoms that together represented perhaps the most formidable power in South Asia of that time (and which later the British needed three wars to defeat).

What is even more politically tempting about the Marathas is that their monarchs – especially their first king, Shivaji Bhonsle – were outspoken in their official worship of Hinduism. This rhymes with the fact that for many of the initial decades of their independence, the Marathas’ biggest foe was the Mughal empire, whose rulers were equally outspoken in their official adherence to Islam. Despite unfavorable odds and many reverses, the Marathas managed to not only survive their conflicts with the Mughals but eventually turned the tables to a point when the hopeless remnants of the Mughal empire briefly became a Maratha protectorate. These circumstances make it easy for many to present such stories as instances of a black-and-white Hindu-Muslim conflict. 

The truth, as usual, was more complex. The Marathas had, for instance, fought against Hindu rulers too (as well as between themselves), employed Muslim soldiers, and occasionally allied with other Islamic rulers.

“Panipat. The Great Betrayal” takes us to 1760-1761 – a time when the Maratha power was perhaps at its zenith, and thus at the beginning of its downfall. By this time the once-mighty Mughal empire was reduced to a region around its capital, Delhi, and even the boundaries of this territory remained fluid and poorly protected. Between the 1720s and 1760s, various armed groups pillaged the land and sometimes even its capital – these included not only the armies of mighty kingdoms but even new, lesser monarchies, overgrown bands of bandits, and stubbornly independent large landowners. One of the major forces that attempted to use this opportunity was the Marathas. However, these and other territorial ambitions put them in conflict with a powerful Afghan ruler, Ahmad Shah Abdali (Durrani), whose ambitions were even wider and whose ways were even more aggressive. Abdali invaded India a few times and in 1760 the Marathas decided to face him rather than allow him to conquer or plunder the land they also coveted. 

The conflict ended with the battle of Panipat (January 1761) when the Marathas, despite mustering a large army under the command of Sadashiv Bhau, were crushed by an even more enormous and stronger Afghan force led by Abdali. While the Afghan ruler subsequently withdrew from India without conquering its larger parts, the battle is well-remembered in history as one of the most sorrowful and bloody defeats of the Marathas, and the first stage of their downfall. The movie shows the events that led to the battle, and the clash itself.

Let me be honest: “Panipat” is a poorly scripted film that makes use of outdated methods of telling the story, such as narrator’s explanations and ridiculously simplified maps. This text is not meant to defend it as a visual work. It is also not meant to be a list of the work’s historical inconsistencies – there are many, even though its main events are factual and the lead characters are taken from the annals of history. And yet this still does not mean that “Panipat” can be regarded as a movie with a radical political agenda behind it.

It is true that its characters are larger-than-life and simpler-than-history. Like the antagonist of “Padmaavat,” the main villain of “Panipat” – Abdali – is not just evil but constantly angry and eerily wicked. This puts him in stark contrast to the nearly constantly composed and soft-spoken hero of the story, Sadashiv Bhau. That dynamic aside, the film does not cash in on religious hostilities in the sense that it does not overtly suggest that the characters’ behavior is motivated by their respective faiths.

The movie even makes passing references to the complexities of religious identity and loyalty. Much to the displeasure of other leaders, Bhau convinces his master, the Peshwa, to accept the services of an artillery specialist, Ibrahim Gardhi, despite the fact that the man was a Muslim and earlier served a rival sultanate. Confronting the doubts against Gardhi, Bhau points out that there are traitors in every community and that there were Muslims in Shivaji’s service as well. Gardhi eventually remains loyal to the Marathas until his death on the battlefield of Panipat (which is nearly true, as he was apparently captured and executed later) while it is one of the Hindu kings that emerges as a traitor. Bhau also holds up this diversity in an inspirational and well-written speech to his soldiers at the battlefield, when he stresses that the “army of India” is composed of both Hindus and Muslims and men of various castes. 

The film’s creator, Ashutosh Gowariker, is known to be fond of making grand historical fiction films, the kind of pictures that look more like moving paintings on a giant and colorful canvas. One of his earlier movies, “Jodhaa Akbar,” while being a work of the same genre, swung the pendulum even further away from religious hostilities, to make a Mughal emperor, Akbar, the protagonist and highly tolerant ruler, and to stress the need for peaceful coexistence between Hindus and Muslims.

One scene in “Panipat” when patriotism – but not radical nationalism – takes the front seat is when peace negotiations between Bhau and Abdali fail just before the battle. The negotiations contain an interesting semantic shift. Bhau suddenly speaks as a protector of all of India (Hindustan), thereby refusing to cede any territory to the Afghan invader. While “Hindustan” does mean India as a whole now, it is clear that in the 18th century this term referred only to northern India – a territory foreign to Marathas and a region far from their core lands, but a territory to which the they tried to extend their influence, revenue collection, and pillage. Thus, the film tells us that Bhau could not come to terms with Abdali because he had a patriotic obligation to defend every inch of India while in reality both the Afghans and the Marathas could not agree on the division of influence over third-party areas from which both sides wanted to squeeze resources. 

In this context a concerning word used by the heroes to refer to Afghan invaders is ghuspetiya – an “infiltrator” – a loaded term nowadays and used by BJP politicians to refer to migrants from neighboring Muslim countries. While this may be read as a dangerous attempt of comparison, it is the only such word used throughout the film. Otherwise, the movie may be said to project the vision of India as one country within 18th century realities. This is surely a misreading of historical realities, but not outright religious nationalism.

It would therefore be unfair to consider “Panipat. The Great Betrayal” a political statement in support of India’s ruling party. It would also be far-fetched to say that that the choice of such subjects has to have its source in governmental influence – that the BJP has influenced Bollywood to a point where it has become another channel of political propaganda. A safer, more careful, and more plausible explanation would be that some filmmakers decided to adapt or tap into the prevailing political mood by selecting historical themes that would be more acceptable or more supported by the ruling dispensation.