I will not watch The Bengal Files. I do not need to buy a ticket to know I will not like Vivek Agnihotri’s new film. I have seen it before in spirit: The cocktail of blood, grievance, selective history, and state-sponsored applause. This is a film that calls itself a “cinematic masterpiece” before its release, but behaves like an election pamphlet with Dolby sound.
Bengal’s history is messy, layered, and painful. I do not shy away from it; it lives in my hometown Calcutta’s memory like an old scar. Direct Action Day in 1946 saw blood flow in its streets, the Noakhali riots scarred villages, and the Partition uprooted millions, including my family. We Bengalis have all grown up with stories of displacement, neighbours turning against each other, and charred homes. I do not fear those stories being told. I fear the way they are being told.
Agnihotri’s new film, the third in his trilogy, claims to reveal the “genocide” of Hindus in Bengal that history allegedly suppressed. He has made a career out of such claims — The Kashmir Files became as much a political event as a film. It was endorsed by political leaders, given tax exemptions, and screened at rallies. Ironically, it was given the National Award for the Best Film on National Integration. Agnihotri’s first in the trilogy, The Tashkent Files, also won two National Awards despite being panned by critics.
Now, he brings us The Bengal Files.
The three-minute trailer of the film leaves little to interpretation. It casts a divided Bengal — between two religions — with the past and present as caricatures, depicting appeasement and threats. Illegal immigration — an electoral flashpoint today — is framed as an existential danger. The invocation of “khela” in the trailer, Bengal’s ruling party’s war cry, seals its political intent.
The Kashmir Files ran on the same engine — a relentless invocation of victimhood, one community’s trauma weaponised as grievance, the other reduced to a monolith of villainy. Nuance wasn’t missing; it was erased. History became a blunt instrument to serve present-day politics. The Bengal Files borrows that template wholesale, shifting terrain from the Valley to Bengal. The result is less a film and more a grievance assembly line, designed to inflame, not inform.
But in Bengal, we also tell stories of neighbours who risked their lives for each other across religious lines. Agnihotri has no patience for that. He prefers the megaphone to the mirror. He will sell you “Hindu genocide,” packaged as “the untold story”. Why wrestle with complexity when you can reduce it to a morality play? Villains here, victims there. Roll camera, collect awards.
Let me be clear: I believe in freedom of speech. I defend a director’s right to make a film, even if I find it distasteful. I would rather live in a country with bad films and free voices than one where every frame is policed.
But freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. You cannot toss a match into a crowded theatre and call it storytelling. Films are not pamphlets; they carry weight, stir emotions, and legitimise prejudices. When wielded carelessly — especially in a time when violence is justified on religious terms — the results can be catastrophic.
And then there is the timing. The Bengal Files releases on September 5, just months before the West Bengal Assembly elections. I cannot watch this film as innocent art when I know it will be deployed as political ammunition. What worries me most is the blurring of culture and campaigning, where history itself is bartered for electoral gain.
What happened in Bengal in 1946 cannot be reduced to a two-dimensional morality play. It requires honesty, sensitivity, and a refusal to exploit wounds for box-office receipts. And that is precisely what I do not expect from this film.
I know I will not like The Bengal Files because I know what it will ask of me. It will ask me to hate. To see only part of the truth, not the whole picture. To choose one community’s pain over another’s, when history tells us both bled. It will ask me to forget the neighbours who sheltered each other, the friendships that endured the Partition, the complexity that is Bengal’s soul.
As a Bengali, I want films that complicate my understanding, not simplify it. That shows grief in its entirety, not slice it for narrative convenience. That reminds me of our collective humanity, not just our divisions. Agnihotri has the right to make his film. And I have the right to say: Cinema that thrives on discord is not cinema I will embrace.
For this reason, I refuse.
stela.dey@indianexpress.com
