'In the summer of 2019, the actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub won a role on “Tandav,” an Indian political drama being produced by Amazon Prime. The title was clever. In Hindu lore, the tandav is the dance of life and death performed by Shiva, the god whose terrible powers can end the universe - a neat metaphor for the dark, intricate maneuvers of national politics. When Ayyub read the show’s script, he spied a handful of allusions to the India around him. In one episode, policemen barge onto a university campus to arrest a Muslim student leader. The scene recalled the government’s persecution of popular student politicians and, more broadly, the hostility toward Muslims that marks the Hindu nationalism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.). The B.J.P. had just begun its second straight term in power. (...)
Ayyub played another student leader, a tyro named Shiva Shekhar. (...) In the first scene that Ayyub shot, Shiva is onstage in a student skit, playing his namesake deity: a Shiva in a suit, newly risen from a cosmic nap, wondering how to be relevant once more. Tweet about something controversial, an accomplice proposes - something about how the university’s students, forever demanding azaadi, or freedom, from their government’s oppression, are “anti-nationals,” traitors to India. The audience chuckles; the B.J.P. rants in this vein so often that it has turned into a trope. But Shiva is surprised. How can a call for freedom be controversial? “Azaadi?” he exclaims. “What the...?” The last word is drowned out by the shriek of mike feedback. (...)
When lawyers for Amazon Prime and an external law firm first reviewed “Tandav” ’s scripts - a customary procedure - Shiva’s line had been a full, florid “What the fuck?”. One of the lawyers told me that his team had urged the showrunners to prune the expletive, but that there was more concern about “Tandav” coming off as anti-B.J.P. One character, the lawyer remembered, “was a politician depicted as a conservative, pushing for the privatization of education, which is one of the Modi government’s issues. We always said, Do it in a way where you can’t match the incidents onscreen to real incidents.” (Amazon broadly disputed this characterization.)
Drawing inspiration from bleak headlines - the religious lynchings, the cronyism, the autocratic acts of the state - had become a fraught enterprise. The B.J.P. and its supporters were growing intolerant of contrary views and criticism, and they were liable to react badly - through social-media attacks, targeted harassment by government agencies, or endless litigation. Outright violence was rarer, although its threat was never distant. (...)
When “Tandav” premièred, in January, 2021, Ayyub (...) on Twitter, (...) noticed that he was being tagged frequently - sometimes by people praising him, but mostly amid heaps of abuse. In cities and towns far from Mumbai, people filed police complaints, claiming that the portrayal of a foulmouthed Shiva was an insult to Hinduism. (A B.J.P. official told me that, in the large family of Hindu-nationalist organizations, “an enthusiastic worker can always be found who will file these complaints to keep his bosses happy.”) Such cases usually go nowhere, but in the B.J.P.’s India, where the police and the courts are pliant, it’s hard to be sanguine. Recently, a Muslim journalist was imprisoned for three weeks because someone complained that a four-year-old tweet derided Hinduism. The account that reported him was anonymous, had one tweet and one follower on the day of the arrest, and went offline thereafter.
To be safe, Amazon cut the skit scene from “Tandav” a few days after the show began streaming. But the storm raged on. A senior B.J.P. leader wrote to Amazon, accusing its “ideologically motivated employees” of running “vicious programming.” Amazon petitioned India’s Supreme Court to protect the show’s director and producers from arrest while the cases were being heard; the Court refused to grant this reprieve. That felt unprecedented, Ayyub said, and it tipped everyone into a state of high alarm. An Amazon employee who worked on “Tandav” remembers how taxing the experience was. “It took over our days, nights, weeks, months,” he said. “And we were all working from home, because this was peak covid. So I was on calls with the Amazon guys in the U.S. late night my time, early morning my time, because the company wanted to protect its employees.” All the discussions, he said, were about “how to keep our people safe” - but for a few months it really looked as if an Amazon executive might go to prison for green-lighting a cheesy TV show.
Filmmaking thrives in plenty of other cities in India, but “Bollywood” has become shorthand for Indian cinema as a whole, and for the thousand or so movies that the country releases annually. For nearly a century, Bollywood has also worn the warm, self-satisfied gloss of being a passion that unifies a country of divisions. Not only are its audiences as mixed as India itself, filmmakers will say, but Bollywood is a place where caste and religion don’t matter. The most piously presented proof of this is the fact that, in a Hindu-majority country, a Muslim man named
Shah Rukh Khan has been the supreme box-office star for decades.
