Celluloid Empires
Cinema, Nationalism, Soft Power, and the Politics of Whose Story Survives
When heroes become symbols, who gets to decide what their resistance means?
A Comparative Study of S.S. Rajamouli's RRR and the Rambo–James Bond Cinematic Tradition
Introduction: Cinema as a Battlefield of Memory
Cinema likes to present itself as harmless. It sells tickets, not ideology; it offers songs and spectacle, not statecraft. Yet from the moment the lights dim, a film is already making decisions that are political in the deepest sense: whose face fills the screen as a hero, whose face is reduced to a silhouette in the shadows, whose history is honoured and whose history is quietly edited out of the frame. Cinema does not merely tell us who the heroes are; it teaches us what their struggles mean, whose history matters, which political narratives become legitimate, and how audiences are encouraged to imagine power, nation, resistance, and identity.
This blog places two seemingly unconnected cinematic worlds side by side. On one side stands S.S. Rajamouli's RRR (2022), a Telugu epic that turns two historical tribal resistance leaders, Alluri Sitarama Raju and Komaram Bheem, into larger-than-life freedom fighters against the British Raj. On the other stands the Hollywood tradition of Rambo and James Bond, action franchises that turned Cold War geopolitics - Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, the War on Drugs - into stories of heroic American and Western intervention. At first glance, a tribal-resistance epic from Andhra Pradesh and a Cold War action franchise from Hollywood and Pinewood Studios seem to belong to entirely different conversations. But read together, through Dilip Barad's two research articles "Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli's RRR" and "Rambo and Bond in America's Geopolitical Narrative," they reveal the same underlying machinery at work: popular cinema takes a specific, local, politically inconvenient history and reshapes it into a broader, cleaner, more marketable story of heroism.
Why place these two cinematic worlds together? Because both raise, in different registers, the same set of unsettling questions. Who controls historical memory? Who becomes a hero and who becomes a villain? What happens when local resistance is absorbed into nationalist mythology? Can cinema function as a tool of soft power even while claiming only to entertain? Can a film resist one form of domination - colonial rule, communism -- while quietly reproducing another - corporate extraction, American exceptionalism? And closer to home: should Indian cinema imitate Hollywood's model of geopolitical storytelling in the name of "soft power," or does that path risk trading one hegemonic narrative for another?
Thesis: From the forests of Adilabad to the mountains of Afghanistan, popular cinema demonstrates that storytelling is never simply entertainment. It is also an act of power - a way of deciding, on behalf of millions of viewers, whose memory survives, whose resistance is celebrated, and whose ongoing struggle is quietly left outside the frame. RRR and the Rambo–Bond tradition, though separated by geography, language, and ideology, are both case studies in how cinema converts history into myth, and how myth, once made, can serve resistance and hegemony at the same time.
Part One: "Reimagining Resistance" — RRR and the Politics of Tribal Memory
Dilip Barad's article opens with a simple but sharp observation: RRR is built on the appropriation of two real historical figures whose actual struggles were far narrower, far more local, and far more radical than the film admits. Understanding the film's politics requires first understanding who Raju and Bheem actually were, before cinema got hold of them.
A. Historical Background: Two Different Fights, One Borrowed Slogan
Alluri Sitarama Raju. Raju led the Rampa Rebellion of 1922-24 in the Godavari agency tracts, resisting British forest policy that followed the 1882 Madras Forest Act. That Act curtailed the traditional rights of Adivasis to practise podu (shifting cultivation) and to access the forests that sustained their food, fuel, and livelihood. Raju's uprising was, at its core, a forest-rights insurgency: a fight to protect the jungle from colonial extraction, not simply a fight for "Indian independence" in the abstract, nationalist sense that later generations came to understand that phrase.
Komaram Bheem. Bheem fought not the British but the Nizam of Hyderabad, a princely ruler whose administration threatened Gond tribal land and forest rights in Adilabad. His resistance produced the slogan that RRR borrows and popularises: "Jal, Jangal, Zameen" — Water, Forest, Land. Bheem's enemy was a feudal, semi-autonomous Indian state, not the colonial British government at all.
