By Priya Ramani
Bengaluru: “I had 92 pellets hit my face. Who says pellets are not lethal? Ask us. Pellets killed our dreams and hopes. They bruised our souls. They made our lives hell.”
— A young Kashmiri man, in Amnesty International’s 2017 report, ‘Losing Sight in Kashmir: The Impact of Pellet-Firing Shotguns’
Film critic Anupama Chopra called director Neeraj Yadav’s last film, Tere Ishq Mein, “inanity disguised as profanity.” In that one, Yadav’s hero intimidates a Chinese aircraft flying into Indian territory, burns down a woman’s house with Molotov cocktails, and does all the things Indian men do when they’re rejected in love, including throwing a liquid on her face. He’s a true hero of the manosphere, a “spiritual” successor (as the film crew described their lead) to the equally toxic Raanjhanaa.
But if the trailer for Chauhaan, Yadav’s latest, is any indication, he’s taken the propaganda film to a darker place than his contemporaries. The Kerala Story films (2023 and 2026) and Hamare Barah (2024) try to legitimise outlandish Islamophobic conspiracies; Bastar: The Naxal Story (2024) recasts human rights activists as terrorists; and the never-ending hagiographies such as PM Narendra Modi (2019) and Swatantrya Veer Savarkar (2024) just create mountains out of men.
If previous films fed us exaggerations, Chauhaan does just the opposite. It takes something horrific that actually happened to Muslim citizens and tells you it was no big deal.
Muslims, Always Villains
Muslims have always been the villains in propaganda films, but here the state arrives as spectacle: Ajay Devgn, a stud in all black (the director can’t decide whether he’s Indian army or National Security Guard), a skull mask covering his nose and mouth.
The humiliation is cemented when he plays Chumma Chumma De De on a boombox while facing down a mob of protestors. Is this the most casual dismissal of historic suffering committed to a big screen in recent memory? Please note, this trailer doesn’t even bother with the usual fig leaf, Pakistan.
This story was originally published in article-14.com. Read the full story here.