Even if Bollywood possesses this liberal fibre, the rightward swing in Indian politics has gnawed away at it. In Mumbai, people divide recent history into pre-“Tandav” and post-“Tandav” periods, reading the show’s fate - its bitter legal battles, its suspended second season - as a lesson in what can and cannot be said in Modi’s India. Their nervousness manifests in absurdities - in, for example, how Amazon Prime now discourages characters who share their names with Hindu deities - but also in decisions to put audacious film and TV projects into cold storage. Other filmmakers embrace genres that match the B.J.P.’s tastes: dubious historical epics that glorify bygone Hindu kings; action films about the Indian Army; political dramas and bio-pics, dutifully skewed. These productions all draw from the B.J.P.’s roster of stock villains: medieval Muslim rulers, Pakistan, Islamist terrorists, leftists, opposition parties like the Indian National Congress. Through Bollywood, India tells itself stories about itself. Many of those stories are now starkly different, in lockstep with the right wing’s bigotry.
Governments have tried to control Indian cinema in the past - mostly through the Central Board of Film Certification (C.B.F.C.), a state authority that can order alterations or essentially ban movies by refusing to certify them. But the B.J.P.’s disdain for Bollywood registers as something deeper - as an echo, in fact, of its animus toward the Congress and other rival parties. When Modi came to power, in 2014, he decried national politics as an élite club: upper-class, upper-caste, English-speaking politicians, activists, and journalists, all cozied up to one another in the plush pockets of central Delhi. In the eyes of the B.J.P., Bollywood, too, is full of liberals disconnected from the real India. And if the film industry is full of “nepo kids” - the children of actors, producers, and directors - then Rahul Gandhi, the Congress’s aspirant Prime Minister and the son, grandson, and great-grandson of earlier Prime Ministers, is the foremost nepo kid of all. (...)
The B.J.P. began with small, typical political moves. In 2015, it appointed a B-movie actor, who was also a longtime Party member, to lead a prestigious, state-run filmmaking institute [credo l'autore si riferisca a Gajendra Chauhan, che guidò il Film and Television Institute of India dal 2015 al 2017]. When a C.B.F.C. chair quit, citing coercion by the government, she was replaced by Pahlaj Nihalani, a director who’d made a campaign video for Modi. (...)
The B.J.P. exhibited another skill as well: an ability to whip up its base - its Internet bruisers, rank-and-file cadre, and ideological allies - into a frenzy so coordinated that it came to resemble popular sentiment. When Aamir Khan (...) admitted, in 2015, that he was worried about growing intolerance in India, a social-media backlash began against Snapdeal, an e-commerce platform that Khan had endorsed on billboards and in TV spots. Within months, Snapdeal decided not to renew his contract; even this year, Khan pleaded with audiences not to spurn a new film because of his past remarks. (...)
Ignoring the mob felt increasingly unwise. In 2016,
Sanjay Leela Bhansali (...) started making “Padmaavat.” Bhansali was dramatizing a legend: the story of Padmavati, a Hindu queen from the Rajput caste, who is so renowned for her beauty that Alauddin Khilji, the Sultan of Delhi, attacks her husband’s kingdom to abduct her. Bhansali shot “Padmaavat” with his usual grandiosity. (...) Toward the end, Padmavati and her handmaidens are besieged by Khilji’s army. Instead of submitting, they dress in red and stream through the palace, like blood through an artery, to leap into a pit of fire - a happy ending, in the moral universe of the Hindu right. Khilji is portrayed as half-mad, lustful, and a committed carnivore, stereotypes of the Indian Muslim brought to life.
Before the film’s release, though, a rumor leaked of a love scene between Padmavati and Khilji. This, it appeared, was too great a slight against Hindu honor. A B.J.P. politician announced a reward for beheading Deepika Padukone, who played Padmavati. A posse of young, angry Rajput men stormed onto the film’s set, found Bhansali, and roughed him up; then they destroyed film equipment and, in a later incident, burned down part of the set. According to Bhansali, he had to finish shooting “Padmaavat” under the protection of fifty-two policemen. “At one point, I thought, Enough. Change my profession. I can’t make films anymore,” he said later.