This detail matters enormously. Raju fought British forest law. Bheem fought the Nizam's land policy. Neither man's central battle was, historically speaking, a fight against the British Raj as such — yet RRR fuses them into a single, invented, buddy-narrative in which both men unite against a common British enemy. The film's premise is itself an act of historical reconstruction before any cinematic embellishment even begins.
B. What RRR Changes
Rajamouli's genius as a filmmaker for popular spectacle is inseparable from his willingness to simplify. RRR imagines a fictional friendship between Raju (fictionalised as "Ram") and Bheem, invents a shared mission to rescue a kidnapped tribal girl from a British governor's mansion, and stages their combined fury as an assault on British colonial power in Delhi. Historically specific grievances over forest law and land rights are folded into a single spectacular emotion: righteous anger against imperial rule. The tribal-specific vocabulary of jal, jangal, zameen becomes, in the film, mostly a rousing slogan and a visual motif rather than the organising political demand it was for the historical Bheem.
C. What Gets Lost
Barad's article argues that this fusion, however cinematically satisfying, quietly erases the specific stakes of land, water, and forest rights that defined both men's actual legacies. When resistance against forest law and resistance against a feudal land policy are both dissolved into resistance against "the British," the film gains a clean moral binary (coloniser versus colonised) but loses the more uncomfortable, still-unresolved question underneath: who controls land, water and forest today, and at whose expense? Indigenous identity, environmental justice, and the specific mechanisms of displacement recede into the background of a story about nationalist unity.
D. Contemporary Relevance
This is not a merely academic complaint about historical accuracy. The article insists that the struggles Raju and Bheem fought are not confined to the past. Displacement, industrial expansion, deforestation, mining, and large infrastructure projects continue to push indigenous communities off ancestral land across India today not primarily at the hands of a foreign colonial power, but through domestic and global corporate interests operating with state sanction. Climate change intensifies the stakes: as forests fall, both the ecological systems that sustain indigenous life and the planet's broader climate stability are placed at risk. RRR, by displacing this ongoing struggle into a triumphant story about the past, misses a chance to connect its audience of tens of millions to a battle that is still being fought.
Article One — Detailed Theoretical Analysis
Main Point 1: Historical Appropriation
In cultural studies, appropriation describes the act of taking an element from one cultural or historical context a symbol, a figure, a struggle and re-using it in a different context, often stripped of its original meaning and redirected to serve someone else's purpose. RRR appropriates Raju and Bheem in exactly this sense: it borrows their names, their images, and even Bheem's slogan, while redirecting their meaning away from forest law and land rights and toward a generalised anti-colonial nationalism that is more emotionally accessible to a pan-Indian audience in 2022. The appropriation is not malicious, but it is not neutral either it is a commercially and politically convenient simplification.
Main Point 2: Nationalism and the Making of Heroes
Cinema is one of the most powerful modern instruments for turning historical individuals into national symbols. A regional freedom fighter, once filmed as a mythic, larger-than-life figure fighting for a united India, stops being a specific person embedded in a specific local struggle and becomes instead a vessel for a much larger, shared national feeling.
Main Point 3: Subalternity and Indigenous Voices
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's landmark essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" asks whether the most marginalised groups in a colonial and postcolonial society those without access to structures of representation, whether legal, political, or cultural can ever truly speak for themselves within dominant discourse, or whether they are always spoken for by someone else: the coloniser, the nationalist elite, or, in this case, the commercial filmmaker.
Main Point 4: Jal, Jangal, Zameen — Water, Forest, Land
Few phrases in India's indigenous rights movements carry as much weight as Jal, Jangal, Zameen. It is worth pausing on each word.
● Jal (Water): rivers, streams, and groundwater are not simply a resource they are the basis of agriculture, of ritual life, and of the seasonal rhythms that structure tribal community life.
