Opinion Vivek Agnihotri writes: Who gets to decide what film is ‘political’ and why is the label applied selectively?
The real panic isn't about politics. It’s about losing narrative control
What lies behind the controversy around films like Dhurandhar, The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Story? (Illustration: C R Sasikumar) 
Every time a film unsettles India’s cultural establishment, a familiar charge appears: This is political messaging, not storytelling. The accusation is usually framed as concern for craft. Politics, we are told, dilutes art. Messaging corrupts cinema. But this raises a more fundamental question we rarely ask: Who gets to decide when a film is labelled “political”, and why is that label applied selectively?
Cinema has never been apolitical. From the nationalist films of the 1950s to the parallel cinema of the 1970s, from caste critiques to human-rights dramas, storytelling has always carried moral positions and ideological frames. Films do not emerge in a vacuum. They reflect societies wrestling with themselves. Yet, only certain narratives are repeatedly accused of ideological contamination while others are quietly absorbed into the canon of “serious cinema”. This is not really a debate about politics versus art, but one about narrative ownership.
For decades, India’s cultural ecosystem developed an unwritten code of acceptable storytelling. Films interrogating the state, tradition, faith, or national identity from specific vantage points were celebrated as brave, nuanced, and necessary. Films that unsettled elite consensus, reopened uncomfortable histories, or re-centred long-ignored victims were often treated with suspicion. Some politics counted as art; others dismissed as propaganda.
The Kashmir Files became a fault line because it violated this code. The film did not break cinematic rules in the conventional sense. It broke narrative rules. It brought a suppressed tragedy into mainstream conversation without cushioning it in familiar ideological comfort. It did not offer the usual moral rebalancing. And it reached audiences directly, at scale, without elite mediation. The response was telling. Rather than engaging with the facts or debating cinematic choices in good faith, much of the criticism shifted to intention. Reviews were withheld or reduced to zero-star verdicts. The film was labelled “dangerous”, “divisive”, or “vulgar propaganda”. The audience itself became suspect. This was not a normal critical disagreement. It was a moment when the usual mechanisms of cultural arbitration visibly failed. What followed revealed an uncomfortable truth: When a film escapes established aesthetic gatekeeping and succeeds, the language of craft often becomes a tool of delegitimisation.
What we are witnessing is not an isolated reaction but a structural one. In an earlier essay, I described this class of cultural gatekeepers as Narrative Zamindars — those who exercise inherited authority over storytelling norms and aesthetic legitimacy. When that authority is challenged, the response is often reflexive. I call this response Narrative Monopoly Syndrome: The panic that sets in when long-held control over narrative meaning begins to slip, and audiences bypass traditional arbiters to arrive at their own judgements. This is not an argument that The Kashmir Files or any film should be immune to criticism. But criticism gains credibility only when its standards are applied consistently. When “political messaging” becomes a selective accusation, it stops functioning as an artistic metric and starts operating as a boundary marker.
Cinema today exists in a radically altered environment. Audiences are no longer dependent on a narrow circle of critics, festivals, or institutions to validate what they feel. Social media, streaming platforms, and alternative distribution models have democratised access. Traditional custodians of taste experience this shift not as pluralism, but as loss of control. The anxiety that surfaces around certain films follows a predictable pattern. When facts are inconvenient, intentions are questioned. When the response is overwhelming, the audience is shamed. When debate becomes difficult, silence or moral labelling replaces engagement. The conversation moves from the film to whether it should exist at all. This suggests the discomfort is not really about storytelling quality. It is about who gets to decide what stories are allowed to matter.
The question, then, is not whether political messaging does disservice to cinema. It is whether our definition of cinema has become too narrow, guarded and dependent on inherited aesthetic hierarchies to accommodate narratives that disturb entrenched comfort zones. Great storytelling has always unsettled societies. It has challenged power, memory, and moral certainty. If we begin to treat that unease as evidence of artistic failure, we risk mistaking gatekeeping for taste, and habit for principle.
In the end, this debate is not just about films. It is about ownership of cultural memory, and whether we are willing to accept that in a diverse democracy, storytelling will inevitably come from multiple directions, not all of them approved in advance. That matters far more than any binary between craft and politics.
The writer is a filmmaker and writer
Share