The B.J.P. often ascribes these events to fringe elements or faceless Hindu “patriots.” But the number of such incidents makes filmmakers assume that they’re seeing a bigger transformation, in which the average member of their audience now truly likes everything the B.J.P. likes, and abhors everything it abhors. (...)
“The Kashmir Files” has proved particularly vexing. Released earlier this year, the movie purports to be based on true events: the brutal eviction, beginning in 1989, of tens of thousands of Hindus from the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir. At least two hundred Hindus were killed, according to government data, but the movie inflates the number to four thousand. Armed insurgents were responsible, but, implicitly or explicitly, the film blames many others for enabling the tragedy and for lying about it afterward. Unsurprisingly, they include some of the B.J.P.’s pet antagonists: leftist university professors, the Congress. “The Kashmir Files” has already triggered a riot, and one B.J.P. leader given to casual calls to shoot “anti-nationals” urged his Twitter followers to watch the film “so that there is no Bengal Files, Kerala Files, Delhi Files tomorrow.” Modi praised the film as another bursting of the liberal bubble; B.J.P. leaders distributed free tickets. (...)
In Mumbai, the quotient of Bollywood celebrity is highest in Bandra, a western suburb shaped like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. The stars who appear elsewhere in the city on movie posters reside here, amid narrow, winding roads, weathered Portuguese churches, and chic bars that they can never visit. Salman Khan (...) lives in the same apartment building where he and his two brothers (...) grew up. Not far away, the actors
Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan, the children of stars themselves, occupy several floors of an apartment block. (...)
Shah Rukh Khan lives with his family in a villa the size of a small hotel, set back from a pair of heavy gates. Above a wall surrounding the compound, Khan has erected a black metal fence with a platform, where he sometimes materializes, in sunglasses, to greet the fans thronging the sidewalk to glimpse him. The pavement is never empty; even late at night, returning to my hotel, I’d see a few straggling devotees taking selfies, talking quietly, or just gazing at Khan’s house in the dark. In those moments, nothing demarcated the gulf between their worlds - between fan and celebrity, outsider and insider - more vividly than the black metal fence.
One morning, a man (...) joined me at my hotel for breakfast. (...) I’ll call him Ramesh, because although he belongs to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the mother ship of the B.J.P. and other Hindu-nationalist groups, he was keen to stress that he was meeting me in a personal capacity. The R.S.S., a volunteer organization that’s nearly a hundred years old, isn’t a political party. It’s the custodian of a belief that India is, first and foremost, a land for Hindus; it aspires so much to a literally muscular Hinduism that its members often receive paramilitary training. Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin was once a proud R.S.S. man. Modi joined the R.S.S. when he was young, as did many other B.J.P. leaders. Ramesh denied, though, that the R.S.S. wields any undue influence over the government. “It’s like there’s a college - let’s say, Harvard,” he said. “A hundred students of Harvard become senators in the U.S. Now, every time they go to their professors to ask something, would you say Harvard runs the government?” He framed this as a rhetorical question, but I suspect that we had different answers in mind.
In 2019, the R.S.S. formed a media unit in Mumbai, ostensibly to liaise not just with the film industry but also with journalists, the music business, and other trades. (...) Ramesh’s work with the R.S.S. involves many meetings - often half a dozen a day, with directors, producers, writers, and studio executives around Mumbai. (...) Ramesh’s mission, he said, is to nudge filmmakers toward subjects close to the R.S.S.’s heart. He wouldn’t care for a drama about conflict between Hindu castes, for instance: “Look at the great history of this country - and what do we show? We show all bad things.” But conflict in itself is not a problem. He often suggests tales of India’s military and intelligence agencies, or stories about the battles won by Hindu kings. (...)