● Jangal (Forest): the forest supplies food, fuel, medicine, and building material, and is frequently woven into cosmology and myth the forest is not "wilderness" but a lived, inhabited home.
● Zameen (Land): land is livelihood, inheritance, and identity; loss of land is rarely just economic loss it is the severing of a community from its ancestral memory.
Taken together, the slogan asserts that these three elements are not interchangeable commodities that can be seized and compensated for with cash payouts or resettlement colonies. They are the material basis of indigenous identity, culture, community, and ecological belonging. This is precisely why the article insists that reducing Jal, Jangal, Zameen to a rousing chant in a nationalist action film however catchy strips the phrase of the specific, ongoing political demand it represents: the demand for legal recognition of forest and land rights, most concretely embodied today in India's Forest Rights Act (2006), whose implementation remains contested and incomplete.
Main Point 5: Displacement — "An Inadequate Word"
To convey what displacement actually costs a community, Barad's article turns to writer Annie Zaidi's account in Known Turf, a work of reportage on rural and marginalised India. The quotation is worth presenting in full, because its cumulative, list-like structure is itself an argument: displacement cannot be summarised in a single sentence; it must be enumerated, loss by loss.
As the article explains, Zaidi's fuller passage describes displacement not as "moving," but as losing a river; losing access to clean, safe drinking water; losing richly watered land; losing the grass that herds grazed on; losing cattle; losing the milk that came from that cattle; losing honey and herbs gathered from the forest; and, perhaps most devastatingly, losing the right to protest when someone in a uniform arrives to set fire to your home. Read this way, displacement is revealed as a cascading, compounding loss material, ecological, nutritional, and finally political, since the very capacity to object is itself confiscated along with the land.
Why this matters for RRR: Raju and Bheem's historical resistance was, at root, resistance to exactly this kind of cascading loss. A film that genuinely engaged with what displacement meant to the communities Raju and Bheem represented would have had to sit with Zaidi's uncomfortable, granular inventory of loss rivers, cattle, honey, the right to protest rather than resolving everything into a single triumphant battle against a colonial governor. The spectacle of victory in RRR's climax offers catharsis; Zaidi's prose offers no such comfort, because the loss she describes is still, for many communities, ongoing.
Main Point 6: Environmental Justice
Barad sir's article closes its analysis of RRR on a hopeful but pointed note: the film's resistance narrative could have been reimagined as a contemporary call to action a story that honoured Raju and Bheem's historical fight for land, water, and forests as still unfinished business, rather than a closed chapter of the national past. In choosing spectacle and closure over continuity and unresolved struggle, RRR becomes, in the article's words, a celebration of the past rather than a call to action for the future.
🎥 VIDEO SUGGESTION
Topic: The historical Komaram Bheem and the Jal Jangal Zameen movement
Video Title: Remembering An Adivasi Leader Who Gave Jal Jangal Jameen — Death Anniversary Of Komaram Bheem (NTV)
Why it's relevant: Provides real historical and contemporary context on Komaram Bheem's legacy and the ongoing resonance of his slogan among Adivasi communities today, offering a useful counterpoint to the film's version of the same figure.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r4Oodp2-vw
🎥 VIDEO SUGGESTION
Topic: RRR as a cinematic phenomenon
Video Title: RRR Official Trailer (Hindi) — India's Biggest Action Drama | SS Rajamouli
Why it's relevant: Useful as a primary visual reference for the film's tone, scale, and framing of Raju and Bheem's alliance before reading the critical analysis of how that framing simplifies their history.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_vbAtFSEc0
A Closer Look: How RRR Builds Its Myth on Screen
Reading RRR through Barad's argument becomes more concrete once we look at how the film's own visual grammar does the work of nationalist appropriation. Three moments stand out as especially instructive, not because of any precise timestamp which would misrepresent the level of verification possible here but because of what they do structurally within the narrative.
