Kashmir to Udaipur: Files & Lies

Udaipur Files is just one film. A lot more films are in the making, one worse than the other. There is a need to pause and reflect on where we are heading

- Saiyyad Mohammad Nizamuddin

ON January 18, 1933, Joseph Goebbels went to watch the film Der Rebell (The Rebel) with his mentor, Adolf Hitler, and upon returning, Goebbels, greatly impressed with how the film moved the audience, wrote in his diary, “Here you really see what can be done with the film as an artistic medium when it is really understood.” Shortly thereafter, Goebbels was appointed “minister of popular entertainment and propaganda” in the Nazi government, and films remained an important focus of his work. David Stewart Hull, in his book Film in the Third Reich, traces the transformation of German films during the Nazi era from critically acclaimed art to hate mongering propaganda. The parallels that emerge in contemporary Bollywood cinema with German films in the 1930s under the Nazi Party are stark and deeply disturbing.

As the controversy surrounding the film Udaipur Files courses its way through the judicial system, perhaps the moment is ripe to step back and see where our films are headed. There has been an increase in particular varieties of films over the course of the last decade. The first variety is hyper-nationalistic films glorifying the army, police and security agencies. Films in this genre include war films like Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), Bhuj: The Pride of India (2021) and The Ghazi Attack (2017), which was based on submarine warfare, among others. Such films have always been produced, albeit not as frequently, and these films are otherwise unobjectionable, but are still relevant to the discussion here because coincidentally, the early days of Nazi power saw an increase in the production of nationalistic films, particularly war films, depicting German heroism in an exaggerated form. These included war films like Berge in Flammen (The Doomed Battalion, 1931), Der Rebell (The Rebel, 1932) and a drama on submarine warfare during the First World War called