Happy endings are relative, though. If a film conforms to the R.S.S.’s vision of India, Ramesh excuses any manipulations of fact; if it departs from that vision, Ramesh believes that its creators seek to “tarnish” India’s image. He cited “The Empire,” a show on Disney’s Indian platform, about Babur, the Muslim warrior who founded the Mughal dynasty in India, in 1526. Why make a show that humanizes Babur, Ramesh wondered. He doesn’t consider Muslim rulers to be Indian, even if they were born in the country. “They were invaders,” he said. “Sacred Games,” a noirish Netflix series, depicted a Hindu man plotting an act of terrorism. Ramesh thought that it was propaganda: “You want to show Hindus as terrorists because you don’t want to acknowledge Islamic terrorism.” “Tandav”? Also propaganda. But he forgives directors who invert history, depicting Hindu kings defeating their Muslim foes in battles that they actually lost. “You have to show something that will inspire people,” he said. And when I asked him about “The Kashmir Files” (...) he claimed unflappably that it was all fact. “You should know the history,” he said. (...) If Amazon feels daunted by the lawsuits against “Tandav” - if it feels compelled to make shows and movies for Hindu partisans - that doesn’t worry Ramesh: “They must be happy that we do court cases. We don’t go and destroy their buildings.” His own efforts to set Bollywood right were minor, but they represented the importance that the R.S.S. vests in cinema. “We recognize that this is the most powerful medium, which controls minds, which influences the opinions of people,” he said. “A film is a mirror of society,” he went on - a tired, tedious idea, although it struck me that the Hindu right, to obtain the precise reflection it wants, is recasting not just society but also the mirror itself. (...)
“In many ways Bollywood, in its beginning, was one of the most cosmopolitan employers,” Debashree Mukherjee, a scholar of South Asian cinema at Columbia University, told me. In part, this was a political alignment with freedom fighters like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who wanted India to be a plural country. But it was also born out of necessity, Mukherjee said, because the movie industry was created as a patchwork of many other trades. “Some of the earliest financing came from Gujarati Muslims, and some of the earliest writers were from the Parsi theatre scene,” she said. Lyricists wrote songs in Urdu, a language inflected with Arabic and Persian and fostered by Muslim nobles as a medium of high culture. On a set, the dress dada might be a Hindu tailor and the art dada a Muslim painter. “The workforce was diverse, which remains the case today,” Mukherjee said.
Onscreen, Indian Muslims tended to be typecast, but in mainstream Bollywood this wasn’t so unusual: every character tended to be typecast. When Muslims led the story, they often figured as Mughal nobles, as courtesans. (...) The stock of secondary roles included the benevolent Muslim elder (...), the soulful poet or composer, and the best friend.
The Muslim type appeared even in “
Amar Akbar Anthony” (1977), a landmark film that enshrined the ideal of religious tolerance. “Amar Akbar Anthony” is unabashed Bollywood - long and exuberant, with a baroque plot and half a dozen musical numbers. Three brothers, separated in childhood, are adopted into different faiths, and grow up to be the film’s dashing heroes, each neatly falling in love with a woman from his own religion. The movie’s conclusion is never in doubt. Its energy springs instead from the question of how its various ends are obtained: how the brothers realize that they’re brothers, how they find their long-lost parents, how they win their women, how they defeat a crime lord who has tried to destroy their family. The film ends in a joyful, syncretic reunion - the Nehruvian nation transposed onto the family in the clearest possible fashion. In this idyll, Akbar, the Muslim brother, could have clerked in a bank or run a magazine; instead, he sings Urdu qawwalis. (...)
“It’s only in the late nineteen-eighties, and really with greater and greater frequency in the nineteen-nineties, that mainstream films start showing Muslims as gangsters, smugglers, and then terrorists,” [
film scholar Ira] Bhaskar said. Not by coincidence, she pointed out, these were also the decades when the B.J.P. grew as an electoral force. In 1992, after calling for the destruction of a mosque in the temple town of Ayodhya, B.J.P. and R.S.S. leaders watched as their followers tore the building down in a matter of hours. The demolition ignited riots, ushering India toward its present condition of chronic, quivering polarization. In 2010, Bhaskar met the director
Yash Chopra, who had made many staunchly secular movies between the sixties and the eighties. “We couldn’t make those kinds of films today,” he told her. The plural ideal had withered too much. “Back then, we had faith in it.” (...)
In 2017, [Dibakar] Banerjee felt an itch. He’d been reading with horror about the lynchings of Muslims and about the murder of a journalist named Gauri Lankesh, all at the hands of Hindu extremists. This was, he said, “a special eruption of the poison” - and yet much of the country seemed not to sense its dreadful import. “The middle class was aware only of a daily, ubiquitous ‘othering’ of people in our lives,” he said. “I really wanted to make a film about it.” The following year, Banerjee signed a contract with Netflix, for a movie tentatively called “Freedom,” and shot the bulk of it in the course of thirty-six days at the beginning of 2020, largely in Mumbai. “We had another five days of exterior sequences left, but that didn’t happen, because the Indian lockdown started,” he said.