The forest-to-fire transition. Bheem is repeatedly framed against animals, rivers, and dense forest in the film's early stretches, visually coding him as a being of the jangal before he ever enters the colonial city. As the story progresses toward its climax, this forest imagery gives way to imagery of fire, weapons, and mass uprising in an urban, colonial setting. The symbolic journey from forest to flame visually enacts exactly the transformation the article critiques: an ecologically rooted, land-based figure is re-coded, scene by scene, as a nationalist warrior whose enemy is the British administration rather than the forces encroaching on the jangal itself.
The dance of unity ("Naatu Naatu"). The film's most globally celebrated sequence, an exuberant dance-off staged at a British colonial garden party, stages Raju and Bheem's friendship and their shared defiance of colonial cultural snobbery through rhythm and movement rather than dialogue. It is a masterclass in what film theorists call emotional manipulation through spectacle: the sequence generates so much pure, infectious joy that the audience's identification with Raju and Bheem as a unified pair is cemented affectively, before the film has to do any further narrative work to justify why two men from entirely different regional struggles should be understood as natural allies.
The armoury climax. In the film's final act, Raju and Bheem, now openly rebelling, arm ordinary villagers with weapons smuggled from a British armoury, staging a visually operatic assault on colonial authority. The sequence is thrilling, but it also completes the film's substitution: the specific grievances of forest law and land policy that drove the historical Raju and Bheem are entirely absent from this climax, replaced by a generic, spectacular image of the colonised rising against the coloniser.
None of this is to say that RRR is cinematically dishonest in any simple sense Rajamouli has been open about the film being a fictionalised "what if" rather than a biography. The critical point, following Barad, is that spectacle of this calibre is precisely what makes appropriation effective: the more emotionally overwhelming the cinematic experience, the less room audiences have to ask what has been left out of frame.
Part Two: "Rambo, Bond and the Celluloid Empire" — Cinema as Geopolitical Power
If RRR shows cinema converting a local, indigenous struggle into national mythology, Barad's second article shows the same mechanism operating on a global scale. The Rambo and James Bond franchises did not simply entertain Cold War audiences they helped narrate, normalise, and popularise a specific American and Western understanding of geopolitical conflict, casting Western intervention as heroism and Western adversaries as villainy.
Summary: Two Franchises, One Geopolitical Grammar
Rambo: From Vietnam to Afghanistan
Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985). The film sends John Rambo back to Vietnam, years after the war's humiliating end for the United States, ostensibly to search for American prisoners of war. The film restages the Vietnam War as a story of American redemption: American soldiers are recast as betrayed heroes, failed not by their own military strategy but by cowardly politicians back home, while Vietnamese forces are depicted largely as faceless, villainous obstacles. The film allows American audiences to relive the war with a different, more flattering outcome victory, rescue, and vindication than history actually provided.
Rambo III (1988). The setting shifts to Afghanistan, where Rambo joins Afghan Mujahideen fighters resisting Soviet occupation. The film mirrors, almost point for point, the real covert U.S. policy of arming and funding Mujahideen forces during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) as part of Cold War containment strategy. On screen, this alliance is framed as a moral crusade: American support for the Mujahideen is heroic solidarity with freedom fighters against Soviet tyranny, not a geopolitical calculation with long-term consequences that would later prove enormously destabilising for the region.
James Bond: A British Hero, a Western Cause
James Bond is a British creation, yet the franchise's politics track closely with broader Western meaning chiefly Anglo-American Cold War and post-Cold War interests.
● The Living Daylights (1987): Bond assists Afghan rebels against Soviet forces, echoing Rambo III's narrative almost beat for beat, and positioning Bond as a defender of Western interests in the same Cold War theatre.
● Licence to Kill (1989): Less explicitly Cold War-driven, the film addresses Western anxieties about international drug cartels, indirectly reinforcing the logic of the U.S.-led War on Drugs.
● Tomorrow Never Dies (1997): Set in the post-Cold War world, the film turns to media manipulation and control of information as its central threat, reflecting a new set of Western anxieties about who controls global narrative dominance once the old Soviet enemy has disappeared.
