After watching the latest Bollywood blockbuster Chhaava, a viewer in Gujarat tore the cinema screen angered by the torture inflicted by Aurangzeb on Sambhaji. Multiple videos of viewers, including children, crying and shouting slogans, after watching the film, have been circulating on social media. Any film that devotes the final 40 of a total 136 minutes, to a brutal depiction of torture is already suspect with its sense of aesthetics.

Chhaava does have the laudable goal of setting the historical record straight about Sambhaji as a great warrior and administrator against biased accounts. But it becomes harmful national-level propaganda when it is fixated on the good Hindu versus the bad Muslim binary, skips some incontrovertible facts, and is in complete sync with the ruling party’s ideology. Thus, it joins the cohort of over 20 blatant propaganda films made recently such as The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story, The Vaccine War, Article 370, Bastar – The Naxal Story, Swatantrya Veer Savarkar, JNU: Jahangir National University, The Sabarmati Report and Samrat Prithviraj. And Chhaava, like some others, was endorsed by the Prime Minister and other Ministers, and made tax-free in certain BJP-ruled States.

Hindu vs Muslim binary

Chhaava’s world is one in which the relentless quest to expose the evilness of the Muslim Aurangzeb makes it omit that he came to power on the basis of support from the Rajputs; that his administration had the highest percentage of Hindu Mansabdars in Mughal history (33%); that it also had Hindus in the posts of the Dewan and as heads of two important provinces; and that the emperor who imposed the Jizya (but exempted it for Brahmins, Rajputs, women, the elderly, etc.) protected some temples just as he demolished others, according to some historians.

This, of course, does not make Aurangzeb tolerant, only that his orthodoxy had to accommodate political pragmatism. While secularist historians emphasise this political pragmatism, Samira Sheikh shows how Aurangzeb’s Sunni bigotry arguably persecuted Shia and other Islamic millenarian groups such as the Mahdavis, Dawoodi Bohras and Sufis more than the Hindus. This persecution had an economic side too — the rising prosperity of these “heretic” groups drew the ire of Aurangzeb’s Sunni clerics who had business motives as well.

Of course, these complexities/debates cannot be a part of Chhaava’s world in which the quest for Maratha “Swaraj” under Sambhaji is suffused with Hindu imagery and is presented as liberating India from “foreign rule.” Actually, the Mughals had already lived in India for over 150 years then. Historian Stewart Gordon argues that Chhatrapati Shivaji, who championed tolerance and syncretism, and who had beseeched Aurangzeb to follow Akbar’s tolerance, was not advocating nationalism or the cause of a “universal Hindu rule.” Shivaji, too, had a substantial number of Muslims in his administration, including top military commanders.

No room for nuance

Chhaava’s world of Hindus versus Muslims/Indians versus foreigners is far from the real 17th century in which there were multiple states and emerging European powers, with various cross-cutting alliances and rivalries between them. A strong coastal power was the Sidis of Janjira, who were African Muslims, while the Peshwa of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate for 26 years was the legendary military general Malik Ambar, an Ethiopian slave. Shivaji (and his father) were a part of the Adil Shahi rule of Bijapur. Even when he rebelled and carved out his own kingdom, he allied with them, the Qutb Shahis of Golconda and even the Mughals, and sometimes against Hindu kingdoms like the Nayaks of the Karnatic. Similarly, Sambhaji, too, allied with Muslim Sultanates against Hindu kings like Chikka Devaraja of Mysore.

Chhaava’s central narrative of Aurangzeb’s evilness would be diluted of its shock value if the film showed that Sambhaji himself had rebelled against his father Shivaji and had briefly joined the same evil Aurangzeb! While Chhaava, unlike other propaganda films, does show aberrations in the ‘good Hindus’ narrative by showing some Hindu traitors, including in his own family, all the kohl-lined Muslims are universally bad.

In positing Aurangzeb’s torture as exceptional, what Chhaava’s world elides is the brutal nature of the medieval world with daily wars. States, including the Marathas, were built through consolidation, as well as through the violent subjugation of Hindu (and Muslim) landed nobles (deshmukhs, jagirdars, etc.) who were constantly shifting allegiances between states for better material/symbolic benefits. Internecine conflict between family members, just like among the Mughals, was rife: Shivaji battled his half-brother Ekoji, and so did Sambhaji’s son with other contenders. When the film shows the failed plot to poison Sambhaji on behalf of his half-brother Rajaram, where 20 key Maratha ministers and elites are executed, it only hints at the violence by the trampling of elephants. When Sambhaji’s Marathas attack Goa, a Portuguese account (cited by historian Jadunath Sarkar) says, “up to now nowhere else in India has such barbarity been seen…” While such narratives have to be treated carefully, what it shows was that violence was pervasive, even if degrees varied.

Ignoring caste

Critically, Chhaava’s Hindu-Muslim binary glosses over caste. It was the lowest castes and the poor who faced the worst forms of oppression across Hindu and Muslim states. In the 1818 Battle of Koregaon, the East India Company forces, with the Dalit Mahars in it, defeated the Peshwa-led Maratha confederacy. It became a symbol of caste resistance for Ambedkar and the Dalits. The film is also ironical considering that the Maharashtra non-Brahman movement had contended for long that the demonisation of Sambhaji as weak, incompetent and morally deficient was perpetuated by Brahmin narratives. This was also repeated by Hindutva ideologues like Savarkar and Golwalkar. The film has led to new Maratha versus Brahmin sentiments.

The world of Chhaava, like many other propaganda history films, is governed by present-day predilections in which a majoritarian nationalism is rampant, with the national audience further reinforcing it. When history in cinema becomes merely a tool to evoke anger, disgust and hatred, it robs us from understanding history in all its complexity. When history textbooks are being rewritten, and when people read history mostly through WhatsApp forwards, films like Chhaava with their erasures portend a dangerous tendency.

Nissim Mannathukkaren is with Dalhousie University, Canada and is on X @nmannathukkaren.