Earlier this year, Banerjee sent me a Vimeo link to his finished film, which confronts the bigotry infecting India. Banerjee approaches his theme slowly and sideways, through the story of one Muslim family. The family’s first generation, living in Kashmir during the unrest in 1990, finds itself sundered from its Hindu friends. In the second generation, a young woman wants to buy an apartment in present-day Mumbai, but no one will sell to her. (Muslims in Indian cities commonly struggle to find places to live, a form of discrimination practiced by Hindu homeowners and residents’ societies.) In 2042, the woman’s son, a novelist, lives in an even more ghettoized Delhi - a geofenced city where the state machinery determines what people can do based on their social-credit score. The wretchedness of this future spills out of the movie; later, I seemed to remember every frame as being gloomy and grim, even though several scenes are brightly lit. “We’ve lived through enough history to understand what’s going on now,” Banerjee said. “Now we can extrapolate, which is what my film does.”
During the years that Banerjee wrote and shot his movie, the takeover of Bollywood quickened. By 2019 - an election year - new power brokers had emerged in the industry, seemingly from nowhere. One of them, the son of a legislator allied with the B.J.P., directed “
The Accidental Prime Minister”, which pilloried the Congress leader who had governed India before Modi. (“It felt like propaganda even as I was making it,” Arjun Mathur, one of the film’s actors, told me. “I really regret doing it.”) Another produced a fawning bio-pic of Modi. One director told me about Mahaveer Jain, a producer who “was a nobody” but who now partners with some of Bollywood’s biggest studios and filmmakers. Jain, who said that he couldn’t meet me because he was unwell, is often described as the B.J.P.’s chief Bollywood liaison. In January, 2019, he helped choreograph a meeting between Modi and a band of A-listers, which yielded a selfie that blazed through the Indian Internet. Conspicuously, not one person in the photo was Muslim.
Sometimes there are more deliberate flexes of muscle. In the summer of 2020, under the pretext of probing an actor’s suicide, federal authorities launched an investigation into the drug habits of some of Mumbai’s most famous stars. Among them was Karan Johar. (...) Kshitij Prasad, a young executive producer who was then with Johar’s company, was called in for questioning, and he later said that the officers seemed keen to pin something - anything - on Johar or on another celebrity. “They kept insisting I was supplying drugs to the industry,” Prasad said. (The investigating agency has denied Prasad’s version of events.) When Prasad refused to cooperate, he was sent to prison for ninety days, then released on bail. The threat of a tax raid has also become a weapon, one director told me. When he was raided himself, investigators noticed that he’d been donating small monthly sums to news sites like Scroll and the Wire, which often criticize the government. “They said, ‘Don’t contribute to any of these publications,’ ” he said. “So I had to stop.”
Even these events, though, were reduced to mere prologue last October, when drug inspectors arrested Aryan Khan, the twenty-three-year-old son of Shah Rukh Khan. A team of agents, under the orders of the same officer who’d imprisoned Prasad, stopped Aryan in a Mumbai port terminal, where he was preparing to attend a party aboard a cruise ship. The agents found no drugs on him, yet they held him in jail for nearly a month before allowing him bail. Earlier this summer, they dropped all charges against him - which made it impossible not to speculate about what had happened. Had a government agency really imprisoned Aryan Khan without proof, as pure intimidation? Shah Rukh Khan said little during those weeks. The rest of Bollywood, meanwhile, absorbed the news as the most cautionary tale of all: if they could do this to the king, imagine what they could do to us.
By mid-2021, after a series of lockdowns, Banerjee had finished postproduction on his generational drama. Like a punctilious gardener, he’d offered to trim some of the movie’s nettles himself, unwilling to have Netflix stung more than necessary. (According to an internal memo, these changes included cutting images of the Indian flag. The memo also suggested, “In one of the shots, one person is walking in the background during National Anthem - remove that person.”) Toward the end of 2021, after Banerjee showed Netflix the film, something shifted. “There’d been a discussion about releasing the film in late 2022,” he said. “But an executive told us that they couldn’t commit to a release plan.” (Netflix denied this characterization.) The government had issued new guidelines for streaming platforms, obliging them, for instance, to pull a show or a movie within thirty-six hours if a court or a state agency ordered it. As Netflix kept dithering, Banerjee felt that he had just a few options left. “Wait indefinitely for the release to happen, or look for a producer who has the interest to release it in India - for the audience that I meant it primarily for - or look for a producer who doesn’t release it in India but releases it everywhere else,” he said. That last possibility was “very, very horrible - but what choice do I have?”