Article Two — Detailed Theoretical Analysis
Main Point 1: Soft Power
The article's central theoretical anchor is Joseph Nye's concept of soft power — a term that has become almost inescapable in discussions of how culture and entertainment shape international politics.
Main Point 2: Cultural Hegemony
Main Point 3: Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus
Main Point 4: Representation
Economic Influence and Global Perception
Barad's article names two further dimensions of soft power at work in these franchises. Economic influence describes how the sheer commercial success of Rambo and Bond — box-office dominance, merchandising, syndication — demonstrated and reinforced American cultural product superiority in global entertainment markets, an economic form of hegemony running parallel to the ideological one. Global perception describes the cumulative effect of decades of films depicting U.S. military and intelligence agencies as supremely competent, principled, and just: even viewers sceptical of specific American policies often absorbed, film after film, a baseline assumption that American power was fundamentally legitimate and well-intentioned, an assumption that shaped how real-world American interventions were received by global publics.
A Closer Look: How Rambo and Bond Build Their Myth on Screen
As with RRR, it is worth looking closely at how these franchises construct their politics visually rather than only summarising their plots. Exact scene timestamps vary across regional cuts and re-releases and cannot be verified here with confidence, so the following description focuses on structural moments within each film rather than invented timecodes.
Rambo's body as spectacle. Across First Blood Part II and Rambo III, the camera repeatedly lingers on Rambo's physically muscular, scarred body, coded as both a weapon and a wound — a visual shorthand for a nation's own sense of injury (the trauma of Vietnam) and its fantasy of restored strength. Every close-up on Rambo's body doubles as a close-up on the American psyche the film is trying to console.
Bond's composure under Cold War chaos. Across The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill, Bond's icy calm amid explosions, betrayals, and gunfire performs a specific kind of Western competence: the sense that Western intelligence and Western values remain rational, controlled, and ultimately victorious even amid the apparent chaos of Cold War proxy conflicts in the developing world. The contrast between Bond's composure and the surrounding disorder is itself an ideological statement about who is fit to manage global order.
The final act handshake. Both Rambo III and The Living Daylights close their Afghanistan-set narratives on moments of alliance and gratitude between the Western hero and Mujahideen fighters a visual seal of approval on a real-world covert policy whose long-term consequences neither film could have anticipated. Watched decades later, these closing images carry an unintended irony that neither film's original triumphant framing accounted for.
Theoretical Toolkit: A Quick-Reference Map
The theories introduced across both articles are not meant to be memorised as an isolated list; each was chosen because it does specific interpretive work for RRR, or for Rambo and Bond, or for both. This table gathers them together as a revision aid, alongside two further theorists Edward Said and Frantz Fanon whose work underlies the postcolonial vocabulary (coloniser/colonised, Self/Other) used throughout this blog, even though they are not the primary theorists in Barad's two source articles.
Should Bollywood Become India's Hollywood?
Barad sir's second article closes by turning the analytical lens homeward, drawing on journalist Palki Sharma's Gravitas Plus segment "How India Can Harness the Soft Power of Bollywood." Sharma's argument is direct: Hollywood sold the world the American Dream, and James Bond marketed Great Britain, while Bollywood, by contrast, often celebrated the act of its own characters relocating to the West and reduced India, in its own storytelling, to a land of colourful entertainment rather than geopolitical significance. Her call is for India to more deliberately use Bollywood, OTT platforms, music, mythology, and cultural heritage as conscious instruments of national soft power, following the Hollywood template.
The Case For Bollywood Soft Power
● India possesses vast, globally recognised cultural resources: classical and folk traditions, a massive film industry, a large diaspora, and, increasingly, globally successful OTT content.
● A deliberate soft-power strategy could reshape international perception of India away from stereotypes and toward a more complex, self-authored national narrative.
● Films like RRR itself demonstrate India's capacity to produce technically dazzling, globally distributed cinema capable of competing directly with Hollywood spectacle.
The Case Against Simple Imitation
Barad sir's article, however, does not simply endorse Sharma's call. It raises a pointed and necessary caution: should India reproduce Hollywood's hegemonic model in order to challenge Hollywood's dominance? Mimicking the very mechanism that produced American cultural hegemony risks replacing one hegemonic narrative with another, rather than offering audiences — Indian or global — a genuinely different way of understanding history and power. The article's own position is that Bollywood's more valuable role is to critique and deconstruct dominant narratives, rather than to simply out-produce or out-market them.
This is where the two articles meet most directly. RRR is, in a sense, already an answer to Sharma's call a technically extraordinary, globally distributed spectacle built to project Indian nationalist pride on a Hollywood-scale canvas. But by Barad's own logic in the first article, RRR achieves that global soft-power success partly through the same mechanism the second article criticises in Hollywood: it simplifies a complex, politically inconvenient local history (tribal forest and land rights) into a cleaner, more universally marketable nationalist story. The danger Barad identifies in Hollywood's soft power is, quietly, already visible in Bollywood's own biggest global success story.
Two Cinematic Worlds, One Political Question
Having examined RRR and the Rambo–Bond tradition separately, the more important task and the master brief for this blog is to hold them together and ask what they reveal about popular cinema in general. The following comparison table maps the conceptual overlap between the two case studies before the discussion unpacks each point of comparison.
1. Cinema as Political Storytelling
In RRR, historical tribal resistance becomes nationalist mythology. In Rambo and Bond, geopolitical conflicts become heroic Western narratives. The critical insight that unites both: cinema does not simply reproduce history; it selects, reshapes, and dramatizes it, always according to what will be legible, marketable, and emotionally satisfying for its intended audience.
2. Heroism: Who Is Allowed to Become a Hero?
Raju and Bheem become heroes by being folded into a nationalist "we" their specific tribal identity becomes secondary to their role as symbols of a unified Indian resistance. Rambo and Bond become heroes by being positioned as defenders of a Western "we" freedom, democracy, and Western values, embodied in a single charismatic individual capable of resolving complex geopolitical conflicts through personal action. In both cases, heroism is manufactured by attaching an individual figure to a larger collective identity that the audience is invited to share.
3. Villain Construction and the "Other"
British colonialists in RRR, Vietnamese forces in Rambo, and Soviet forces in Bond's Cold War entries are all constructed, to varying degrees, as a simplified Other against which the hero's virtue becomes legible. This is precisely the mechanism Edward Said identified in Orientalism: a society defines itself by projecting onto an external Other the qualities cruelty, irrationality, menace that its own heroism can then triumph over. Notably, RRR inverts the geographic direction of this gaze (an Indian film Orientalising its British villains) while Rambo and Bond exemplify Said's original claim about the West Orientalising the East.
4. Nationalism versus Globalism
RRR channels its cinematic energy into Indian nationalism a shared, internally directed story about who "we" are as a nation. Rambo and Bond channel theirs into Western geopolitical imagination an externally directed story about how "we" (America, the West) should act in, and understand, the wider world. Both processes rely on cinema's unique capacity to make an abstract collective identity (the nation, the West) feel emotionally immediate and personally meaningful to an individual viewer.
5. Local Resistance versus National Narrative
RRR transforms localised tribal struggles into a larger nationalist narrative; Rambo and Bond transform specific geopolitical conflicts (Vietnam, Afghanistan) into general stories of Western heroism. In both cases, the specific, local, and politically inconvenient details forest law, land rights, the actual complexity of Cold War proxy conflicts are precisely what get smoothed away in the transition from local reality to national or civilisational myth.
6. Cinema as Soft Power
Both Hollywood and Bollywood can, and do, use popular cinema to shape international audiences' cultural perceptions, national identity, and political imagination. The difference Barad's articles surface is one of scale and self-awareness: Hollywood's soft-power function has been extensively theorised (Nye's own framework emerged partly from observing American cinema's global influence), while Bollywood's equivalent capacity is only beginning to be discussed in these explicit strategic terms which is exactly why Sharma's call, and Barad sir's cautious response to it, matters.