Banerjee’s film joins a growing trove of content that studios and filmmakers are reluctant to air. One director told me that he’d shot a love story about a couple who run away from home to be together. No one wants to release the film, he said, because “it just so happens that the boy is Muslim and the girl is Hindu.” According to two sources, a miniseries based on “Maximum City”, the popular nonfiction book that recounts Mumbai’s religious riots in 1992, has been frozen. (The production company denied this.) “Takht”, a Karan Johar extravaganza set in the Mughal period, began gestating around 2018. Two people who worked on the film described it as a celebration of secular values - which, they suspect, is partly why it’s effectively comatose. (Last year, Johar denied that he has abandoned the project.) (...) In a conversation with a former Netflix employee, I asked why Banerjee’s film had suddenly stalled. “There’s a huge sense of fear,” the employee admitted. “No one wants to take the political risk of releasing a project like that.”
In contrast, Bollywood is glutted with movies and TV shows that align with the B.J.P.’s politics. (...) Two vocal Modi supporters, the actors Kangana Ranaut and Anupam Kher, are collaborating on a film about the Congress leader Indira Gandhi and her two-year suspension of democracy, between 1975 and 1977. One director showed me a four-minute video that he’d received on WhatsApp - a teaser for a production about a Congress corruption scandal in the eighties. The clip interleaved old news footage and fresh footage so deftly, the director said, “that you feel like they don’t have an agenda. Then you read the names of the people involved.” At the end of the video, a logo popped up: Anupam Kher Studios. (...)
The first week I was in Mumbai turned out to be a representative one, as far as Bollywood releases were concerned. One new movie, “
Major,” was about the life of an Indian Army officer who died trying to rescue hostages from the Taj Mahal Palace hotel, in Mumbai, after Pakistani terrorists seized the building, in 2008. Another film, “Samrat Prithviraj,” sang the glories of a twelfth-century Hindu ruler, Prithviraj Chauhan, who was killed after a battle against Muhammad Ghori, a king venturing eastward from present-day Afghanistan. “Samrat” - or “Emperor” - had been affixed to the title at the eleventh hour, after members of Chauhan’s caste protested that calling the film “Prithviraj” was insufficiently reverential. This was the same group that had vandalized the set of “Padmaavat”; it was perhaps easier to just give in.
I watched “Samrat Prithviraj” on the morning of its release. (...) In the lead role was Akshay Kumar, an aging action star with a face as lean as a greyhound’s. Kumar’s Prithviraj is a self-righteous bore, forever harping on about Hindu tradition and the need for Hindus to stick together. (The film’s obviousness won it tax exemptions in several states ruled by the B.J.P.) His sandstone palace is bathed in a golden light - the perfect venue for his wedding to an ingénue of a princess. But Prithviraj can spare little time, and just a couple of song-and-dance sequences, for love. Most of the film is taken up either by his councils with advisers about battles or by the battles themselves. In the climax, Prithviraj dies - but not before he rewrites history by killing Ghori. (Lions in a coliseum are involved.) The film’s epilogue calls Prithviraj the “last Hindu ruler in north India” (a falsehood) and laments that, after his death, India recovered its honor only when it gained independence from the British, in 1947 - thus conflating homegrown Muslim rulers with European colonists in a sweep of rhetoric.
When the lights came up, there were barely a dozen people left in the theatre, down from the twenty or so at the beginning. In the weeks that followed, “Samrat Prithviraj” proved to be a box-office dud. It’s the sort of fact that some filmmakers cited to me in hopeful tones, as if to say that the Hindu-nationalist playbook doesn’t guarantee a hit - that the whims of the audience will ultimately thwart any ideological conquest of Bollywood. But this idea ignores the sheer volume of oxygen taken up by films like “Samrat Prithviraj,” and their accretive psychic weight. And it overlooks the movies that aren’t being made, the stories that aren’t being told, the things that aren’t being said. “The worrying aspect,” Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub told me, “is that, out of fear, you draw back and you draw back and you draw back, until you step on the very people you ought to be defending”.'