🎥 VIDEO SUGGESTION
Topic: Orientalism and the construction of the cinematic 'Other'
Video Title: Edward Said on Orientalism (1998 Documentary)
Why it's relevant: Said's own explanation of how the West constructs the East as an exotic Other provides essential grounding for the villain-construction analysis in the Comparative Analysis section, and for reading RRR's inversion of the same gaze onto British colonial villains.
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MYYDEj4fIU
Cinema in the Age of Globalization
Neither RRR nor the Rambo–Bond tradition could achieve the cultural reach Barad describes without the infrastructure of globalization. Films now travel across countries, languages, political borders, streaming platforms, and social media at a speed and scale earlier generations of cinema could not have imagined. RRR, a Telugu-language film, became a genuine global phenomenon — winning international awards, trending on social media worldwide, and reaching audiences with no prior familiarity with Telugu cinema, Adivasi history, or Indian regional politics. Rambo and Bond, decades earlier, achieved a comparable global reach through international theatrical distribution and, later, television syndication, embedding their geopolitical narratives into the popular imagination of audiences who had never set foot in Vietnam, Afghanistan, or the Soviet Union.
Globalization therefore allows cinema to become a powerful mechanism of cultural exchange, cultural influence, ideological circulation, and soft power, often simultaneously. A single film can carry a nation's self-image to an international audience while also carrying, invisibly, the particular ideological assumptions embedded in its storytelling choices. The same global platforms that let a wider world discover Naatu Naatu also ensure that RRR's simplified version of Raju and Bheem's history becomes, for the vast majority of that global audience, the only version they will ever know.
When Does Resistance Become Propaganda?
This is perhaps the most intellectually uncomfortable question the two articles raise together. Resistance, nationalism, patriotism, propaganda, soft power, cultural hegemony, and entertainment are not five separate categories that a film neatly belongs to; they are points along a single, blurred spectrum, and a film can occupy several of them at once.
RRR is, on one register, a genuine act of cinematic resistance: it insists that tribal heroes deserve to be at the centre of a mainstream, big-budget national epic, rather than confined to the margins of Indian film history. Yet on another register, precisely because it channels that resistance through a nationalist framework that erases the specific, ongoing struggles of the communities it represents, it risks functioning as a subtler form of propaganda a story that lets audiences feel they have honoured Adivasi resistance while leaving contemporary Adivasi land and forest struggles entirely unaddressed.
Rambo and Bond present the inverse case with equal clarity. Framed as entertainment, they nonetheless performed real ideological work for American and Western foreign policy interests throughout the Cold War not through any crude, explicit political messaging, but through the accumulated emotional effect of watching charismatic heroes repeatedly vindicate Western intervention. Can a film resist one form of domination while reproducing another? RRR arguably resists British colonial memory while reproducing a homogenising nationalist gaze toward Adivasi identity. Rambo arguably resists the trauma of Vietnam-era American self-doubt while reproducing an interventionist, hegemonic vision of American power abroad.
Questions the Films Leave Us With
This blog does not claim to resolve the tensions it has traced. It closes instead with the questions those tensions leave open — questions worth carrying into any future viewing of a historical epic or a geopolitical thriller.
● Who controls historical memory, and what happens to the histories that memory-makers choose not to tell?
● Who gets represented on screen, and who gets quietly erased in the process of representation?
● Can nationalism appropriate marginalised histories even when its intentions appear celebratory?
● Is cinema ever politically neutral, or is neutrality itself always a kind of political choice?
● Can entertainment become soft power without audiences ever realising they have been persuaded of anything?
● Does global popularity equal genuine cultural influence, or can a film be globally popular while still misrepresenting the very history it claims to honour?
● Should Bollywood imitate Hollywood's model of geopolitical storytelling, or can India develop a non-hegemonic form of soft power?
● Can popular cinema represent indigenous communities without appropriating their struggles for a different, more marketable purpose?
● Can a film like RRR become a genuine vehicle for environmental and land-rights justice, or does spectacle always risk overwhelming the specific political demand underneath it?
● Whose responsibility is it — the filmmaker's, the audience's, or the critic's — to notice what a triumphant story has left outside the frame?
Conclusion: Whose History Survives the Story?
Cinema is a battleground of memory, identity, ideology, and power not a metaphorical one, but a literal, ongoing contest over which version of a contested past gets to occupy the collective imagination of hundreds of millions of people. RRR takes Raju and Bheem, two tribal leaders whose actual battles concerned forest law and land rights, and reshapes them into unified symbols of anti-colonial nationalism, gaining emotional and commercial power precisely by shedding the specific, unresolved political demands Jal, Jangal, Zameen, displacement, environmental justice that defined their historical legacies. Rambo and James Bond, operating from the opposite direction of global power, take real Cold War conflicts in Vietnam and Afghanistan and reshape them into stories of Western heroism, using the tools of soft power, cultural hegemony, and ideology to normalise a pro-Western worldview for audiences who never had reason to question the frame they were being shown.
Placed side by side, Hollywood and Bollywood emerge not as opposites but as structural mirrors of each other: both demonstrate that the most effective vehicle for ideology is rarely a lecture or a policy speech — it is a song-and-dance sequence at a colonial garden party, or a rescue mission through the mountains of Afghanistan, arriving disguised as pure entertainment. Barad's own caution to Bollywood — that critiquing hegemonic storytelling matters more than out-producing it — applies with equal force to how audiences everywhere might learn to watch these films: not by refusing their pleasures, which are real and considerable, but by asking, after the credits roll, what history had to be simplified, whose struggle had to be resolved a little too neatly, for that pleasure to arrive.
Globalization ensures these questions cannot be confined to any one national cinema. As films travel further and faster than ever, cutting across languages, platforms, and borders, the responsibility to ask what has been left outside the frame becomes a shared one — for filmmakers who choose which histories to dramatize, and for audiences who choose which stories to believe.
The question is not simply who gets to tell the story, but whose history survives in the story that is told.
Works Cited
Primary Sources
● Barad, Dilip. "Reimagining Resistance: The Appropriation of Tribal Heroes in Rajamouli's RRR." Dept. of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University, pre-print.
● Barad, Dilip. "Rambo and Bond in America's Geopolitical Narrative." Dilip Barad | Teacher Blog, 26 Aug. 2024, blog.dilipbarad.com/2024/08/rambo-and-bond-in-americas-geopolitical.html.
● RRR. Directed by S. S. Rajamouli, performances by N. T. Rama Rao Jr., Ram Charan, Ajay Devgn, and Alia Bhatt, DVV Entertainment, 2022.
● Rambo: First Blood Part II. Directed by George P. Cosmatos, performance by Sylvester Stallone, TriStar Pictures, 1985.
● Rambo III. Directed by Peter MacDonald, performance by Sylvester Stallone, TriStar Pictures, 1988.
● The Living Daylights. Directed by John Glen, performance by Timothy Dalton, MGM/UA, 1987.
● Licence to Kill. Directed by John Glen, performance by Timothy Dalton, MGM/UA, 1989.
● Tomorrow Never Dies. Directed by Roger Spottiswoode, performance by Pierce Brosnan, MGM/UA, 1997.
● Zaidi, Annie. Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales. Tranquebar Press, 2010.
● Sharma, Palki. "Gravitas Plus: How India Can Harness the Soft Power of Bollywood." YouTube, uploaded by WION, 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YgQPTCKknw.
Theoretical Sources
● Althusser, Louis. "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses." Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971.
● Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed., Verso, 2006.
● Bullard, Robert D. Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality. Westview Press, 1990.
● Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, 1995.
● Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, International Publishers, 1971.
● Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage Publications, 1997.
● Nye, Joseph S., Jr. Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power. Basic Books, 1990.
● Nye, Joseph S., Jr. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. PublicAffairs, 2004.
● Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
● Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271-313.
.png)
No comments:
Post a Comment